BUSINESS
December 30, 2012 | Michael Hiltzik
The good news for the U.S. economy as we enter 2013 is that the election's over. The bad news is that the election's over. What's good about it is that both parties in Washington can shed their preoccupation with the campaign theatrics that dominated our long national voyage from pre-primary jockeying through election day. Yet the most dispiriting thing about the campaign's end is that the economic challenges facing the majority of Americans remain...
BUSINESS
October 7, 2012 | By Walter Hamilton, Los Angeles Times
Of all the challenges individual investors face, one of the toughest is finding a good financial planner. As a generation of do-it-yourself investors grows older and their financial lives get more complex, many people are realizing they want a human touch. Though they're comfortable researching investments on the Internet, they want some level of guidance from a planner. "People say, 'Look, I know what I'm doing but I just had a kid' or 'I've gotten a bonus at work and money is now more important to me. It's more serious,'" said Jon Stein, founder of investment website Betterment.com.
ENTERTAINMENT
August 16, 2012 | By Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times Film Critic
"Cosmopolis," starring Robert Pattinson as a super rich supernova, is an exceedingly self-conscious adaptation of the brooding indictment of the 1% found in Don DeLillo's novel of the same name. The attempt is earnest, but the material itself resists easy transition because virtually all of the action takes place inside a tricked-out limo and a trickier mind. It is a disappointment coming from writer-director David Cronenberg, who has proved such a master at mind games. Cronenberg is perhaps too faithful to the book.
NATIONAL
February 1, 2012 | By Matea Gold, Tom Hamburger and Maloy Moore, Washington Bureau
When it comes to big money in politics, Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons' influence has long been apparent in Texas, where he has plowed more than $1 million into Rick Perry's gubernatorial campaigns. Now Simmons has found a new outlet for his outsize political giving — the explosion this election cycle of "super PACs," independent political organizations that can accept massive contributions to influence the presidential race and other federal elections. Simmons and his privately held holding company, Contran Corp., dumped $8.6 million into a series of GOP-allied super PACs last year, according to campaign finance records released late Tuesday night.
WORLD
December 9, 2011 | By Edmund Sanders, Los Angeles Times
Israel's hottest new TV show may be making many viewers feel guilty. But they can't stop watching it. It's a "Real Housewives" reality-based knockoff about six rich, materialistic women bouncing from personal training sessions in their mansions to Botox appointments to champagne-fueled shopping binges, dishing dirt about one another and generally reveling in their own fabulousness. Hardly scandalous stuff to American TV viewers. But in the land of the kibbutz - a nation founded on egalitarian ideals, where lawmakers still wear jeans in the Knesset, or parliament, and the flaunting of wealth was once considered taboo - this unapologetic celebration of the lifestyles of the rich and Israeli is hitting a raw nerve.
OPINION
September 20, 2011 | By Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott
President Obama is right to insist on the "Buffett rule": Millionaires should not be paying income tax at a rate lower than their secretaries'. But correcting this inequity is only a small step toward fairness. The more serious inequality problem facing the United States involves overall wealth, not just income. While the top 1% of Americans earned 21% of the nation's income, they owned a staggering 35% of the wealth in 2006-07, the most recent year for which statistics are available.