Check Out The Connecticut House A Hedge Fund Analyst Just Bought


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Todd Halky, an analyst at Balyasny Asset Management, a Chicago-based hedge fund, just purchased this house in Westport, Conn, according to Blockshopper.

Halky has worked in the NYC office of Balyasny since 2005. Before that, he was at Sandler O'Neill, where he was named an "All Star Analyst" by the WSJ in 2001 and 2003. Before Sandler O'Neill, he was at Lehman Brothers and Capital One.

Halky and his wife paid $2.275 million for the 6,000 square foot property. The previous owners bought the place back in 2008 for $2.9 million.

The five bedroom house was built in 1993 and features a movie theater, a wine cellar, and almost 10 acres of land.

The house is 6,018 square feet

And is on almost 10 acres of land

The open stairway

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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Netflix Business Model Faces Serious Challenges After Raising Its Rates, Again (NFLX)


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Today, Netflix announced that they are raising rates on monthly plans that allow customers to get unlimited streaming and one DVD out at a time. The plan which originally cost $9.99 a month will now cost $15.98 a month.

In addition, the company is now splitting out streaming only plans from DVD plans and consumers can get an unlimited streaming plan for $7.99 a month, or one DVD out at a time for $7.99 a month.

Essentially, Netflix is making people decide if they really want DVDs as part of their streaming subscription and if they do, requiring them to pay nearly $6 more for it per moth.

In November of last year, Netflix raised DVD plans between $1-$3 per month, depending on the plan you were in and now, only eight months later, they are raising rates again. This is a bad move on Netflix's part, but one that's not surprising as they look for ways to generate more revenue. With their licensing costs skyrocketing and the company aggressively pursuing more content deals for their expansion into Latin America, Netflix is feeling the pressure.

Now, they are forcing people like me who were paying $9.99 a month, to drop to a streaming only plan at $7.99 a month. That's $24 in revenue they are missing out from one customer, per year, and they are going to be millions like me who make that decision. Typically, I only got one or two DVDs a month, so Netflix wasn't losing money on me with the inclusion of DVDs in my plan. Now, when I want a DVD, I'll simply go to Redbox and get it for $1 a night. Forcing customers to go somewhere else for DVD rentals, when even Netflix admits their is still a demand for then, really isn't a smart move.

It was bad enough that Netflix gave in to the studios and agreed not to rent any new DVDs by mail for 28 days, just so the studios could force consumers to have to buy the DVDs instead. Now they are raising prices on DVD plans for the second time in 8 months and not increasing the selection and inventory of streaming only content fast enough or with content that's a lot newer.

In January of 2008, Netflix confirmed it had about 12,000 titles available for streaming. In September of 2009, ads on their website put that number at 17,000. Today, it appears that Netflix has about 20,000 titles for streaming, although Netflix won't confirm that number. If that number is accurate, it means that at any given time, Netflix has only added about 4,000 pieces of content a year for the past two years. That's not a lot of content.

Netflix is going to have a real challenge continuing to grow their subscriber numbers each quarter when they continue to give customers less for their money each month and make their plans less valuable.

Added: When logging into my Netflix account, unless I click on "your account" and then select "change plan," there is no notice that Netflix is going to raise my rate to $15.98 a month come September 1st. So unless you have heard of the news, imagine how many people are going to be surprised when they see their monthly fee change. Netflix should be highlighting this change to you immediately upon logging into their website.

This post originally appeared at BusinessofVideo.com.

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Source: http://www.legaldebthelponline.com/2011/07/12/is-your-debt-relief-program-for-real/

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Why The Euro Is Not Worth Saving


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The Euro crashed yesterday to record lows against the Swiss Franc, and interest rates on Italian and Spanish bonds have hit record highs.

This latest episode in the Eurozone crisis is a result of fears that the contagion is now hitting Italy. With a two-trillion dollar economy and $2.45 trillion in debt, Italy is too big to fail and the European authorities are worried.

Although there is currently little basis for the concern that Italy’s interest rates could rise high enough to put its solvency in jeopardy, financial markets are acting irrationally and elevating both the fear and the prospects of a self-fulfilling prophesy.

The fact that the European authorities cannot even agree on how to handle the debt of Greece – an economy less than one-sixth the size of Italy – does not inspire confidence in their capacity to manage a bigger crisis.

The weaker Eurozone economies – Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and Spain – are already facing the prospect of years of economic punishment, including extremely high levels of unemployment (16, 12, 14 and 21 percent, respectively).  Since the point of all this self-inflicted misery is to save the Euro, it is worth asking whether the Euro is worth saving. And it is worth asking this question from the point of view of the majority of Europeans who work for a living, i.e., from a progressive point of view.

It is often argued that the monetary union, which now includes 17 countries, must be maintained for the sake of the European project. This includes such worthy ideals as European solidarity, building common standards for human rights and social inclusion, keeping right-wing nationalism in check, and of course the economic and political integration which underlies such progress.

But this confuses the monetary union, or Eurozone, with the European Union itself. Denmark, Sweden, and the UK, for example, are part of the EU but not part of the monetary union. There is no reason that the European project cannot proceed, and the EU prosper, without the Euro.

And there are good reasons to hope that this may happen. The problem is that the monetary union, unlike the EU itself, is an unambiguously right-wing project. If this has not been clear from its inception, it should be painfully clear now, as the weaker Euro-zone economies are being subjected to punishment that had previously been reserved for low- and middle-income countries caught in the grip of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and its G-7 governors.

Instead of trying to get out of recession through fiscal and/or monetary stimulus, as most of the world’s governments did in 2009, these governments are being forced to do the opposite, at enormous social cost. The insults added to injury, as with the privatizations in Greece or “labor market reform” in Spain; the regressive effects of the measures taken on the distribution of income and wealth; and the shrinking and weakening of the welfare state, while banks are bailed out at taxpayer expense – all this advertises the clear right-wing agenda of the European authorities, as well as their attempt to take advantage of the crisis to institute right-wing political changes.

The right-wing nature of the monetary union had been institutionalized from the beginning. The rules limiting public debt to 60 percent of GDP and annual budget deficits to 3 percent of GDP – while violated in practice, are unnecessarily restrictive in times of recession and high unemployment. The European Central Bank’s mandate to care only about inflation, and not at all about employment, is another ugly indicator.

The U.S. Federal Reserve, for example, is a conservative institution but it is at least required by law to concern itself with employment as well as inflation. And the Fed -- for all its incompetence in failing to recognize an $8 trillion housing bubble that crashed the U.S. economy -- has proved to be flexible in the face of recession and a weak recovery, creating more than $2 trillion as part of an expansionary monetary policy. By comparison, the extremists running the European Central Bank have been raising interest rates since April, despite depression-level unemployment in the weaker Eurozone economies.

Some economists and political observers argue that the Eurozone needs a fiscal union, with greater coordination of budgetary policies, in order to make it work. But right-wing fiscal policy is counter-productive, as we are witnessing, even were it to be better coordinated. Other economistsincluding this one – have argued that the large differences in productivity among the member economies present serious difficulties for a monetary union. But even if these problems could be overcome, the Eurozone would not be worth the effort if it is a right-wing project.

European economic integration prior to the Eurozone was of a different nature. Unlike the “race-to-the-bottom” approach of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) – which displaced hundreds of thousands of Mexican farmers while contributing to reduced wages and manufacturing employment in the U.S. and Canada – the European Union made some efforts to pull the lower-income economies upward and protect the vulnerable. But the European authorities have proved to be ruthless in their monetary union.

The idea that the Euro must be saved for the sake of European solidarity also plays on an oversimplified notion of the resistance that taxpayers in countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, and Finland have demonstrated to “bailing out” Greece. While it is undeniable that some of this resistance is based on nationalist prejudice – often inflamed by the mass media – that is not the whole story. Many Europeans don’t like to pay the bill for bailing out European banks that made bad loans. And the EU authorities are not “helping” Greece any more than the U.S. and NATO are “helping” Afghanistan – to take a somewhat analogous debate where those who oppose destructive policies are labeled “backward” and “isolationist.”

It appears that much of the European left does not understand the right-wing nature of the institutions, authorities, and especially macroeconomic policies that they are facing in the Eurozone. This is part of a more general problem with the public misunderstanding of macroeconomic policy worldwide, which has allowed right-wing central banks to implement destructive policies, sometimes even under left governments. These misunderstandings, along with the lack of democratic input, might help explain the paradox that Europe currently has more right-wing macroeconomic policies than the United States, despite having much stronger labor unions and other institutional bases for more progressive economic policy.

This post originally appeared at The Guardian Unlimited.

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Source: http://www.legaldebthelponline.com/2011/07/10/remarkable-facts-and-solutions-to-get-awful-credit-score-debt-consolidation-loans/

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