Brightbridge Wealth Management Headlines: Apple may have tough road in Amazon lawsuit

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(Reuters) – Apple Inc may face hurdles in stopping online retailer Amazon.com Inc from using Apple’s App Store name through a trademark lawsuit, a U.S. judge indicated at a hearing on Wednesday.

Apple, the maker of best-selling iPhones and iPad tablets, filed a lawsuit saying that Amazon has improperly used Apple’s App Store name to solicit software developers throughout the United States.

At the hearing in an Oakland federal court on Wednesday, District Judge Phyllis Hamilton said she would reread some of the supporting papers in the case, according to an individual who was at the hearing.

However, Hamilton said Apple had a “stumbling block” in proving that anyone would confuse Apple’s App Store for Amazon’s Appstore for Android, the individual said.

Hamilton did not make a final ruling at the hearing, court records show.

Apple declined to comment. Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Apple claims in the lawsuit that Amazon is unlawfully using the App Store name in connection with what Amazon calls the “Amazon Appstore Developer Portal,” along with other instances like advertisements for a version of Angry Birds, the popular mobile game.

Apple has also asserted a claim of unfair competition, and is seeking to enjoin Amazon from using the App Store mark.

The case in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California is Apple Inc v. Amazon.com Inc, 11-1327.

Brightbridge Wealth Management Headlines: Zurich Steps Closer to Entering Latin America Market

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NU Online News Service, July 15, 1:54 p.m. EDT

Zurich Financial Services Group says it has signed a definitive agreement with Banco Santander SA to buy a majority interest in the bank’s Latin America insurance operations.

The Zurich, Switzerland-based insurer says the agreement is “materially unchanged from what was announced” on Feb. 22.

The carrier went on to say that it and Madrid, Spain-based Banco Santander expect the transaction to be completed before the end of this year.

Earlier this year, Zurich announced it signed a 25-year distribution agreement with Banco Santander where it would acquire 51 percent of the bank’s insurance business in Latin America and Santander would keep the remaining 49 percent.

Zurich will pay Santander $1.67 billion in a combination cash and financed deal for its book of business.

The insurer will have access to 5,600 bank branches and an additional 36 million customers in five South American countries.

Thirty percent of the business is general insurance, primarily homeowners insurance, and the bulk of the rest is in life products.

In 2010, Santander’s Latin American insurance operations delivered a net profit of $328 million.

Zurich says the deal would make the company the 6^th largest non-life insurer in the region, increasing its market share in the region to 3 percent. Once complete, Zurich becomes the 3^rdlargest life insurer in the region and the 4^th largest insurer overall in Latin America.

Brightbridge Wealth Management Headlines: Zurich streets among Europe’s most congested

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A recent survey has revealed that more than a quarter of roads in Switzerland’s main business conglomeration are clogged, putting Zurich in 16th place in the list of most congested cities.

The survey by Dutch navigation system maker TomTom comes days after a critical report in the New York Times accusing Zurich of “working overtime in recent years to torment drivers”.

The article reports that traffic lights are programmed to favour trams while pedestrian crossings have been moved from underground passages to street level.

The TomTom analysis found that daytime traffic on 27.4 per cent of Zurich city’s streets was forced to travel less than 70 per cent as fast as during the night when roads are less busy. Brussels came out worst in the report with nearly 40 per cent of its streets congested.

Angry pedestrians

Pio Marzolini from Zurich’s civil engineering department told swissinfo.ch that the authorities had made a decision to share out the limited space in the city more equitably.

“Most cities put cars first, but in Zurich we give equal rights to pedestrians, cyclists and public transport,” he said. “We do not want to create traffic jams, but tram users and pedestrians also get angry when they get delayed.”

Marzolini added that inhabitants of Zurich city supported the policy – unlike commuters – and that good public transport links had encouraged more people to relinquish their cars. In the last decade, the percentage of households without a car in the city has increased from 40 to 45 per cent.

“It is no good just telling people to give up their cars, we have to provide them with a good alternative too,” he said.

The policy is bound to please environmentalists who three years ago launched a campaign to reduce vehicle congestion in five of Switzerland’s largest cities.

More bypasses needed

Zurich even toyed with the idea of introducing a congestion charge for vehicles driving in the city, but the city council shelved the project because it lacked enough political support.

However, motor vehicle associations are less than happy with the situation in Zurich. Reto Cavegn, director of the Touring Club of Switzerland’s (TCS) Zurich chapter, told swissinfo.ch that, unlike for pedestrians and trams, the city had no clear policy for vehicle transport.

He argued that road congestion is critical throughout the canton of Zurich and not just in the city. Cavegn laid the blame on a lack of construction projects that could take traffic away from the city and other built up areas.

The Uetliberg tunnel was opened in 2009 to improve traffic access to central Switzerland from the south of Zurich. But Cavegn believes that there should be more such outlets and that existing bypasses, such as the notoriously congested Gubrist tunnel, should be upgraded.

“Nothing is being done for car drivers,” he told swissinfo.ch. “As long as vehicles lack clear routes away from the city then we will have too much traffic there.”

TCS estimates that traffic jams cost the canton of Zurich’s economy SFr100 million ($118 million) a year as commuters are late for work or deliveries are delayed.

Intelligent traffic lights

Dirk Helbing, a professor of sociology at Zurich’s Federal Institute of Technology, claims to have the answer to all these problems. Together with colleagues at Dresden’s University of Technology, Helbing has developed an intelligent traffic light system that he claims could reduce traffic waiting time by up to 30 per cent.

Using sensors and wireless technology, this system monitors the amount of vehicles on the roads and better coordinates traffic flow by having traffic lights “talk” to one another before changing from green to red.

This system would adapt to changes in traffic flow rather than the present rigid method of programming lights to change at fixed times according to the time of day.

“This is a more flexible approach that responds to actual traffic flow and provides better performance,” Helbing told swissinfo.ch. “It would not be very expensive to install because the wireless technology can be adapted to existing systems and does not require roads to be torn up.”

The system would also recognise buses and trams and be able to give them priority, Helbing added. Pedestrians and cyclists would also benefit by breaking traffic into smaller blocks, giving more space to others using the road or wishing to cross over, he said.

Brightbridge Wealth Management Headlines: People’s Bank Still Owes an Accounting to Its Shareholders: View

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Imagine that a friend with infinite resources gives you unlimited access to his bank account in exchange for a symbolic amount of interest, say 0.01 percent. Then imagine that you can do as you please with the money, including lend it back to your deep-pocketed friend at a much higher rate of interest and keep the difference as profit.

It sounds too good to be true, yet it happens to be a pretty good analogy for the method the U.S. Federal Reserve used to rescue the financial system from collapse in 2008. The biggest U.S. banks — and some foreign ones — were given access to Fed lending programs at negligible rates and then used the money to, among other things, buy 10-year Treasury securities with yields from 2.05 percent to 4.27 percent. Altogether, the central bank committed $3.5 trillion to bailing out banks and restoring the flow of credit to a paralyzed financial system.

Astoundingly, in combination with the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program and various other bailouts by the Treasury Department and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., this approach mostly worked: Credit markets gradually thawed, the biggest U.S. banks were pulled back from the brink and the economy has posted seven quarters of consecutive — albeit modest — growth since June 2009.

So why does the Fed continue to keep Congress, and the rest of us, in the dark about the way taxpayer money was used? Last week, Bloomberg News’s Bob Ivry reported that in 2008 Credit Suisse Group AG (CS), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc (RBS) each borrowed at least $30 billion from a Fed emergency-lending program whose details haven’t been disclosed to shareholders, members of Congress or the public.

28-Day Loans

It was no simple task to uncover this $80 billion Fed initiative known as single-tranche open-market operations (ST OMO), which from March through December 2008 made 28-day loans to units of 20 banks that paid interest rates as low as 0.01 percent. Information about the program was buried in just 27 pages of the more than 29,000 pages of data the Fed was forced to release under the Freedom of Information Act after a request for disclosure was contested all the way to the Supreme Court. Nor was the program mentioned in the reports on emergency lending the Fed was required to make to Congress last year under the Dodd-Frank law.

The Fed claims, with some justification, that it has been more open than ever before in its 97-year history, giving pride of place to Chairman Ben Bernanke’s big press conference on April 27. Openness is different from transparency, however. While it is true the central bank has released a trove of data concerning its lending facilities during the 2007-2009 crisis, it has never done so voluntarily.

Bank-Supervisory Memos

There is a lot more to be done. Specifically, the Fed should make public the bank-supervisory memos from the period that preceded the popping of the credit bubble. Determining which signs and portents were missed, ignored or misinterpreted will help regulators and Congress — and the Fed itself — avoid similar mistakes in the future.

Another urgent change is to require the Fed’s regional affiliates to be more transparent. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which administered the ST OMO program, has rebuffed requests for information about specific amounts the bank lent and to which firms. The New York Fed claims, unconvincingly, that it’s not subject to the disclosure laws that cover the rest of the executive branch because it’s a private entity.

Quantitative Easing

Finally, the Fed’s emergency policy of funneling money into the banking system has been followed by a post-emergency policy of quantitative easing, which amounted to funneling even more money into that same banking system. This has increased the threat of inflation and weakened the dollar. More disclosure would force central bankers to tell us how they plan to address these unintended consequences.

More than two years after the official end of the recession, the Fed should understand that withholding information ultimately undermines its ability to preserve its independence, a fundamental requirement of fulfilling its mandate. Its opacity only serves to reinforce a misguided sense among some Americans that the central bank is an occult organization devoted to mysterious ends. This perception was visible in a Bloomberg National Poll published in December in which a majority of respondents said they favored either bringing the Fed under tighter political control or abolishing it outright.

Greater disclosure has the power to deepen public appreciation of an independent Fed’s beneficial role for all Americans. The central bank should trust the citizens it serves to understand the actions it takes in their name — and with their money.

Brightbridge Wealth Management Headlines: Don’t let a natural disaster become a financial disaster

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HEADLINES routinely ring with news of natural disasters this spring. With wildfires in the west, earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan, and flooding and record tornadoes across the country, it’s a dose of reality that disaster can strike anytime and anywhere.If the unthinkable occurs, would your family be prepared? The following tips will help make sure you are ready to weather any devastation that may come your way.  

First things first

Take care of basic things first like installing smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors and knowing how to shut off utilities. Familiarize yourself with extreme weather conditions in your area and how to prepare for them. Advance preparation may ultimately save valuable time, money and resources during a crisis.

Disaster-proofing your home

Certain improvements may help disaster-proof your home. Before deciding to invest in home improvements, assess whether the changes will reduce your insurance premiums, increase the value of your home or offer you peace of mind if there is a disaster.

Brightbridge Wealth Management Headlines: Asia BoomChanging World economy says RBA

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Reserve Bank of Australia governor Glenn Stevens said the rapid growth of China, India and other emerging economies was driving Australia’s terms of trade to levels about 85 per cent above their 20th-century average.

“The amount of additional income accruing to production in Australia from that is 15 per cent or more of annual GDP,” the bank chief said in a speech.

Stevens said the boost reflected a “large and persistent change in global relative prices”, warning that the “China story” went beyond cyclical forces of supply and demand to a deeper structural shift.

“Hundreds of millions of people in the emerging world have seen growth in their incomes and associated changes in their living standards, and they want to live much more like we have been living for decades,” he said.

“This means they are moving towards a more energy- and steel-intensive way of life and a more protein-rich diet. That fact is fundamentally changing the shape of the world economy.”

In Australia, that meant a “very large boost to national income” which would require “some degree of restraint”, he said, raising the prospect of a rate hike – the first since November when it was lifted to 4.75 pe recent.

The Australian dollar spiked to $US1.0707 from $US1.0671 prior to Stevens’ remarks.

The Reserve Bank of Australia held official rates steady this month for the sixth time since November, saying floods and cyclones over the summer had thrown the economy into reverse, while Europe remained under a debt cloud.

Brightbridge Wealth Management Headlines: Bitcoin ‘will recover’ from crash

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The virtual currency Bitcoin will “bounce back” after a hack attack caused its value to collapse, according to one of its senior developers.

Gavin Andresen said he hoped the crisis would lead to better security on sites where Bitcoins are bought and sold.

Prices on the main exchange, Mt.Gox, fell from $17.50 (£10.80) to almost zero when a large number of stolen Bitcoins were dumped on the market.

Trading was suspended and eventually rolled back to pre-crash rates.

Mt.Gox revealed details of the security breach on June 20 with an announcement on its website.

“It appears that someone who performs audits on our system and had read-only access to our database had their computer compromised. This allowed for someone to pull our database,” the statement read.

Around the same time, an unidentified person accessed one of the compromised accounts and sold all of its Bitcoins.

They then attempted to buy the coins again and withdraw them in US dollars.

The fraudster was partially foiled when they hit Mt.Gox’s $1000 daily limit.

The decision to reset the Bitcoin rate to a point just before the malicious trades were placed was criticised by some users who had taken the opportunity to buy low.

“Why should everyone who profited from the crash suffer your inability to secure the site?” wrote a user called Elments.

Questionable future

Although the problem was caused by security failings at Mt.Gox, it has raised wider questions about the viability of Bitcoin as a virtual currency.

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