Michelle Grathers is an international tax expert. She has consulted for a variety of firms and high net worth individuals on all tax- and legal-related issues. She also helps new companies develop payroll services, statutory audits and mergers and acquisitions. Contact Michelle at michelle[at]businessdistrict.com
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Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman has examined the US economy, and likes what he
CEO James Gorman of Morgan Stanley
sees. Despite the challenges presented by emerging markets such as China and elsewhere, Gorman is continuing to invest in the US market.
“I think we are now recognizing the U.S. economy is strong and getting stronger. That’s obviously very positive for the markets,” Gorman stated to FOX Business’s Maria Bartiromo in an interview on ‘Opening Bell’ Monday.
The interview marked what has now been five years of bullish behavior on Wall Street which has recovered in spades since the low point in 2009, rising almost 10,000 points since those crisis-laden days.
“If you look at the macro environment, I remain very bullish. The upside risk is the U.S. economy. It’s taken a while for people to get comfortable with that,” said Gorman, who noted “scar tissue from the crisis” continues to linger.
Gorman based his assessment on several factors, including improved US economic expansion, increased confidence from business leaders, the lowering of consumer debt, strong corporate balance sheets and recapitalized banks.
“The system is working well. It doesn’t surprise me the markets are performing,” Gorman asserted.
The Japanese Finance Ministry released their figures for 2013 showing that Japan had a record trade deficit, exceeding even the previous year’s numbers.
For the first time in three years Japan posted an year-on-year rise in the value of exports, mostly caused by the continued loss in value of the yen compared to the dollar, with a simultaneous uptick in the value of imports.
Last year was the third year in a row that Japan had a trade deficit, the first time since data on this information became available in 1979. Last year’s trade deficit totaled 11.47 trillion yen ($112 billion). That number represents a giant increase of 65.3 percent over the previous year’s record of 6.94 trillion yen.
Japan’s trade with the United States is the highest for all countries and regions. The total exports from Japan to the US were up 15.6 percent, to 12.93 trillion yen. Part of that increase came from the sale of Japanese cars to US markets.
Record-breaking unseasonably cold temperatures caused by the meteorological
Cold Temperatures Require Planes to be De-Iced
phenomenon known as the Polar Vortex have disrupted air traffic across the eastern seaboard to the Midwest and as far south as Brownsville, Texas and Central Florida.
Over half the flights from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport had to be cancelled due to frozen fuel supplies. Tuesday’s temperature registered as low as minus 12F in the Windy City.
According to FlightAware.com, an airline tracking website, about 4,000 flights across the country were cancelled, while about 7,500 were delayed. One of the problems caused by the weather was the inability of ground crews to tolerate staying outdoors for more than 15 minutes at a time due to the extreme temperatures. Hundreds of flights were forced to cancel by airlines such as United, Southwest and American.
“The fuel and glycol supplies are frozen at (Chicago O’Hare) and other airports in the Midwest and Northeast,” said Andrea Huguely, a spokeswoman for American Airlines Group. “We are unable to pump fuel and or de-ice.”
JetBlue just finished spending five days catching up with their schedules after last week’s snowstorm caused delays and cancellations. The most recent bout with bad weather caused the airline to stop their operations at three airports in the New York area and at Boston Logan International Airport. JetBlue gave their crews a chance to rest and recover from the frigid temperatures from 5pm on Monday evening until 10am on Tuesday morning.
Not everything came to a standstill due to the freezing cold, however. One woman in a Chicago suburb was seen shoveling snow from her driveway while her pickup truck was idling to warm up a bit. When she and her car is ready she will be making the short drive to the mall where she is employed.
“I just wish I could get the day off too but it would take more than a bit of weather to close down the mall where I work,” she said.
Colorado is gearing up to make the switch from merely allowing the use of marijuana for only medical applications to allowing the mild intoxicant for purchase for recreational use. As of January 1st stores will be able to legally sell marijuana to anyone older than 21. Only stores already selling medical marijuana and who are “in good standing” will be eligible to apply for a retail sale business license to sell marijuana.
The application process was initiated as of October 1, 2013, and Annie’s, a shop in the Colorado mountain town of Central City, has the honor of being the country’s first store awarded a retail license to sell cannabis.
To mark this special occasion Central City’s police chief personally delivered the license to Annie’s.
“This is a historic occasion, and at each milestone I am reminded of what we have achieved here,” said Major Neill Franklin.
Franklin is a former police officer and is now the head of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. LEAP is an organization of law enforcement agents against the war on drugs.
“For the first time in history, those who sell marijuana are receiving licenses from the state instead of rap sheets,” said Mason Tvert, who co-lead the campaign to legalize pot in Colorado last year.
Erin Phillips, the dispensary representative at Annie’s, part of a local chain of eight stores called Strainwise, was excited to receive the new license.
“It’s the same old bureaucratic piece of paper,” said Phillips of the license. “But we might put it in a fancy frame.”
It should be a very happy New Year for Coloradoans.
In the early 1980s then high school student Ed Terebus and his older brother, unemployed auto worker Jim, decided to try their hands at the scare-trade by opening their first haunted house attraction.
The haunted house was set up in a trailer filled with hired actors in disguises made of egg yolks and oatmeal. A ticket cost $1.50 per person.
The undertaking proved to be quite profitable, and over the years the business became the four-story haunted house known as Erebus in Pontiac, Michigan. During the years 2005 until 2009 the Guinness Book of World Records said this site was the world’s largest haunted house attraction. By 2010 a larger enterprise surpassed Erebus.
Scaring visitors in this particular manner is a growing business, according to the industry’s trade association, America’s Haunts. They say there are about 1200 large-scale, for-profit haunted attractions in the US, and an additional 3000 haunted houses run by charities and open for business only 1-2 days each year. The commercial endeavors raise between $300 million and $500 million in revenue each year.
Much of the interest and draw of these attractions can be attributed to the advent of technology to make the effects scarier and more realistic.
“Haunted houses are trying to create these immersive environments, and technology often does that,” said Brett Bertolino. Bertolino is the director of operations at Eastern State Penitentiary, a former Philadelphia prison which is transformed once a year into a giant haunted house.
Erebus in Michigan creates its horror with tools like animatronic mutant gorillas and a moving wall that forces guests into what looks like a hole with no bottom. But what is scary to the Terebus brothers is not just the props, but the kind of staff they need to keep the place going.
“I have an IT guy here full time now,” Ed Terebus said. “That’s the scary part.”
To keep things real designers try to make the monsters they use less mechanically predictable by using air-powered devices in tangent with computerized sensors.
“They aren’t on timers where something is going ka-junk, then 30 seconds later, ka-junk,” says Billy Messina, a co-owner of Netherworld, an Atlanta haunted house known for its innovative use of silicone masks on actors to create extremely realistic monsters.
“With the sensors, you can time it so it’s not always the person at the front of a group that’s getting scared,” he said.
As production costs rise and competition between these attractions intensifies, it is no surprise that ticket prices are heading north. Today the average entrance fee is $15, but tickets can cost a cool $65 at some attractions, says America’s Haunts.
