how mcdonald s sees the broadest economy. social investing. why using social media to get a competitive edge in the market could be dangerous to your wealth. all this and more on nightly business report good evening, everybody. s susie, any growth is good news. good, but not great. u.s. economy grew by 2.5%. that was less than the robust 3% most experts were predicting. much of the gains in the gross domestic product came from strong consumer spending. businesses and government spend less, raising concerns that growth may grind to a halt in the months ahead, unless big changes are made. american consumers get most of the credit for ramping up the economy. buying cars, lots of them, and houses. and paying utilities to heat those homes. consumer spending rose 3.2% pace, the fastest in two years. why was the gdp number such a bummer? consumers funded many of the purchases by saving, and that tradeoff pulled the nation s saving rate down to 2.6%, the lowest since 2007. high
competitive edge in the market could be dangerous to your wealth. all this and more on nightly business report good evening, everybody. s susie, any growth is good news. good, but not great. u.s. economy grew by 2.5%. that was less than the robust 3% most experts were predicting. much of the gains in the gross domestic product came from strong consumer spending. businesses and government spend less, raising concerns that growth may grind to a halt in the months ahead, unless big changes are made. american consumers get most of the credit for ramping up the economy. buying cars, lots of them, and houses. and paying utilities to heat those homes. consumer spending rose 3.2% pace, the fastest in two years. why was the gdp number such a bummer? consumers funded many of the purchases by saving, and that tradeoff pulled the nation s saving rate down to 2.6%, the lowest since 2007. higher payroll taxes in march also didn t help. paychecks got skimpier because of the % tax hike.
consumers. there s a list of conditions placed on the new company. consumers are still concerned about higher cable prices and fees for content that used to be free. but what about the other side? what about investing in this new company or other stocks in the media sector? diane jaffe is group managing director a firm that manages for investment funds and big investors, your company s two media holdings are comcast and cbs. full disclosure is time warner, the parent company of this network. let s start with comcast. they re in the news, this deal with nbc, the takeover really of nbc universal. do you like the deal? and do you think investors can benefit from it? we do like this deal. comcast is transforming itself from a cable distribution company into a full diversified media company. now with content and distribution. how does that make a merged company, let s say, more valuable than those stand-alone
company that is whose stock prices lower than others in its space. compared to how much it earns. you re exactly right. in fact the media companies are generally later-cycle companies, so they typically trade at a discount to the overall market, on price-to-cash flow basis. there are some exceptions, but certainly comcast and cbs and even time warner are attractive valuations. great to talk to you about this, diane, thanks very much for being with us. we d like to help you be a little smarter about your money. you d like to think you re pretty smart about money already, right? our next guest says even smart people do dumb things with their money, he ll explain, next. when it comes to investing, no one person has all the answers. so td ameritrade doesn t give me just one person.
president used the state of the union to assure americans that he shared their top concern. i realize that for every success story, there are other stories. of men and women who wake up the anguish of not knowing where their next paycheck will come from. who send out resumés week after week and hear nothing in response. that is why jobs must be our number one focus in 2010. number one focus in 2010. let s look at the results, more than 1.1 million jobs added in 2010. look at the right side, that s the interesting part, 1.3 million jobs were added in the private sector. the reason we only come out with 1.1 in total is because there was a loss of 200,000 government jobs. that brought the final tally down. by the way, we prefer that our jobs are created in the private sector. because taxpayers don t pay for those jobs. steven moore is an editorial writer for the wall street journa journal . steven, all of us agree, we need more jobs, what do you as a conservative need to h