Blog Posts by Daniel Gross

Enough with all that interesting stuff going on overseas. For too long, the Europeans have been able to grab our attention with their soccer and tennis tournaments, quaint bicycle races, and truly unquaint financial crises. With the latest summit seeming to have resolved, for now, Spain and Italy's sovereign debt crisis, and with Independence Day approaching, it's time for Americans to shift the focus back to what really matters — the short-term fate of the U.S. economy.

As Henry Blodget and I discuss in the accompanying video, the news flow continues to be whipsawed by the cross-currents of a continuing expansion, which has now entered its 37 month, that remains unsatisfying for the legions of unemployed. With the forces that propelled the U.S. out of recession three years ago — global growth, business investment and manufacturing — ebbing, future growth hinges on whether the services sector and consumer demand can take the helm. And that's an open question.

There's no question that

The financial headlines are delivering a persistent message. New York, and all those who live and work in the self-proclaimed financial capital of the world, is showing rising signs of financial irrelevance.

Sure, the New York-based stock and bond markets have been gyrating with their usual velocity, processing news, fear and greed. But increasingly, it seems that the real action is happening elsewhere, and that New York is now the tail being wagged by a distant dog.

In the accompanying video, I discuss this phenomenon with my Daily Ticker colleague, Henry Blodget, joining via Skype. (Note: New York has lost its magnetic pull to such a degree that Blodget, usually a regular at our midtown Manhattan studio, connected from an undisclosed offshore location.)

On a daily basis, American investors are obsessing over the latest details from Europe. Will the European Central Bank come to the rescue of Spanish banks? Will Italy manage to avoid the fate of its fellow Club

It's been reported that some employees at Apple retail stores have received a raise of up to 25 percent. The news was noteworthy for three reasons: because it was Apple, because of the size of the increase, and because it's been so rare for large numbers of service workers to get such a significant bump.

In the accompanying interview, my Daily Ticker colleagues talk with Apple retail Specialist Cory Moll. Last week his hourly pay jumped $2.82 per hour to $17.31.

One of the remarkable features of this expansion, which turned three years old this month, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, has been the zero-sum game between companies and their workers. Corporations have rebounded extraordinarily well from the great recession of 2008-2009. Corporate profits have risen from $1.3 trillion in 2009 to $1.942 trillion in 2011, and in the first quarter of 2012 were running at an annual rate of nearly $2 trillion. Corporate cash holdings are high. Thanks to a host of factors —

Sunday's election in Greece was supposed to deliver a catharsis . Either the markets would rally in relief of pro-bailout parties won. Or they'd collapse in fear if an anti-bailout party won. But the reaction thus far has been a shrug. Why?

The big fear is that the Greeks would upset and fail to live up to commitments. That's still an open question, although the (muddled) election results seem to have forestalled an eminent exit. But there's a larger fear. What about countries that have steadfastly labored to meet their commitments to bondholders and other creditors, stuck to the austerity programs — and yet the market still treats them like junk?

Take Ireland. The island nation's desire to seek a bailout had nothing to do with runaway public-sector spending. Rather, it had everything to do with its private-sector banks running amok. Ireland's banks lent way too much indiscriminately, and borrowed from bond investors around the world. Come the housing bust, rather than let bank

Greece is becoming like one of those celebrities who has to do or say ever more outrageous things to continue to stake a claim on public attention. (Ahem, Mr. Trump.) Having sought two bailouts and convinced many bondholders to take a 75 percent haircut on the value of their holdings, Greece has lately resorted to more extreme measures. Like electing several members of the neo-fascist party Golden Dawn to Parliament, as it did last month. Or perhaps by electing a party to run the government that has threatened to default on its debt entirely, as it may do on Sunday.

But as is the case with celebrities making outrageous statements, Greece's ability to shock the world is declining. And in fact, given the activity elsewhere in the euro zone, the action in Greece is becoming something of a sideshow.

Consider. Holders of Greek bonds have already accepted a three-quarters reduction in the value of their holdings; that means there is only 25 percent to go. A conscious decision by Greece to

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Monday brought news of three transactions in the broad fields of content, communications, and technology -- each worth about $1 billion. Cerberus bought a majority stake in AT&T's Yellow Pages business, Microsoft bought a bunch of patents from AOL, and Facebook purchased Instagram. Since we live in Dickensian times, it's only proper to note that these deals represent the ghosts of social media past, present, and future. The transactions, the players behind them, the prices paid, and the valuations attached to them, shed light on the dynamism of the U.S. economy in general, and, in particular, in its media and communications industries.

The Ghost of Social Media Past. In the Cerberus-AT&T deal, a bunch of 50- and 60-year old guys bought a century-old, cash-flow producing business from a 135-year-old social media pioneer.

After the telegraph, the telephone was perhaps the original social network. Its rapid spread allowed anybody to communicate with anybody else. The early phone

We've heard a lot of talk about the one percent and the 99 percent. With the release of his proposed budget for fiscal 2013, President Obama has opened a new front in the class war. He's pitting yuppies against the overclass, the struggling well-off against the very rich.

This declaration of class warfare can be found on page 39 of the section on cutting waste and reducing the deficit. President Obama's deficit-cutting proposals rest in part on making life more expensive for the very rich. He wants to let the Bush-era marginal tax cuts for those making $250,000 or more (about 3 percent of American households) expire, and limit the amount of deductions they can take. He proposes to end the loophole through which "carried interest" —the money private equity magnates are paid for managing other people's money — is taxed at a low, long-term capital gains rate. And he's proposing to codify what's come to be known as the Buffett Rule, the notion that "those making over X million $ should pay