americans

Ominous Portents in Consumer Sentiment

by Lee Adler, Wall Street ExaminerWhile the media focuses on the meaningless short term squiggles in consumer confidence indicators, I like to look at the long term trend. I like it because US consumers in the aggregate are far better forecasters of markets and the US economy than are the professional economic and financial pundits who are so focused on […]

Big Data Meets Fantasy Football | Jason Grill – Huffington Post

Fantasy football is right around the corner. The summer months will pass and before you know it people from across the country will be joining friends to draft their 2014 teams. The Fantasy Sports Trade Association estimates that nearly 32 million Americans play the game, spending close to 11 billion dollars. Needless to say this is a growing industry with […]

FTC Says Data Brokers Need To Make Their Information Trove …

Big data and the growth of services that help us make sense of it are some of the more fascinating developments of our connected world, but in some cases they can be also some of the more scary, with companies collecting billions of data points that speak to every aspect of what we do online. Today, a report published by the Federal Trade Commission […]

Summary of White House Big Data Privacy Report: 'Give Feds More …

Credit: JD Hancock / photo on flickrIn January, the Obama
administration put together a “working group” to analyze how huge
swaths of Americans’ data are being gathered and stored and what
sort of privacy issues need to be addressed. The group’s report was
just released this week.Before you ask: No, it’s not about the National Security Agency
(NSA) sweeping up huge amounts of metadata from […]

Discrimination potential seen in 'big data' use – Phys.org

A White House review of how the government and private sector use large sets of data has found that such information could be used to discriminate against Americans on issues such as housing and employment even as it makes their lives easier in many ways.

 […]

Survey Says: Avoid the Stock Market – The Daily Reckoning

In honor of yet another all-time high in the S&P 500, I have a quick question for you…If you had a spare $1,000, where would you invest it?If your answer has anything to do with the stock market, you’re in the minority.Shocking, isn’t it?A Gallup poll posed this question in a survey in January — shortly after the previous all-time […]

Sentiment Surrounding Obamacare On Social Media | Twitter Trends

SharePinterestFacebookEmailOver the last month, Obamacare has taken many shots from its opposition. The CBO released a damaging report on how the law will affect employment over the coming years, and numerous stories detailing how the healthcare law has negatively impact Americans have continued to surface.Now, with President Obama’s approval numbers slipping, we looked at the recent perception on social media […]

US Consumers Sour on the Stock Market – Bespoke Investment Group

This morning’s release of Consumer Confidence for the month of February showed that consumers were less optimistic about the current state of affairs than economists were expecting. In addition to the weaker than expected overall sentiment, this month’s report also showed that consumers have soured a bit on the stock market.In each month’s Consumer Confidence survey, consumers are asked […]