This past week, it took 100 pizza chefs, 250 assistant pizza makers, six hours and 11 minutes to build a 1.15 mile long pizza in Naples, Italy, breaking the previous mile- long record set in Milan last year. The recipe called for 4,409 lbs of mozzarella and flour, 3,527 lbs of tomatoes, 66 lbs of
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05/30/2016
During the first two months of 2016, cash home sales were 35.7% of all transactions, their lowest February reading since 2008 and a 2.5 percentage points decline Y-o-Y. Cash sales were 59.2% of REO sales, 35.6% of resales, 32.6% of short sales and 15.2% of new home sales. Traditionally, cash tr
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05/30/2016
Doubling the pay threshold under which salaried workers must be eligible for overtime to $47,476 a year will make an additional 4.2 million employees, less than 3% of all workers, eligible for overtime pay. By comparison, increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour nationally would affect about
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05/30/2016
While April housing starts rose 6.6% month over month and declined 1.7% year over year, housing starts have been flat for a year. Since April of 2015, the peak in monthly seasonally adjusted starts was a rate of 1.213 million in June 2015; the trough was 1.063 million in May 2015. Howev
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05/18/2016
Should Britain vote to exit the EU on 6/23/16? From reading all the opions from the "experts" the feeling is that the pound will fall in value, UK inflation will rise and the economy will likely enter a mild recession. Depending on the magnitude of these changes, the Bank of England may c
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05/18/2016
While Memphis, Tenn., had the highest share of flipped properties (number of flipped home sales as a percentage of all home sales) in first quarter 2016 followed by Fresno, Calif., Lakeland-Winter Haven, Fla., came in third, according to CoreLogic data on the 86 largest U.S. metro areas.While a
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05/16/2016
The top coffee producing nation is Brazil, which harvested 6 billion lbs. in 2014. Vietnam follows with 3.6 billion, then Columbia at 1.5 billion, Indonesia at 900 million, and Ethiopia, where coffee was discovered, at 860 million. The largest producer of generally higher-priced Arabica bea
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05/16/2016
If the May Wall Street Journal economist survey is any indication, the economy is a lot worse off than it was as recently as a month ago. A couple of setbacks—first, in late April, the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced GDP growth for the first quarter was a mere 0.5 percent (in their ad
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05/16/2016
The median priced home is $220,000. Assuming 10% down and thus a $198,000 mortgage, at the current 30-year mortgage rate of 3.7%, that works out to a payment of $917/month. Add $180/month for property taxes and the total is $1,097/month. That is an annual total just $564 higher than the 20
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05/12/2016
In the first quarter of 2016 revenue at Amazon was a staggering $29 billion and net income was $513 million. More interesting, Amazon Web Services (AWS) revenue jumped 64% to $2.6 billion, 9% of total revenue, but 67% of operating income and 56% of operating profits (the amount of revenue that
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05/09/2016
