Fitch Ratings has released a statement saying that U.S. banks are moving in the right direction expanding their wealth management divisions and offerings. "Wealth management, including advisor-based guidance and asset management, provides recurring sources of income and requires less capital usage than traditional bank loan products. Wealth management services can strengthen and make stickier relationships with good customers, which tend to provide additional deposit funding, as well as opportunities for cross-selling a bank's core products, such as mortgage lending," according to the statement.
Crowd-Sourced Earnings Estimates Are More Accurate
Estimize.com relies on crowdsourcing to estimate a public company’s quarterly earnings, and claims its data is 70 percent more accurate than the consensus numbers gathered by traditional Wall Street data companies like Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg. Now Estimize wants to provide more transparency with a feature that evaluates individual estimates (which come from 5,500 contributing analysts) and rates each one based on accuracy. Estimize hopes the system will help investors make better decisions by more accurately benchmarking a company's performance.
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Why Millennials Don't Save
In short, they hate banks. The longer answer? They're in too much debt. Adults under 35 have a savings rate of -2 percent, and nearly half of millennials spend at least half of their paychecks paying off credit card, mortgage and student loan debt. The Atlantic looks at all the reasons why kids these days don't save.
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The Gaming Recovery
A new report released by the Entertainment Software Association, a video game lobbying group, says the games business played a major role in reviving the U.S. economy. From 2009 to 2012, the video game industry grew 9 percent annually – more than four times the growth of the U.S. economy as whole during that time – and outpaced general annual job growth by about 13 times. Video games contributed a whopping $6.2 billion into the economy in 2012 alone, and the industry doesn’t show any signs of slow down.
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