How to be Rich, Happy and Free from Scams

As Shire announces that it will buy U.S. company NPS Pharmaceuticals, Richard Gnodde, co-CEO of Goldman Sachs International, discusses the outlook for mergers and acquisitions in 2015, and says this deal is an Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in healthcare looks set to be strong again this year, Goldman Sachs said on Monday, following deal announcements from pharmaceutical giants Shire and Roche Holdings .    And the co-CEO of Goldman Sachs International, Richard Gnodde, also said that energy—a quieter sector for activity last year—was set to shine in 2015. Over the weekend, Shire announced it would buy the...

Getting rich and becoming a millionaire is a taboo topic. Saying it can be done by the age of 30 seems like a fantasy. It shouldn’t be taboo and it is possible. At the age of 21, I got out of college, broke and in debt, and by the time I was 30, I was a millionaire. Here are the 10 steps that will guarantee you will become a millionaire by 30. 1. Follow the money.  In today’s economic environment you cannot save your way to millionaire status. The first step is to focus on increasing your income in increments and repeating that. My income was $3,000 a month and nine years later it was $20,000 a month. Start following the money and it will force you to control revenue and see opportunities. 2. Don’t show off -- show up!  I didn’t buy my first luxury watch or car until my businesses and investments were producing multiple secure flows of income. I was still driving a Toyota Camry when I had become a millionaire. Be known for your work ethic, not th...

LONDON (AP) — The global economy's problems seem to be multiplying. Hours after the leaders of the world's 20 most developed economies sought to boost confidence by promising to increase global output by $2 trillion over five years, Japan said it had fallen into recession. That leaves the country — the world's third-largest economy — on a long and growing list of troubled economies. China is slowing as well, and Europe can't seem to take off. Among major economies, only the United States and Britain are growing at decent rates, and how long that lasts depends on how much trouble their trading partners are in. British Prime Minister David Cameron warned in an opinion piece in the Guardian newspaper on Monday that the "red warning lights are flashing" for the world economy. Here's a look at the problems in some key economies. JAPAN'S RECESSION This setback was not in the plan. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had pledged to end two...

By Matt Egan Some of the brightest minds in finance are sounding the alarm about a stock market bubble. They aren't warning of an imminent crash, but their comments should remind investors that the current bull market -- over five years long -- can't last forever. 1. Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller: Valuations at "worrisome" levels.   "The United States stock market looks very expensive right now," Robert Shiller wrote in a recent column for The New York Times .   Shiller, a Yale University professor who is often cited as one of the most influential people in economics and finance in the world, created a metric that compares stock prices with corporate profits. The metric recently climbed above 25. That level has only been surpassed three times since 1881: 1929, 1999 and 2007. Steep market tumbles followed each instance, including the bursting of the dotcom bubble in the early 2000s. The Nasdaq still hasn'...

Chuck Jaffe You can read the headlines, just don’t trade on them If the market is making your head swim, you may be able to solve the problem by turning off, tuning out and dropping out of the 24-hour news cycle.  That’s an odd suggestion coming from someone who works in the media, but what makes it doubly strange is that it’s prompted in part by the website I trust like no other, MarketWatch.com. Beyond simply being my employer, I trust the site because I know personally the quality people and journalists my fellow staffers are.  But, last month, MarketWatch set a site record for the number of unique visitors to its news pages, which set me to wondering what kind of messages we were sending to both new and increasingly active visitors at a time when they were presumably drawn in looking for some measure of market guidance to calm their nerves or keep them on top of the financial news.  In the old days of newspapers...

If you were an operations leader during the 2008 Financial Crisis and deep ensuing recession, you probably spent a lot of time on the phone like I did, literally begging vendors and business partners not to cancel credit lines or change payment terms vital to keeping a business afloat. If that's the case, none of us were alone as total credit market debt held by American businesses peaked in 2008; contracting by $247.7 billion in 2009, the worst year of the downturn; not reaching 2008's levels again until 2011 or 2012. So what happens when nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars in business credit is siphoned out of the economy in one year, customers pay you slowly for past business, banks stop lending, and customers stop buying new products? Welcome to the world American COO's, CFO's, and CEO's faced just a few years ago: a period of intense struggle and fight or flight mode for many of us. Thankfully, business lending regained traction, increas...

Myths are very troublesome because they’re hard to dispel. What’s worse – if a myth crosses over from the realm of obscurity and becomes mainstream “belief,” that’s when the trouble starts. The sad thing is that a lot of people end up getting hurt by accepting myths as truth – especially when it comes to financial myths that many wrongly assume are right. So before you mistakenly set yourself on a course for financial disaster, read about the 3 money myths you should avoid at all costs! #1 Your Cash Savings are Completely Safe Sitting In a Bank Account One myth that most Singaporeans thankfully recognise is reality that their Central Provident Fund (CPF) account savings probably won’t be enough to retire comfortably on. If you’ve read our article on what you can use your CPF for other than retirement , you already know that you’re pretty much limited to using it on housing, investing, education and insurance. Of course, there are restrictions to how (and how m...