The world's 10 richest cities - Number Six Los Angeles

The world's 10 richest cities,Number Six Los Angeles

Los Angeles, which is the sixth richest city in the world, is also among the highest paymasters. Home to Hollywood, LA is also the world's entertainment capital.

On an average, the world's highest gross and net wages are paid in North America.

The world's 10 richest cities - Number Five Oslo

The world's 10 richest cities,Number Five Oslo

5. Oslo
Oslo is fifth richest city and the world's most expensive city. It is also the hub of Norwegian trade, banking, industry and shipping.

According to UBS, the deductions take the largest average bite out of gross income in Western Europe (27.6%), followed closely by North America (26.2%) and Eastern Europe (25.1%).

Payroll deductions are lower in the Middle East (9.2%), Asia (13.4%), South America (15.1%), Africa (19%) and Oceania (22%).

The highest payroll deductions are found in Copenhagen and Ljubljana, followed by Munich, Oslo, Amsterdam, Brussels and Frankfurt, where at least one-third is deducted from gross wages.

Payroll deductions are lowest in Bangkok, Delhi, Hong Kong, Caracas and Mexico City, where less than 10% of gross income -- although relatively modest -- goes to taxes and social security contributions on average.

State deductions are virtually nonexistent in the cities of Doha, Dubai and Manama.

The world's 10 richest cities - Number Four New York

The world's 10 richest cities,Number Four New York

4. New York
Geneva is followed by New York at the fourth position. One of the world's most expensive cities, the wages in New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago are significantly higher on average than in the Canadian metropolises of Montreal and Toronto.

The weighted average net hourly wage for our 14 occupations was highest in Zurich, Geneva, New York and Dublin.

At the bottom of the league are employees in Nairobi, Delhi, Manila, Jakarta and Mumbai, who have to settle for less than one-tenth of European or North American incomes.

Workers there receive an average of around $1.4 for an hour's work. On a global scale, hourly wages average around $11.8 before taxes and $8.8 after.

The world's 10 richest cities - Number Three Geneva

The world's 10 richest cities,Number Three Geneva

3. Geneva
Geneva is ranked third among the world's richest cities. Geneva has ranked as the world's sixth most important financial centre by the Global Financial Centres Index.

A Mercer survey ranks Geneva as the third best nation in offering good quality of life. Geneva is referred to as world's most compact metropolis.

The city is also expensive to live in as people in Geneva and Zurich have to shell out around 20 per cent more on average for products, services and accommodation than their peers in other Western European cities.

The world's 10 richest cities - Number Two Zurich

The world's 10 richest cities,Number Two Zurich

2. Zurich

Zurich is the world's second richest city. Zurich has also been among the top cities that offer best quality of living in the world. The financial hub of Switzerland, Zurich is home to financial institutions and banks like UBS, Credit Suisse, Swiss Re, Zurich Financial Services.

In terms of wages, Zurich is the best. The net incomes are higher than in any other city in the world. With its extremely high gross wages and comparatively low tax rates, Switzerland is a very employee-friendly country.

The world's 10 richest cities - Number One Copenhagen

The world's 10 richest cities,Number One Copenhagen

1. Copenhagen

Copenhagen is the richest city in the world and the financial hub of Denmark.

In 2008, Copenhagen was ranked 4th by FDi magazine in the list of Top 50 European Cities of the Future. Oslo, Zurich and Copenhagen have the highest prices among the 73 cities including rent (and energy), which accounts for roughly one quarter of the cost of living for an average Western European household, New York,

Oslo and Geneva have some of the highest living expenses in the world.

The world's 10 richest cities - What are best richest cities

The world's 10 richest cities,What are best richest cities

European cities have emerged as the world's richest and most expensive places. By comparison, Indian cities are amongst the world's least expensive.
New Delhi and Mumbai are among the least expensive cities in the world, ranked 70th and 73rd positions, respectively.

Amongst Asia's most expensive cities, New Delhi ranks 41st, Mumbai 43rd, Chennai 44th, Bangalore 45th, Hyderabad 46th, Pune 47th, and Kolkata 49th.

The UBS survey of 73 international cities found that employees in Copenhagen, Zurich, Geneva and New York had the highest gross earnings. Living costs were calculated based on a survey of 154 items in total.

They include 122 products and services that are used directly to calculate the reference basket.

The basket costs the least in Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Delhi and Mumbai.

A survey by citymayors.com on the kind of salaries that Indians are paid when compared to the payscales in some other global cities is quite a revelation. The survey says that in New York or Zurich one would have to work for 9 hours to earn enough to buy an iPod nano, whereas in Mumbai you would have to work for 177 hours to be able to afford the gadget!

Bill Gates Company Microsoft,About Microsoft and Bill Gates

Bill Gates Company Microsoft,About Microsoft and Bill Gates

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKEX: 4338) is a multinational computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. Headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA, its most profitable products are the Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software.

The company was founded to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800. Microsoft rose to dominate the home computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by the Windows line of operating systems. Its products have all achieved near-ubiquity in the desktop computer market. One commentator notes that Microsoft's original mission was "a computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software." Microsoft possesses footholds in other markets, with assets such as the MSNBC cable television network, the MSN Internet portal, and the Microsoft Encarta multimedia encyclopedia. The company also markets both computer hardware products such as the Microsoft mouse as well as home entertainment products such as the Xbox, Xbox 360, Zune and MSN TV.The company's initial public stock offering (IPO) was in 1986; the ensuing rise of the company's stock price has made four billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires from Microsoft employees.

Throughout its history the company has been the target of criticism, including monopolistic business practices and anti-competitive strategies including refusal to deal and tying. The U.S. Justice Department and the European Commission, among others, have ruled against Microsoft for various antitrust violations accordingly in today's political-cultural climate of mixed economies and "public interest of society".

About Bill Gates Early Life,Bill Gates is young

About Bill Gates Early Life,Bill Gates is young

Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, to William H. Gates, Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates, who was of Scottish descent.. His family was upper middle class; his father was a prominent lawyer, his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way, and her father, J. W. Maxwell, was a national bank president. Gates has one elder sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and one younger sister, Libby. He was the fourth of his name in his family, but was known as William Gates III or "Trey" because his father had dropped his own "III" suffix. Early on in his life, Gates' parents had a law career in mind for him.

At 13 he enrolled in the Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school. When he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy an ASR-33 teletype terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the school's students.Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly. When he reflected back on that moment, he commented on it and said, "There was just something neat about the machine."[13] After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, he and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students—Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans—for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.

At the end of the ban, the four students offered to find bugs in CCC's software in exchange for computer time. Rather than use the system via teletype, Gates went to CCC's offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, including programs in FORTRAN, LISP, and machine language. The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970, when the company went out of business. The following year, Information Sciences Inc. hired the four Lakeside students to write a payroll program in COBOL, providing them computer time and royalties. After his administrators became aware of his programming abilities, Gates wrote the school's computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students. He later stated that "it was hard to tear myself away from a machine at which I could so unambiguously demonstrate success."At age 17, Gates formed a venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor. In early 1973, Bill Gates served as a congressional page in the U.S. House of Representatives.


Bill Gates' mugshot from a traffic violation in 1977Gates graduated from Lakeside School in 1973. He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT and subsequently enrolled at Harvard College in the fall of 1973.Prior to the mid-1990s, an SAT score of 1590 corresponded roughly to an IQ of 170, a figure that has been cited frequently by the press.While at Harvard, he met his future business partner, Steve Ballmer, whom he later appointed as CEO of Microsoft. He also met computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou at Harvard, with whom he collaborated on a paper about pancake sorting.He did not have a definite study plan while a student at Harvard and spent a lot of time using the school's computers. He remained in contact with Paul Allen, joining him at Honeywell during the summer of 1974. The following year saw the release of the MITS Altair 8800 based on the Intel 8080 CPU, and Gates and Allen saw this as the opportunity to start their own computer software company.He had talked this decision over with his parents, who were supportive of him after seeing how much Gates wanted to start a company. [References Wikipedia]

Who is Bill Gates, Bill Gates Biography,World best richest man

Who is Bill Gates, Bill Gates Biography

William Henry "Bill" Gates III (born October 28, 1955)is an American business magnate, philanthropist, and chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen. He is ranked consistently one of the world's wealthiest people and the wealthiest overall as of 2009.During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of CEO and chief software architect, and remains the largest individual shareholder with more than 8 percent of the common stock.He has also authored or co-authored several books.

Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. Although he is admired by many, a number of industry insiders criticize his business tactics, which they consider anti-competitive, an opinion which has in some cases been upheld by the courts (see Criticism of Microsoft).In the later stages of his career, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, donating large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000.

Bill Gates stepped down as chief executive officer of Microsoft in January, 2000. He remained as chairman and created the position of chief software architect. In June, 2006, Gates announced that he would be transitioning from full-time work at Microsoft to part-time work and full-time work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He gradually transferred his duties to Ray Ozzie, chief software architect and Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer. Gates' last full-time day at Microsoft was June 27, 2008. He remains at Microsoft as non-executive chairman. [References Wikipedia]

What is the history of money - about money history

What is the history of money - about money history

The use of barter-like methods may date back to at least 100,000 years ago, though there is no evidence of a society or economy that relied primarily on barter. Instead, non-monetary societies operated largely along the principles of gift economics. When barter did occur, it was usually between either complete strangers or potential enemies.

Many cultures around the world eventually developed the use of commodity money. The shekel was an ancient unit of weight and currency. The first usage of the term came from Mesopotamia circa 3000 BC. and referred to a specific mass of barley which related other values in a metric such as silver, bronze, copper etc. A barley/shekel was originally both a unit of currency and a unit of weight.[14] Societies in the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australia used shell money – usually, the shell of the money cowry (Cypraea moneta) were used. According to Herodotus, and most modern scholars, the Lydians were the first people to introduce the use of gold and silver coin. It is thought that these first stamped coins were minted around 650–600 BC.

The system of commodity money eventually evolved into a system of representative money. This occurred because gold and silver merchants or banks would issue receipts to their depositors – redeemable for the commodity money deposited. Eventually, these receipts became generally accepted as a means of payment and were used as money. Paper money or banknotes were first used in China during the Song Dynasty. These banknotes, known as "jiaozi" evolved from promissory notes that had been used since the 7th century. However, they did not displace commodity money, and were used alongside coins. Banknotes were first issued in Europe by Stockholms Banco in 1661, and were again also used alongside coins. The gold standard, a monetary system where the medium of exchange are paper notes that are convertible into pre-set, fixed quantities of gold, replaced the use of gold coins as currency in the 17th-19th centuries in Europe. These gold standard notes were made legal tender, and redemption into gold coins was discouraged. By the beginning of the 20th century almost all countries had adopted the gold standard, backing their legal tender notes with fixed amounts of gold.

After World War II, at the Bretton Woods Conference, most countries adopted fiat currencies that were fixed to the US dollar. The US dollar was in turn fixed to gold. In 1971 the US government suspended the covertability of the US dollar to gold. After this many countries de-pegged their currencies from the US dollar, and most of the world's currencies became unbacked by anything except the governments' fiat of legal tender.

What is the money - About money

What is the money - About money

Money is anything that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts. The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a store of value, and occasionally, a standard of deferred payment.

Nearly all contemporary money systems at the national level are fiat money systems. Fiat money is without value as a physical commodity, and derives its value by being declared by a government to be legal tender; that is, it must be accepted as a form of payment within the national boundaries of the country, for "all debts, public and private". By law, the refusal of a legal tender (offering) extinguishes the debt in the same way acceptance does. Some bullion coins such as the Australian Gold Nugget and American Eagle are legal tender, however, they trade based on the market price of the metal content as a commodity, rather than their legal tender face value (which is usually only a small fraction of their bullion value).

The money supply of a country is usually held to consist of currency (banknotes and coins) and demand deposits or 'bank money' (the balance held in checking accounts and savings accounts). These demand deposits usually account for a much larger part of the money supply than currency.Bank money is intangible and exists only in the form of various bank records. Despite being intangible, bank money still performs the basic functions of money, as checks are generally accepted as a form of payment and as a means of transferring ownership of deposit money.

More generally, the term "price system" is sometimes used to refer to methods using commodity valuation or money accounting systems