James Springer Jr, a broker at Stifel Nicholas, was awarded $3 million in his arbitration case against UBS Financial Services, his former employer, for defamation. The award is one of the largest in financial industry history related to defamation, according to the Tampa Bay Business Journal. Springer, who managed $350 million in assets, was discharged by UBS in 2014, just before the broker was going to jump to a competitor, the publication reports. Meanwhile, UBS told his clients he was overcharging them, which was untrue. UBS’s reason for the discharge on his U4 was that he had “caused charges on his corporate credit card to be characterized inaccurately so as to portray certain of his personal expenses as business expenses in order to get back funds set aside from his pre-tax earnings to pay for business expenses.”
Business Owner Action Hinges on Tax Reform
The majority of business owners believe taxes are too high and should be a legislative priority ahead of healthcare and infrastructure, according to the latest UBS Investor Watch survey. Perhaps not surprisingly, their strategic decisions hinge on what taxes might be going forward. Out of those polled, three in every four business owners expect their companies to grow in the next 12 months but could accelerate that grow if taxes were lower. With lower taxes, 44 percent said they would invest more in their businesses and 29 percent said they would increase hiring. If taxes remain unchanged, only 15 said their would invest more and 11 percent would hire more.
Children who are taught to spend more time on productive activities, like exercising and reading, and no more than an hour on leisure, like watching TV, tend to be more successful in life, according to a new book by accountant and financial planner Tom Corley. Corley writes in Rich Kids: How to Raise Our Children to Be Happy and Successful in Life that surveys of 233 wealthy individuals on their daily habits versus 128 lower-earning people found that the key to success is limiting what he calls “time wasters.” “Our daily habits are the reason why we are rich, poor or middle class,” he explains in the book. “When you add a few rich habits to your daily routine, they chip away at your [unproductive] habits, which gets your seesaw tipping toward success.” For examples, he notes that Bill Gates reads about 50 books each year and Warren Buffett spends at much as 80 percent of his day reading, CNBC reports.
