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Planet Money : NPR

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The Rise Of The Blue-Collar Noncompete : Planet Money : NPR

Workers in sales jobs, or those who have access to a company's trade secrets, are often asked to sign noncompete clauses as part of their employment contracts. By signing noncompetes, employees often agree — in the event they quit or are terminated — not to go and work for a competitor for a certain period of time. That way the company is protected from having the employee take intellectual property — like client lists, proprietary corporate processes, or other secret sauces — to a competitor.

Noncompetes are common in industries like banking and insurance, and they often feature in employment agreements for managers and other white-collar professionals. But as the labor market has tightened over the last few years, noncompetes are starting to show up, and to be enforced, in the contracts of all kinds of blue-collar workers, from heavy equipment operators to hairdressers.

How to Identify A Recession Before It’s Official – Bloomberg

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How to Identify A Recession Before It’s Official – Bloomberg

As the U.S. nears a record-long expansion in July, the conversation is increasingly turning to when it will all end.

Recessions are inherently hard to spot. The National Bureau of Economic Research’s Business Cycle Dating Committee, a panel whose determinations of when expansions begin and end are accepted as official, generally waits about a year to make a call. By the time a sustained downturn is evident in data like payrolls or gross domestic product, a contraction may have already begun.

BBC – Capital – The curious origins of the dollar symbol

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BBC – Capital – The curious origins of the dollar symbol

The dollar sign is among the world’s most potent symbols, emblematic of far more than US currency.

It’s shorthand for the American dream and all the consumerism and commodification that comes with it, signifying at once sunny aspiration, splashy greed and rampant capitalism. It’s been co-opted by pop culture (think Ke$ha when she first started out, or any number of fast-fashion t-shirts) and borrowed by artists (Salvador Dali fashioned a moustache from it, Andy Warhol rendered it in acrylic and silkscreen, creating an iconic body of work that itself now sells for $$$).

It’s used widely in computer coding and it provides money-mouth emoji with its dazed eyes and lolling tongue. Yet despite its polyglot ubiquity, the origins of the dollar sign remain far from clear, with competing theories touching on Bohemian coins, the Pillars of Hercules and harried merchants.

How to Trick People Into Saving Money – The Atlantic – Pocket

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How to Trick People Into Saving Money – The Atlantic – Pocket

Americans’ difficulty saving, Daniel Eckert told me recently, is a textbook example of how brains wired to reckon with short-term threats and opportunities struggle to think about long-term consequences—and struggle even harder to take current action to stave off future disaster. Eckert, who oversees Walmart’s financial-services businesses, became interested in behavioral economics while earning his M.B.A. at the University of Chicago in the early 2000s.

Take a walk through a retail store—a Walmart, let’s say. You’ll pass heaps of products in every category, big signs advertising prices that seem too good to pass up, TV screens touting bargains galore. I shop at Walmart frequently, and somewhere in the long walk from the dog-biscuit aisle to the yogurt case I am at the very least tempted to buy something I didn’t know I needed when I arrived.

For America’s middle-income families, the dollars aren’t making sense

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For America’s middle-income families, the dollars aren’t making sense

While I'm not sure I agree with his paid post that a paid financial advisor is essential or even recommended for most families, I do think people should read up and listen to practical advise on saving and investing, and give up more luxuries and be prepared for a more uncertain tomorrow. It's a very risky proposition to think the government will always be there to bail you out, or that things won't be as bad as you might they think they would be.