Metropolis Opinion

Once you have determined that you are entitled to claim a deduction for business use of your home, you then need to determine the allowable deductions that are related to your business, and the use of your home.
So what household expenses are deductible? To make this determination it is necessary to separate your household expenses into three categories;

1) Expenses that are not related to your business use.

2) Expenses that are indirectly related to your business.

3) Expenses that are directly related to your business.

Let’s eliminate one category right away. Expenses that are totally unrelated to your business are not deductible, therefore these expenses need to be treated as personal expenses. In general I would state that all expenses directly related to your business would be deductible. In addition, the portion of related expenses that are not directly related would be deductible. I might caution you that because of limits placed on deductions for expenses that pertain to your business, you may find that even directly and indirectly related expenses could be disallowed. I won’t go into this here, but you could research what limits are placed on deductions to make a determination in your situation.

I should explain what a directly related expense is. These would be the expenses incurred in your home that benefit only the business portion of your home. This would be for the area used exclusively for your business, and only for the business area. An example would be new carpet only in the area used exclusively for business, or painting the area.
Directly related expenses are fully deductible but are subject to a limit based on the gross income of the business . If a direct expense is for the purchase of property that will be used for more than one year (furniture), the cost must generally be depreciated over a number of years.
Ok now let’s discuss indirectly related expenses. These are the expenses that you incur in maintaining and running your entire home.
These expenses benefit both your business and personal portions of the home. You may use the business portion of these expenses to calculate the home office deduction. Indirect expenses include such items as: 1. Real estate taxes;
2. Deductible mortgage interest;
3. Rent;
4. Utilities and services;
5. Insurance; and
6. Depreciation. Full Article »

In the modern world of business globalization the term brand or branding takes up much existence in the capital market. There are thousands of brands living with us today trying to deliver an individual image of some sort. Brads refer to a certain identity that make companies, products or services different from one another. While some brands are very memoriziable and at times very close a heart others may not have much meaning to us. This can be explained with the fact that brands, as a form of visual communications deliver a meaning or impression beyond the visible symbols, colors, letters it is compiled with or even sometimes the unique sounds a distinct brand name may produce having itself deliver a nuance of some sort giving a touch comfort, excitement, seriousness, aristocracy or maybe beauty.

The term brand minded in advertising is used to explain those brands that I referred to “close at heart” every time we experience a certain Romanism or emotion we auto-relate the experience to a certain brand. For instance, a Kodak moment is an expression widely knowledge as a special moment happening in our lives that must be documented because it delivers a special meaning to the evens we experience in life. Kodak is a form of visual communication. It is a well-known brand of a film for cameras clearly associated with the idea of documenting a special moment. Nike is a brand that produces a sound associated to the squeaking sounds of sneakers produces by the players of a basketball game.

Brands Approach Nuance

The use of color has become inextricably integrated into the image of corporate identity. While some colors are meant to make you think of the corporation itself, like the yellow and red of the McDonald’s it also creates a nuance of warmth in close relationships of families and friends. From a graphic designers perspective, these colors, red, orange, yellow, have the tendency to create a warm atmosphere and are also considered to be colors that ignite an appetite. The curviness of its M has and nuance of comfort and informal closeness. This is just a simple example of the manifestations of visual communication through color used by advertisers to convey an idea or feeling about their brand. The success of a business although doesn’t stop at the point when individuals become trained to recognize brand identity or are visually literate enough to signify a company.

Brand Management

The importance of brand management then becomes significant in the success of a business enterprise. Starting from the process of name creation to its maintenance, the whole concept of brand management in a global environment is a matter of complexities of visual communication and brand management strategies. Companies should not only have brand name that achieve a high level of brand recognition Like Kodak, Nike and McDonalds, (Short, Simple, Memorable, Unique, Richly Connotative) but also have international presence.

Companies, large and small, should have international presence. These companies should be repeatedly exposed thru a wide network of different types of media. The Internet is one media that has achieved an important role for this purpose. For corporations that have an existence in the cyber world should be take in high consideration towards preventing domain hijacking an interruption of business and brand dilution by cyber squatters. Therefore, these companies should have a comprehensive Domain Name (DN) management strategy.

A Company should not only produce a brand that will convey the essence of the companies valued product but also to assure that the companies name is legally verified and properly registered. Finding an available name and managing a strategy for a good Domain Name is increasingly difficult these days but with the help of a name creation company the business of managing and protecting company trademarks and domain names will be taken care from the moment a brand name is born.
VAYTON Brand Capital is the naming company offering innovative brand management services. VAYTON Brand Capital names both companies and products. Their two naming solutions consists of a team of 30 name testers covering 30 languages and A portfolio of ready to use names already tested and registered as a .com. VAYTON services also protects new company or product name by using a new technology that will audit domain name registration and registers a company’s domain name in all countries and languages. They also have a new tax advisory service that will make sure a company hosts their new trademark and domain name in a tax friendly environment.

Hello World!

Below are those news mail from Reuters. I try to collect and post for you with 2 purposes. First is to try show you latest day about financial crisis, the journey to crash. Highlight about condition and actions from FED, Companies, Market, Stocks, and others actions to save and to minimize lost or necessary action to save financial crash, highlight about 29 crash companies, FED actions, to save their credit crunch. Second is to know about the journey of the impacts that created by credit crunch and the impacts to countries.

Reuters Before the Bell also provide highlight about live data, transaction and all activities in Wall Street, Stock Index, Gold price and any economic and financial news.

Goodbye
FRI 10 Oct 2008
“Sell, Baby, sell!” - Those are the words Wall Street has been living by for the past seven sessions, and today seems to be no exception. Stock futures are pointing down.
But hey, it may not be fun to be an investor, stockbroker or fund manager, but overseeing a major economy is no picnic either.
Group of Seven finance ministers are under heavy pressure to come up with something at their meeting later today to calm the markets down and revive the banking system. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson will hold a post-G7 news conference.
The Wall Street Journal says the U.S. government is looking at guaranteeing billions of dollars in bank debt and temporarily insuring all bank deposits.
The economic mess has pushed oil prices down and prompted the International Energy Agency to cut its forecast for black gold demand growth to a 15-year low.
U.S. Treasuries are lower, but the dollar is up against an index of major currencies.
Data on tap includes the international trade deficit and import-export prices.
General Electric’s quarterly results have done nothing to … er, electrify the market. The stock is down even though earnings were in line with the conglomerate’s reduced forecast.
And now a personal note. This will be the last editor’s message in the Before the Bell news mail, although you’ll still get an automated mailing of the top business and economic stories.
I’ve really enjoyed giving you my take on the ups and downs of the markets, and I wish you all the best in these tumultuous times.
In the closing words of “The Sopranos,” don’t stop believing!
Sincerely,
Lisa Von Ahn
News Mail Editor Full Article »

Federal Reserve Bank (FED) and White House become little Panic (Big Panic) about the American Financial situation. But the good news, Storm in American Economic has no big effect to their politic, it indicates that American has already opened their mind and has already become the settle states, if we compare with Indonesia, when Crisis Strom attacked in 1998; Economic Panic has multidimensional effect to politics. So we don’t find a demo in America about their politic, about government policy in economic.
Back to topic!
Today, any news showed and told about wall street and financial in large company in America. Some of them run bankrupt, show the minus trend in their balance sheet, try to find new buyer and some of them going to merge. I don’t know (maybe I didn’t heard the news before) about the $700 million white house proposal to congress was deal or not. Once deal, this is world history.
NYTimes.com has accurate analysis and put in box chart to understand that there are 29 companies are hard hit from the financial crisis; started by Credit crunch some couple months before. The 29 big companies, WaMu is the worst. WaMu show negative Market Capitalization more than 90 percent in their market capitalization from $31.1 billion in October 2007 to $ 2.1 billion in September this year. Very hard hit!
Freddie Mac, taken over by government become of poor performance and shows 99.3 percent in their market capitalization. Both WaMu and Freddie fall because of bad credit in mortgages and loans. The report shows that in September 2008 Freddie Mac only out $ 0.3 billion of their market capitalization or declined 99.3 percent in October 2007 around $41.5 billion.
Countrywide financial run to bankrupt, biggest and largest mortgage financial shows $0 in their market capitalization in their report. It was brought by Bank of America in June but no helpless and gone to collapse.
American International Group, Insurance Worldwide Company also wrote off $32.3 billion in September this year or decline 82 percent of their market capitalization from $ 179.8 billion in October last year, but their worldwide branch claimed and conference that their costumers is save and need not to worry about their condition. They said, the problem only attacked their central AIG in America. Full Article »

Two days after Barclays, the British bank, failed to reach a deal that would have salvaged Lehman Brothers, it moved closer to its prize on Tuesday, striking a tentative agreement to buy the broken investment firm’s core capital markets businesses for $1.75 billion — far less than Lehman had hoped for.

The accord, announced late Tuesday, could save 8,000 to 10,000 Lehman jobs and allow Robert E. Diamond Jr., the president of Barclays, to attain his longtime goal of expanding his bank’s reach in the United States.

“If you want to transform yourself from a minor player into a major firm, this is the time to do it,” said Roger Nightingale, a global strategist at Pointon York in London. “It’s so difficult to do that in an ordinary period.”

The deal, which also includes Lehman’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters building and two data centers — accounting for $1.5 billion of the deal’s value — must be approved by a judge overseeing Lehman’s bankruptcy proceedings. Barclays said it expected to raise $1 billion in equity to support the deal.

Lehman, staggered by losses on its commercial and residential real estate assets, filed for bankruptcy protection of its holding company Monday morning.

Barclays is taking on Lehman’s large fixed-income trading operations, while avoiding a purchase of the large portfolio of toxic real estate assets that forced Lehman into bankruptcy, people involved in the process said.

Lehman is still trying to sell the bulk of its investment management division by Thursday or Friday. Two private equity groups, Bain Capital and Hellman & Friedman, are seen as the most likely buyers. Full Article »

I’ll start with the good news.

The largest bank failure in the history of the U.S. was handled smoothly by the teamwork of the government and the private sector. The system worked!

Let’s explore this a bit further: Since the 1930s, depositors in commercial banks, savings banks and credit unions have been protected by government deposit insurance. Beginning in 1980, the insured amount has been $100,000 (although only the effort and bother prevents anyone from spreading any larger amount across two or more banks). The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation covers banks; a separate agency covers credit unions.

When a bank is insolvent–when its assets don’t cover its liabilities (which are largely deposits)–the FDIC takes control. The owners are wiped out, since their equity position is negative. Senior management is dismissed. Unsecured creditors are unprotected.

The FDIC then usually finds an acquirer–a solvent bank–to take over the deposit liabilities and the assets of the failed bank. The insured depositors are kept whole; their deposit claims are now the obligations of the acquiring bank.

If the acquirer takes all of the assets, the FDIC writes a check to the acquirer for the negative equity “hole” so that the acquirer is getting a “balanced” (assets equal liabilities) deal. In some instances the acquirer declines to take some of the assets, so the FDIC writes a bigger check and those hard-to-value assets become the property of the FDIC, which eventually liquidates them.

In the WaMu transaction, JPMorgan Chase (nyse: JPM - news - people ) won the auction that the FDIC held among potential acquirers earlier in the week. JPMorgan Chase assumed all of WaMu’s deposit obligations–uninsured as well as insured. These deposits totaled about $188 billion. It also absorbed all of WaMu’s net assets, which were mostly residential mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. Some of WaMu’s assets had been pledged to secured creditors (such as the Federal Home Loan Bank System, which lent WaMu around $60 billion) who could immediately grab collateral that satisfied their claims. The net assets acquired by JPMorgan Chase had a nominal value of around $240 billion. Implicitly, there was also “brand name” value that JPMorgan Chase acquired, since WaMu had an extensive branch network and a good reputation in many states where JPMorgan was absent but longed to expand.

In this resolution, the FDIC didn’t pay anything to induce JPMorgan Chase to absorb WaMu. Indeed, JPMorgan Chase paid the FDIC $1.9 billion.

So, the good news is that the system of deposit insurance worked smoothly, as did the FDIC resolution of a large troubled bank. There was only a small “run” of depositors withdrawing their money from WaMu branches earlier in the week. The FDIC moved in Thursday night, rather than waiting until Friday night (as it usually does). It probably feared that the depositor run would get worse on Friday, and it didn’t want images of depositor lines outside WaMu branches in newspapers, newscasts and Web sites over the weekend. Full Article »