As the nation's economy continues to recover from the last recession, the disparity between the rich and the poor has grown according to the Pew Research Center.
The top 7% of American hold holds saw their net worth grow by 28%, while the bottom 93% of U.S. households fell by 4%. In fact, the top 7% owned 68% of all household wealth in the U.S. as of 2012.
New York City -
Apple's stock has dropped below $600 a share following an announcement by Apple of changes at the top of the company.
Apple announced that Scott Forstall and John Browett are both leaving the company. Forstall was the head of Apple's iOS and once thought to be a successor to Steve Jobs. Browett was head of the retail division for just a few months.
The news came out on Monday as Hurricane Sandy was slamming into New Jersey and New York and the stock market was closed.
Washington, D.C. -
An unexpected hiring frenzy has pushed the unemployment rate down to 7.8% which helped trigger a record five-year high on wall street as stocks rose to 13,637 on the NYSE by 11:30am today.
Making the gains especially good news was that the jobless rate dropped despite more workers returned to the labor market resuming their search for a job, something that normally pushes the unemployment rate up.
News of record sales yet again for Apples newest iPhone, the iPhone 5, has pushed Apple's stock above $700 in after hours trading. The stock closed today at $699.78 per share.
At $700 a share, Apple is worth $656 billion and only four other companies have every crossed the $700 a share barrier; Priceline, Berkshire Hathaway NVR Inc. and Google.
In a rare acknowledgement by anyone at Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg recently commented on the rapid decline in stock price of Facebook shares after the much anticipated IPO.
During an employee meeting, he described the drop as "painful" and according to the Wall Street Journal, the meeting was "an effort to buck up morale" which has widely been reported to have sunk very low.
In the first release of account infomation in regulatory filings, Facebook has revealed that an estimated 4.5% of all active accounts were fakes, duplicates, user-misclassified or pets. In fact, pets alone make up nearly 100,000 active accounts of the 955 million users according to estimates.
The largest in this group were "fakes" according to Facebook, which desribed the accounts as dpulicants in which one user has two accounts, possibly for work and personal. 80.3 million accounts have been labels as fake or undesireable by Facebook.
New York City -
Stocks closed higher Tuesday with the Dow up 32 points or 0.26% as the average home price rose 1.3% in April. Home builders such as PulteGroup, and Lennar were up as a result of the housing news, which helped pull the Dow up on light trading at 3.3 billion shares for the day.
Lower gas prices and the fact the the economy isn't loosing more jobs also helped buoy the mood for the day despite deep concerns over the European debt crisis which threatens to drag the global economy down.
On Monday, the 17 nations of the Eurozone were told during a meeting to "prepare a contingency plan, individually, for the potential consequences of a Greek exit from the euro," while European stock markets fell about 2% amid anxiety that Greece might have to exit the euro.
Europe is feared to be entering another deep recession and France's new president, Francois Hollande, has told the euro-block that it will not support German led austerity measures meant to keep government from defaulting on their debts by forcing deep government spending cuts.
Lawsuits have been filed by shareholders against Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg and Morgan Stanley claiming they hid information that would cause the stock to be worth less than the IPO, the 19 page suit was filed Wednesday morning in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan by the Brian Roffe Profit Sharing Plan, Jacob Salzmann and Dannis Palkon.
New York City -
Shares of Facebook slide again today, down to $34.03, or 11%, from its opening of $38 per share during its recent IPO. Even has Facebook was preparing for its IPO, there were considerable concerns that it was overvalued, with GM recently pulling all of its advertising with the social media giant citing poor returns on ad investment with Facebook saying it was "ineffective."