More Americans feel uneasy about the state of their finances — and not because of any change to their income or expenses.

Instead, the latest bad news concerns software that many people use to manage their cash flow. One of these applications, Microsoft Money, perished at the end of June after Microsoft chose to stop developing it. Another, the Mac version of Intuit’s Quicken — which needed a rewrite when it shipped in 2006– now won’t get its next update until February, the latest in a long string of delays.

The Windows version of Quicken continues to chug along, but its users have to buy a new version every few years to retain access to the online services that automate most of its work.

In this stagnant market, most of the signs of life lie not in disc-based programs (though smaller developers are doing interesting work) but on the Web. There a few sites provide simpler ways to manage your money — and do so for free.

Mint (http://mint.com), Intuit’s Quicken Online (http://quickenonline.com) and Wesabe (http://wesabe.com), among others, automatically synchronize their records with those of your financial institutions, then categorize transactions to track your spending. There’s no extra software to install — though these three provide basic, free iPhone applications for on-the-go access.

The only catch is that in most cases, you must store your bank account passwords on these sites. (All three say they encrypt these data to block them from being misused.)

I handed over many of my own log-ins to these sites in May 2008, and I found them promising but limited; this time around, two of the three did significantly better.

Mint.com is now closer to the utility of Money or Quicken, thanks to a series of updates that added support for mortgages and such assets as houses and cars. (It uses Web sources to estimate values for the former but not the latter.)

Mint connected to all the bank, credit card, investment and mortgage accounts I tested, then correctly categorized most transactions in each. It was even smart enough to split ATM surcharges into separate transactions, though it didn’t then file those charges under its “ATM Fee” category.

The site will set up budget goals based on your past spending, which you can and should adjust yourself. But you can’t enter a pending transaction; if you write a large check, you must remember it’s out there. Mint’s automatic alerts of upcoming bills also missed some of mine, and it doesn’t let you fix any oversights by adding your own alerts.

Mint, based in Mountain View, Calif., now claims more than a million active users. It makes its money by suggesting credit cards, banks and investments to fit your habits, then collecting referrals on accounts opened through these “Ways to Save” tips. Keep this advice in context — a credit card’s points rewards aren’t as useful as cash back.

Quicken Online got its biggest upgrade when Intuit, also in Mountain View, dropped a $2.99 monthly fee, helping it win more than 1.3 million users. This time around, Quicken Online automatically categorized almost as many transactions as Mint and easily outdid that site at warning me of upcoming bills.

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July 17 (Bloomberg) — General Electric Co. is committed to keeping its finance arm and expects to be able to fund the unit once a U.S. government bond-insurance program expires, Chief Financial Officer Keith Sherin said in an interview.

GE Capital, which is shrinking its balance sheet, has issued about $9 billion in bonds so far outside the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. program, the most of any company, he said. Known as the Treasury Liquidity Guarantee Program, it expires in October.

“That’s more than any other issuer for long-term debt,” Sherin said in an interview. “We’ve made so much progress strengthening GE Capital.”

GE said today that profit at the finance arm declined 80 percent in the second quarter as the first global recession since World War II slashed consumer spending and real estate markets collapsed. GE remains an important source of lending to small and medium-sized businesses in the U.S., Sherin said on a call today with investors. The unit lent $69 billion in the first half of 2009.

It’s too early to tell whether the company will gain any business if New York-based CIT Group Inc. files bankruptcy, he said. CIT, a 101-year-old commercial finance company whose customers including Dunkin’ Brands Inc., said yesterday it’s “continuing to evaluate alternatives” after failing to receive federal guarantees for its bonds.

Unlike CIT, GE doesn’t provide factoring financing, or cash used by vendors to produce goods that retailers typically pay for later, usually within 90 days. GE does compete with CIT in offering loans to smaller companies and leasing planes.

‘Some Opportunities’

“There are some opportunities where we do have overlap,” Sherin said on the investors call. “We’ll have to wait and see how that plays out.”

The company, which isn’t a bank holding company and didn’t take money from the Federal Reserve’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, can take advantage of two government programs. In addition to using the FDIC bond-insurance, GE can sell into the Commercial Paper Funding Facility set up by the Fed, which it tapped once.

GE has already issued about $12 billion in notes, or about a third of the $35 billion to $40 billion it plans to refinance in 2010. The company has “prefunded” all of the $45 billion it planned to refinance this year.

The company remains “extremely committed” to keeping GE Capital, Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt said on the call with investors today, even as proposals that may force the separation of the parent and finance unit begin to work their way through Congress.

GE Capital Partner

In the interview, Sherin said he isn’t working on a scenario that would include giving ownership of the majority of GE Capital to a joint venture outside the parent company. Nicholas Heymann, a New York-based analyst with Sterne Agee & Leach Inc., expects GE to seek a partner for all of GE Capital in the second half of next year, he said in an interview with Bloomberg Radio.

GE doesn’t think it’s being targeted by President Barack Obama’s proposed law strengthening financial regulations. The company is fighting for so-called grandfathering that would allow the parent company to keep its finance arm even if the final version of the law is written in a way that would apply to GE, General Counsel Brackett Denniston said on the call. GE favors the proposed law’s broad themes on systemic regulation, Denniston said.

“GE has benefited from government assistance in the form of liquidity provisions” under the FDIC insurance program, said Gary Jenkins, a credit strategist at Evolution Securities in London. “In order to restore themselves to independent good health, they require no further economic shocks that would negatively impact their business.”

Commercial Paper Balances

GE has reduced its commercial paper balances to $50 billion from about $74 billion at the beginning of the year, ahead of schedule, the company said today.

Profit from GE’s continuing operations declined to $2.87 billion, or 26 cents a share, from $5.39 billion, or 54 cents, a year earlier, the company reported today. Analysts’ average estimate was 24 cents a share.

GE fell 75 cents, or 6 percent, to $11.65 at 4:01 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading, the most since April 9. The shares have gained 8.1 percent this week and are up from $5.73 on March 4, the lowest intraday price since December 1991.

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After months of dismal unemployment numbers, this morning’s continued growth in the unemployment rate from 9.4% in May to 9.5% for the month of June reinforces the fact that the U.S. is still very much in the midst of recession. Additionally, the U.S. Department of Labor reported today that employers cut 467,000 jobs in June, compared to 322,000 jobs in May. Unfortunately, the tech industry is still feeling the heat of the recession, with the rate of available jobs not improving much from the past few months, according to technology jobs site Dice.com.

Tom Silver, senior vice president of Dice.com, told us this morning that Dice.com is reporting a 44% year-over-year drop in job listings for the month of June. May’s year-over-year decline hovered around 45%. And Silver also points to a rise in the Department of Labor’s unemployment rate for the “Computer and Mathematics sector,” (the area best associated with the tech sector). June’s unemployment rate for the tech sector almost tripled year-over year, from 1.9% in June of 2008, to 5.4% in June of 2009. While Silver says that the tech job market is certainly better than during the fourth quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009, the number of job opportunities have remained stagnant over the course of the past few months.

According to the TechCrunch layoff tracker, layoffs in the tech sector may be slowing down, which we reported in May. Layoffs are still taking place—the tracker has increased by 10,000 lost jobs over the past two months to a total of 340,000 individual layoffs. But there is a marked difference in the pace of layoffs from late 2008 and the first quarter of 2009, when layoffs were increasing by 100,000 every few weeks For instance, it only took three weeks for cumulative tech layoffs to go from 200,000 to 300,000 in February and five weeks for layoffs to go from 100,000 to the 200,000 mark before that in January.

Though companies are cutting back and limiting hiring for the near future, Silver says that there are still certain jobs within the tech sector that are in demand. Developers who are skilled in the areas of virtualization and IT security are among those in high-demand. And Silver maintains that tech companies are always in need of talented and skilled programmers. But for all the marketing and business development folks out there, demand usually picks up in line with the economy.

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Employers cut a larger-than-expected 467,000 jobs in June, driving the unemployment rate up to a 26-year high of 9.5 percent, suggesting that the economy’s road to recovery will be bumpy.

The Labor Department report, released Thursday, showed that even as the recession flashes signs of easing, companies likely will want to keep a lid on costs and be wary of hiring until they feel certain the economy is on a solid ground.

June’s payroll reductions were deeper than the 363,000 that economists expected.

However, the rise in the unemployment rate from 9.4 percent in May wasn’t as sharp as the expected 9.6 percent. Still, many economists predict the jobless rate will hit 10 percent this year, and keep rising into next year, before falling back.

All told, 14.7 million people were unemployed in June.

If laid-off workers who have given up looking for new jobs or have settled for part-time work are included, the unemployment rate would have been 16.5 percent in June, the highest on records dating to 1994.

Since the recession began in December 2007, the economy has lost a net total of 6.5 million jobs.

As the downturn bites into sales and profits, companies have turned to layoffs and other cost-cutting measures to survive. Those include holding down workers’ hours and freezing or cutting pay.

The average work week in June fell to 33 hours, the lowest on records dating to 1964.

The worse news: as some economists predicted, the stimulus package was too small to affect the “real” economy - you know, the one you and I live in? - in any significant way. Sounds like those who urged Obama to think large and visionary (a la FDR’s Public Works Administration) really did have the right idea:

Reporting from Washington — Even as the nation’s economy begins clawing its way out of the worst recession in 60 years, there are growing signs that this recovery could come with an unsettling twist: The wheels of commerce may begin to turn again without any substantial boost in jobs.

Not only is the national unemployment rate, now 9.4%, likely to climb into double digits later this year, but it is also expected to remain there well into 2010, economists say. That would prolong the misery of the unemployed, squeeze retailers and other businesses, and add millions of dollars in government costs and lost productivity. It could even threaten the recovery itself.

Though it’s common for the jobless rate to keep climbing for a time after economic output turns positive, the aftermath of the last two downturns, in 1990-91 and 2001, introduced the idea of a “jobless recovery.” Even though the economy improved, many unemployed workers discovered that jobs as good as the ones they’d lost were almost impossible to find.

This time, many economists say, there are new factors that could make the problem worse. Many more layoffs in this recession have been permanent, not temporary.

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Debt-heavy Canadian mining company Teck Resources Ltd. announced it has sold a 17 per cent stake in the company to China Investment Corp. (CIC) in a $1.74-billion all-cash deal.

The sale gives CIC more than 101 million class B subordinate shares for seven per cent aggregate voting rights in Teck. The shares sold at $17.21 each.

CIC expects the deal to close by July 14, and has agreed to hold the shares for at least one year afterwards.

The $200 billion Chinese fund said this lock-up period was consistent with its strategy as a long-term investor.

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Banks loan us money they create out of nothing. Not only is this a scam, but it is outlawed by the Constitution, although our government allows this criminal activity. This activity is at the heart of our unsound money system, which is the direct cause of our nation`s current economic collapse. To reverse our economic decline we must have a sound and constitutional money system.

“I thought that, as a scientific man, I ought to know something about economics. So I studied the money system for two years and could make nothing of it. Then, one day, the truth dawned on me. What I was studying was not a system, but a confidence trick.” The conclusion that the money system is a confidence trick comes from “the father of nuclear fission” Nobel Prize winning chemist Frederick Soddy.

A confidence trick is a scam, a racket, a rip off, a con. What makes the money system a confidence trick? Put most simply, money is created for private profit by banks rather than created for the common good by the government. Only the government of a nation should create money. The confidence trick that is the money system takes two forms.

First, rather than simply print money, the government, when it wants more money than it has obtained through taxation, issues bonds. The Federal Reserve then creates new money that did not exist before and uses this money to purchase the bonds. Then the populace, through taxation, is forced to pay the interest on these bonds. This is how the National Debt was created. Rather than impoverishing the populace by forcing them to pay interest on bonds, the government could simply create money instead of having the Federal Reserve create money to purchase government issued bonds.

Second, banks devised a subtle way to counterfeit money. Banks invented a separate and distinct form of money other than cash. Banks invented a kind of money which exists solely as entries in their computers. Over 99% of money exists in this form. Anytime a check, credit card, debit card, or money order is used, electronic bank money is being used. Whenever someone gets a loan from a bank the bank is in fact creating entirely new electronic money that did not exist before. Through this subtle form of counterfeiting banks have been able to take control of the money system. This confidence trick is played not only by US banks but by all banks the world over. The money system is the world`s longest running and most successful confidence trick.

Not only is allowing banks to create money and charge us interest a confidence trick, but it is also illegal! The Constitution explicitly gives the power to create money to Congress and to Congress alone. It does not authorize Congress to allow private corporations to create money. Article I, Section 8, Part 5 of the Constitution of the United States gives Congress the power, “To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin”. The Constitution is the highest law in the United States of America. No law passed by Congress can override the Constitution. It is illegal for banks to create money, and it is illegal for Congress to allow banks to create money. The only way banks could legally create money would be if an amendment to the Constitution authorizing money creation by banks were passed. There is no such amendment. Sadly the Constitution is not a self-enforcing document, and if the people do not force the government to follow its dictates the government is free to ignore the law without consequence.

President Garfield stated, “He who controls the money supply of a nation controls the nation”. Is it any wonder that against the will of the great majority of Americans the banks and Wall Street were able to get the bailout bill passed? The so-called bailout was nothing other than a massive transfer of purchasing power from the people to the banks and the acquisition of worthless debt and stock by the government at high prices from the banks. Banks were able to force this bill through because of the enormous power they wield from controlling the money system. The Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, is a banker. He is the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, and he conducts government policy in accord with the interests of banks and not of the American people.

The truth of the monetary system has long been withheld from the American people. We have been kept in the dark by the twin commandments put into effect through the influence and power of banks: we shall not have an honest money system, and we shall not examine the money system except under their direction. An honest, constitutional money system is the one thing banks will not stand for. The workings of the money system and the economy are always discussed in mysterious terms. People feel that it is something too complicated for them to understand. In fact, only falsehoods and false principles need to be discussed in mysterious terms. Any person of average intelligence can understand how the money system works. However, banks do everything in their power to keep people from understanding how the money system works, because if the majority of Americans ever did understand, then there would soon be a great call for the abolition of the unsound and dishonest monetary system and a call for its replacement with an honest and constitutional one.

Never on television, radio, in newspapers, or in magazines is the truth of the money system discussed. The people are to be kept in the dark and ignorant. Only on the internet and in a few books is the truth of the monetary system discussed. Those who literally create money can certainly afford to direct the discourse regarding the money system in a direction favorable to their interests. Economists prophesize nothing but economic doom and gloom for us upon the horizon. This is true so long as we have a dishonest money system. As soon as it is replaced with an honest money system the way will be open to much greater prosperity than ever before.

The worldwide economic crisis we face today is caused directly by the dishonest and unsound money system. There can be no liberty without economic freedom. There can be no economic freedom without an honest money system. The people must demand an honest money system. We must put such pressure on the government that they have no alternative but to execute the will of the people. Either we continue to pay billions and trillions yearly to be kept artificially poor or we demand honest US constitutional money. The choice is clear.

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A beautifully styled plug-in hybrid represents the green car philosophy of ex-BMW designer Henrik Fisker. Using his own money, Fisker is betting the barn on plug-in hybrid technology.

Henrik Fisker is the BMW designer that is responsible for the Z8, as well as for the Aston Martin DB9 and Vantage. That would certainly explain the looks of the new Fisker Karma, the flagship of Fisker Automotive. The Karma is a four-door with GT styling, due to be launched in June of 2010. Fisker’s personal automotive philosophy and environmental beliefs are responsible for the new automotive entry being a plug-in hybrid. There is a philosophical and financial battle going on for the future bragging rights of the different alternative-fuel strategies. Fisker is betting on plug-in hybrids in a big way. At a recent dinner speech, he said plug-in hybrids, or PHEVs, will be the dominant type of car for the next 10 to 15 years. Fisker has been intelligent in the ramp-up to his car. He looked very carefully for off-the-shelf parts, and partnered early with Southern California-based Quantum Technologies, who had previously built a series of hybrid-drive concept vehicles for the military, according to a CNET story. Their system, called Q-Drive, uses two rear-drive motors, a lithium ion battery pack that runs longitudinally down the center of the car, and a gasoline engine as a range extender under the hood. The Q-Drive system produces a hybrid total of 400 horsepower and has already undergone significant testing by Quantum Technologies. Fisker is not going to build either the car or the engine. The engine will be bought from GM, who currently uses the turbocharged four-cylinder in the Pontiac Solstice GXP. The battery pack will come from Enerdel, and the Karma will be built by the Finnish company Valmet. Having another company actually build the cars might seem to be an odd and risky choice, but Valmet has already proved itself to be a competent contract builder via the production of the Porsche Boxster and Cayman. Once again, we have a very sporty alternative energy car, selling in the range of $80,000, reminiscent of the Tesla, and totally out of the price range of anyone but the very wealthy. These are both nice choices for the rich and famous, and maybe those are the only people that Tesla and Fisker care about. However, the rich and famous crowd is not going to do much to wean us off foreign oil, the stated objective of both these manufacturers. As cool as they are, both these cars are a real-world fail.

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Even though Beijing Automotive (BAIC) tendered a non-binding offer for Opel, the company is said to have no chance of actually acquiring the brand. General Motors is still in talks with Magna and its partners, GAZ and Sberbank, and according to Sberbank CEO German Graf, “The choice has been made and the question now is of how to structure the deal.”

Observers also feel that the GM-Magna agreement is merely waiting on some dotted I’s, crossed T’s and that the deal won’t fall apart unless Magna blows it up or walks away. That hasn’t stopped GM and the German government from creating the appearance of courting other bidders for Opel and Vauxhall, including BAIC and Belgium’s RHJ.

BAIC appears to be serious, even if everyone assumes that GM’s just using it as a decoy. Magna wants to get the paperwork inked by July 15, and that’s around the same time that BAIC wants to make a binding offer for Opel’s purchase. It’s working with Deutsche Bank and PriceWaterhouse Coopers on its proposal, and we can only assume BAIC will be ready with a bag full of cash in the unlikely event Magna exits stage left.

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India imports 2 million barrels of oil a day. That’s about $52 billion at todays rates, and $73 billion at $100 per barrel. We currently have $254B in reserves. Even if we had to pay two years of oil in USD, we could do it with $150B.
Diversifying away from the dollar can only mean buying a currency that is likely to be stronger - which one? Euro? Not a chance. Yen? Uh, no. Chinese Yuan? Maybe but they have to accept it back as trade currency.

I say keep a year of oil, and find a way to convert those dollars to rupees instead. I don’t know how - but it should be possible to give those dollars out and use it to generate rupees; buying infrastructure technology, thorium reactors (hint, hint) or such foreign goods and use them up. Or, let Indians invest much more abroad, and they’ll figure out a way to diversify. Of funding countries such as Iceland, and demanding back rupee based interest and principal at then applicable conversion prices. It could be done by letting Indians invest on margin (currently disallowed) in markets abroad, which will additionally bring stability to Indian commodity prices from the cross-hedging.

It’s time to make the rupee convertible, too.

Now if Indians can be allowed to borrow in dollars, and get those fantastic interest rates, life might be a lot easier; heck, we could even apply for the PPIP in the US, we’re very happy to get non-recourse loans at 16x leverage, thank you. If they’ll let us, that is.

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Citigroup is raising its employees’ base salaries by up to 50 percent, the Times reports today, to offset smaller annual bonuses.

The shift means that most Citigroup employees will make as much money as they did in 2008, although some might earn more and others less. The company also plans to award millions of new stock options to employees in an effort to retain workers and neutralize a precipitous drop in the value of their stock holdings.

The bare fact that Citi is raising its salaries by 50 percent is predictably raising some hackles, but to be fair, it doesn’t seem so bad. First of all, it’s a step away from the Big Bonus culture of banking that the populace has been raging against in the first place. It’s like they’re baristas, and instead of making them shill for tips with a jar, they’re employers have raised their base salary so that their loyalty is to the company and not the flashy, high-tipping customer. Second, it doesn’t seem like a mind-blowingly awesome deal for employees. Citigroup stock is trading around $3 — around $20 less than Home Depot, where employees also have a generous stock-option plan. So hold the outrage: It’s only a matter of time before Citi employees start getting paid by the hour.

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