Forget Apple, Forget Facebook: Here's The One Company That Actually Terrifies Google Execs. The Building That's In Two Countries At Once : Planet Money. Hide captionHans Hover has one foot in Germany, and one in the Netherlands. Robert Smith/NPR Hans Hover has one foot in Germany, and one in the Netherlands. Zoe Chace and Robert Smith are reporting from European borders this week. This is the first story in a four-part series. A metal strip on the floor of Eurode Business Center marks the border between Germany and the Netherlands.
On one side of the building, there's a German mailbox and a German policeman. The building was supposed to make it easy to work in both countries. The border is open enough that a single building can span it. A computer security company called Alunsa has offices on both sides of the building. The reason for all the back and forth: Taxes. Jan Schlievert, an EU lawyer who also works in the Eurode, agrees with Potgens. Schlievert tells the story of a Belgian carpenter who spent his days doing carpentry in Germany, then drove home to spend the night in Belgium. This is how a united Europe is being created. "The Beijing Conference": See How China Quietly Took Over Africa. The U.S. Economic Policy Debate Is a Sham. Watching Democrats and Republicans hash out their differences in the public arena, it’s easy to get the impression that there’s a deep disagreement among reasonable people about how to manage the U.S. economy.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, there’s remarkable consensus among mainstream economists, including those from the left and right, on most major macroeconomic issues. The debate in Washington about economic policy is phony. It’s manufactured. And it’s entirely political. Let’s start with Obama’s stimulus. Or consider the widely despised bank bailouts. No Support Do you remember the Republican concern that Obama had somehow caused gas prices to rise, a development that Newt Gingrich promised to reverse? How about the oft-cited Republican claim that tax cuts will boost the economy so much that they will pay for themselves?
The consensus isn’t the result of a faux poll of left-wing ideologues. Let’s be clear about what the economists’ remarkable consensus means. The real cost of being Batman | Movie Editor's Blog. Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy dealt with the emotional and physical cost of parading around a city fighting crime dressed as a bat, but not so much the financial cost.
Enter Moneysupermarket.com, who have had their top boffins calculate how much Bruce Wayne had to delve into his piggy bank to on his quest for justice. Covering everything from a periscope to his butler Alfred's salary, the infographic below details how much you'd have to spend to become the caped crusader... [Related story: Christian Bale visits shooting victims in Denver] [Related feature: Eddie Murphy as The Riddler? The maddest Dark Knight Rises rumours] (Credit: Moneysupermarkt.com/Warner Bros) Apple Profit Margin May Be Starting To Decline. Apple Just Made $9 Billion (And Investors Are Mad) : Planet Money. Daniel Hennemand (photogestion)/Flickr Apple reported its financial results for the quarter ended June 30, and depending how you look at it, they're either amazing or disappointing. The company says it made $8.8 billion in profits over the course of three months. That's more than enough to buy every share of Alcoa, the global aluminum giant, which was worth just under $8.6 billion when the stock market closed this afternoon.
Put another way, the computer company's profits were just about the same as Mongolia's entire economic output for all of last year, using World Bank GDP figures, and bigger than the output of the nations of Belize, Liberia, Bhutan, Guyana, Greenland and Guinea-Bissau combined. In three months. But the stock market is not happy about this: Since the company announced the news after the market closed this afternoon, Apple's shares have fallen by nearly $30, or just shy of 5%, in after-hours trading.