'Girls Who Invest' Empowers Young Women to Get Into Finance
With only 1.1% of women and minorities running the asset management industry's $71.4 trillion in assets, the field is lacking diversity. Girls Who Invest, a non-profit organization, is using empowerment to try to change that. Seema Hingorani, Founder of Girls Who Invest, joined us at the New York Stock Exchange to share why she feels it is important to encourage young women to pursue careers in asset management.
Girls Who Invest is working towards the goal of getting 30% of investable assets managed by women by 2030. Hingorani says the lack of diversity is a pipeline problem. She adds that young women don’t even know about the industry and how impactful and rewarding it can be. Hingorani said there has been a cloud over the industry since the 2008 financial crisis. To reach the next generation of women, Girls Who Invest designed a 10-week summer program for college students.
President Trump's immigration policies have put up a roadblock to Girls Who Invest's international growth, Hingorani says. Girls Who Invest accepted fewer international students in 2017 than last year because several women struggled to obtain work visas. She says the policies hurt the talent pool because talented women aren’t getting interviews due to the fact they don’t have visas.
Stocks closed lower on the last trading day of 2021, but all three major indexes ended the year with double-digit growth. The S&P 500, in particular, marked its third straight positive year. What's in store for 2022 amid the Federal Reserve's plans to speed up asset tapering and raise interest rates, and how could COVID-19 continue to impact stocks? Steve Sosnick, Chief Strategist at Interactive Brokers, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss movement on the last trading day of 2021, market predictions for 2022, and more.
As the pandemic continues to evolve, and cases of the omicron variant increase, how will this impact economic growth and movement in the new year? Consumer behavior continues to shift, labor issues linger, and questions about whether the pandemic will eventually become endemic are on economists' minds as we enter 2022. Jason Ware, Economist & Chief Investment Officer at Albion Financial Group, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.
Mike Draper, Founder and Owner of Raygun, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell, where he discusses how increases to the minimum wage in several states next year will help his company and explains why he advocates for it nationally.
The push to regulate the gig worker economy is gaining steam as the share of workers who participate in freelancing through businesses like Uber and Lyft have also exponentially grown during the pandemic. Employment attorney Mark Kluger, founding partner at Kluger Healey, LLC, joined Cheddar to break down how the battle to reclassify gig workers will continue in the new year, and why the issue continues to generate conflict. "More and more workers are using gig work as their primary source of income and as a result of that they are not like employees in the sense that they don't have benefits like health insurance," Kluger noted.
Renewable energy company Heliogen has gone public via a SPAC merger with blank check company Athena Technology Acquisition Corp. on the NYSE. Joining Cheddar, founder and CEO Bill Gross went into why he felt the end of 2021 was the best time to get into the public markets. "If you think of the Industrial Revolution and the digital revolution, this renewable revolution is probably going to be as big or larger than that," he said. "So we're going to use this capital to scale our business, to meet more customer demand, to do more projects in parallel, and to scale our research and development to continue to drive down the price to be competitive with fossil fuels."
Carl "The Moon" Runefelt, a Bitcoin investment expert, recently made a hefty purchase of a $2 million Bugatti sports car at a Dubai dealership. The Swedish crypto evangelist joined Cheddar to talk about how he made the big acquisition of a luxury item he had long had his eye on and why he chose the dealership, The Car Vault, to make the unprecedented transaction. "They accepted crypto directly, and that was important to me," he said. "I am not going to go to any car dealership that don't accept crypto, and that's kind of a principle I have today."
Marjorie Mesidor, Partner at Phillips & Associates, joined Wake Up With Cheddar to break down the latest trends in the job market, as the demand for labor has recovered, but as the number of people willing to fill positions remains relatively low.
2021 proved that crypto currency is here to stay. This year saw more and more adoptions of crypto, from top athletes looking to be paid in bitcoin, to Elon Musk even experimenting with bitcoin and dogecoin payments for a bit over at Tesla. And it wasn't all bitcoin either - other cryptos like Cardano and Solana saw some action in 2021 as well. Patrick McConlogue, CEO of Overline and former Citadel Investment Group Engineer explains why 2021 was such a good year for crypto, and what to expect in 2022.