Portal:Business
The Business and Economics Portal  Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or buying and selling products (such as goods and services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for profit." A business entity is not necessarily separate from the owner and the creditors can hold the owner liable for debts the business has acquired except for limited liability company. The taxation system for businesses is different from that of the corporates. A business structure does not allow for corporate tax rates. The proprietor is personally taxed on all income from the business. A distinction is made in law and public offices between the term business and a company (such as a corporation or cooperative). Colloquially, the terms are used interchangeably. (Full article...) Economics (/ˌɛkəˈnɒmɪks, ˌiːkə-/) is a social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analyses what is viewed as basic elements within economies, including individual agents and markets, their interactions, and the outcomes of interactions. Individual agents may include, for example, households, firms, buyers, and sellers. Macroeconomics analyses economies as systems where production, distribution, consumption, savings, and investment expenditure interact; and the factors of production affecting them, such as: labour, capital, land, and enterprise, inflation, economic growth, and public policies that impact these elements. It also seeks to analyse and describe the global economy. (Full article...) Selected articleBank of China (Hong Kong) Limited (BOCHK, 中國銀行(香港)有限公司) is the second-largest commercial banking group in Hong Kong in terms of assets and customer deposits, with more than 300 branches in Hong Kong. It was established on October 1, 2001 from a merger of 12 subsidiaries and associates of the Bank of China in Hong Kong, and listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in October 2002. As of the end of 2003, the bank had HK$763 billion in assets and earned net profit of HK$8 billion in 2003. BOCHK is one of the three banks which issue banknotes for Hong Kong, the biggest member and a founder of the JETCO ATM and payment system, and the designated clearing bank in Hong Kong for transactions involving the renminbi, Mainland China's currency. It is legally separate from its parent, Bank of China (BOC), although they maintain close relations in management and administration and cooperate in several areas including reselling BOC's insurance and securities services. It also shares its Hong Kong headquarters, the Bank of China Tower, with its parent; completed in 1988, this was the first building outside of North America to exceed 1,000 feet (300 m). Selected image
Selected economy.jpg) The economy of New York City encompasses the largest municipal and regional economy in the United States. In 2023, the New York City Metropolitan Area generated a GMP of US$2.299 trillion. Anchored by Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, New York City has been characterized as the world's premier fintech and financial center. The city is home to the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE, on Wall Street) and Nasdaq (headquartered in Times Square), the world's two largest stock exchanges by both market capitalization and trading activity. New York City, with its center in Manhattan, is the world's leading center of banking, finance, and communication. Many of the world's largest corporations are headquartered in Manhattan. The borough contained over 500 million square feet (46.5 million m2) of office space in 2015, making it the largest office market in the United States. Midtown Manhattan, with nearly 400 million square feet (37.2 million m2) that same year, is the largest central business district in the world. New York City is distinctive for its high concentrations of advanced service sector firms in the law, accountancy, banking, and management consultancy fields. It is the top global center for the advertising industry, which is metonymously called "Madison Avenue". Silicon Alley, metonymous for New York's broad-spectrum high technology sphere, continues to expand. (Full article...) Selected quote"With a logic reminiscent of a generation earlier, statists argued that the gold standard was largely to blame for the credit debacle which led to the Great Depression. If the gold standard had not existed, they argued, Britain's abandonment of gold payments in 1931 would not have caused the failure of banks all over the world. (The irony was that since 1913, we had been, not on a gold standard, but on what may be termed "a mixed gold standard"; yet it is gold that took the blame.) But the opposition to the gold standard in any form — from a growing number of welfare-state advocates — was prompted by a much subtler insight: the realization that the gold standard is incompatible with chronic deficit spending (the hallmark of the welfare state). Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes. A substantial part of the confiscation is effected by taxation. But the welfare statists were quick to recognize that if they wished to retain political power, the amount of taxation had to be limited and they had to resort to programs of massive deficit spending, i.e., they had to borrow money, by issuing government bonds, to finance welfare expenditures on a large scale. Under a gold standard, the amount of credit that an economy can support is determined by the economy's tangible assets, since every credit instrument is ultimately a claim on some tangible asset. But government bonds are not backed by tangible wealth, only by the government's promise to pay out of future tax revenues, and cannot easily be absorbed by the financial markets. A large volume of new government bonds can be sold to the public only at progressively higher interest rates. Thus, government deficit spending under a gold standard is severely limited. The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit. They have created paper reserves in the form of government bonds which — through a complex series of steps — the banks accept in place of tangible assets and treat as if they were an actual deposit, i.e., as the equivalent of what was formerly a deposit of gold. The holder of a government bond or of a bank deposit created by paper reserves believes that he has a valid claim on a real asset. But the fact is that there are now more claims outstanding than real assets. The law of supply and demand is not to be conned. As the supply of money (of claims) increases relative to the supply of tangible assets in the economy, prices must eventually rise. Thus the earnings saved by the productive members of the society lose value in terms of goods. When the economy's books are finally balanced, one finds that this loss in value represents the goods purchased by the government for welfare or other purposes with the money proceeds of the government bonds financed by bank credit expansion. In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves."
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