Brace Yourself: Ugg Season May Be Even Bigger Than Usual This Year

Each year as the temperature dips, women across the country turn to their closets and dig their Ugg boots out of hibernation. Others head to stores to score a pair of the squat sheepskin booties in preparation for a chilly winter.

This year the Ugg frenzy may be even bigger than usual. Sales at the Ugg brand rose nearly 24 percent last quarter to $417 million, compared to $337 million for the same period the year prior, parent company Deckers reported Thursday. The spike was due to higher wholesale sales, online sales and new retail store openings worldwide.

And now, Ugg is about to enter its prime season.

"With temperatures turning cold in recent weeks, sell-through of weather boots and classics have gained pace across the majority of our markets," Deckers chief executive Angel Martinez said on a conference call with analysts on Thursday.

Ugg's upcoming product lines are "as compelling as we have ever seen for the company," Sam Poser, an analyst at Sterne Agee, wrote in a note to clients on Friday. He added that Ugg's reaping the benefits of favorable fashion trends, as shoppers search the aisles for comfy clothes like stretchy leggings and oversized sweaters.

However Ugg's holidays turn out, "Ugg Season" will remain. The annual donning of the Uggs has even made its way into memes, like "Girls be like."

Meanwhile, Ugg's plan to diversify its offerings seems to be working. Ugg is now selling more items that aren't dependent on cold weather. It launched a home goods line in October, offering an assortment of sheepskin area rugs, knit pillows and floor poufs. There's also Ugg's loungewear line, a casual clothing label. On the call, Martinez said that Ugg's home and loungewear businesses are still "small but burgeoning" and early results have been "very strong." Ugg will be pushing both lines hard through the holidays.

In an attempt to tell customers Ugg sells more than just shearling boots, the brand launched an advertising campaign in August with the tagline "THIS IS UGG," featuring sketch artist Langley Fox Hemingway and New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady.

But until those lines get bigger, Ugg remains a slave to the elements. According to a report from Nomura Securities, Deckers is the best example of a company that's exposed to weather risk, something it could never hope to control. So far, the climate has treated Deckers, which also owns footwear brands Teva and Sanuk, quite well this year.

"Despite the mild weather conditions over the last two winters, this year was more seasonably cool and snowy in many parts of the U.S., which had a substantially large impact on companies with a great deal of cold weather product including Deckers," Nomura analyst Bob Drbul wrote in the report.

Overweight Women More Likely To Have Low-Paying Jobs Than Overweight Men

Fat shaming can have economic consequences.

As a woman gets heavier, her chances of working in a low-paying, physically taxing job grow, according to a new study from Jennifer Shinall, a law professor at Vanderbilt University. But weight doesn’t have nearly as much bearing on the type of job a man lands.

Though obese men are more likely than men of average weight to work in lower-paying, physical jobs, the effect isn't nearly as strong as it is for women. As a result, obese women make $7 less than their average-weight counterparts, while obese men make just $2 less.

“It absolutely suggests that weight is much more of a consideration in the labor market for women than it is for men,” Shinall told The Huffington Post in an interview.

Shinall’s findings add to the growing body of evidence that physical attributes play a depressingly large role in the lives of working women, no matter how they look. Very skinny women tend to get paid more. Hiring committees penalize attractive women by not calling them for interviews.

Such factors typically add to the broader discrimination women already face at work. Research shows women earn less than men in the same roles and are also more likely to work in low-paying fields.

Many female-dominated, low-wage jobs, such as home health care and child care, are where obese and morbidly obese women are most likely to end up, Shinall’s study found.

"Those are the only jobs that are available for the heaviest women in the labor market," she said.

For her study, Shinall analyzed occupation, health and population data for 10,007 women and 8,928 men. She found that, the heavier women get, the more likely they'll end up working in jobs that require more physical activity.

The opposite is true for women seeking jobs in fields that involve a lot of personal interaction, such as sales. Women become less likely to land those roles the more overweight they are. Morbidly obese women who do get jobs in such fields are paid about 5 percent less, on average, than other women, even controlling for factors like education, the study found.

For men, on the other hand, being heavier can actually boost earnings in some jobs. Overweight men working in more physical jobs make about 4 percent more, on average, than their average-weight colleagues, according to the study.

Shinall said she suspects that one of the main reasons obese and morbidly obese women tend to cluster in low-paying, strenuous jobs is because of discrimination in hiring for white-collar roles. Companies may not want an overweight woman representing them to customers, she said, and it's also possible that the person doing the hiring may not want to work with an obese woman.

How The Fed Blew Its Most Important Job For Over Three Years

WASHINGTON -- The Federal Reserve was aware of risky practices at JPMorgan Chase as early as 2008 but failed to follow up for more than three years until those risks had snowballed into the company's $6.2 billion London Whale scandal, according to a new report from the central bank's Office of Inspector General.

Financial reform advocates' response to this unhappy but perhaps not surprising news was summed by Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of Better Markets.

"The remarkable thing here is that the Fed's own people identified the high-risk activities at JPMorgan Chase's offshore units and alerted their supervisors and others that a comprehensive systematic review of those activities should be undertaken quickly," Kelleher said. "And then they didn't. They just didn't do it."

But the implications of the IG report reach well beyond the Whale debacle, highlighting how much power the Fed's New York branch wields and how little influence the public interest has within that branch.

While the Fed Board of Governors, based in Washington, is a public agency, the regional Fed banks are private sector entities. The London Whale report has led bank watchdogs to suggest that, at the very least, the New York Fed presidency should be a fully public position, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

"The New York Fed is the key on-the-ground supervisor of the largest Wall Street banks, including JPMorgan," Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform, told HuffPost. "So I think there are some questions about this hybrid public-private structure given the critical public interest in all these issues."

"Nobody with that much power and authority should be unaccountable to any publicly elected official," said Kelleher.

The London Whale rocked the American financial establishment when JPMorgan began taking sudden, heavy losses in 2012. The bank had placed big risky investment bets on an index of credit derivatives that then backfired. JPMorgan, which declined to comment for this article, was able to shoulder the brutal losses. Yet their speed and severity caused many to question whether the banking system was vulnerable to more and potentially bigger such problems.

Under the Volcker Rule approved by U.S. regulators in 2013, banks would now be barred from making such trades for their own accounts. But rules only matter if they are enforced, and the IG report offers little reason to have confidence in the New York Fed's oversight.

The Fed's IG report lays the London Whale regulatory breakdown at the feet of the New York Fed under multiple leaders. The New York Fed discovered the problematic proprietary trading at JPMorgan in 2008. The following year, it recommended a deep review of the JPMorgan division that ultimately harbored the London Whale trades. That review was never performed, and the New York Fed never coordinated -- as it should have -- with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which also has regulatory authority over JPMorgan.

Part of the problem may be that the top levels of the Fed are not fully staffed for regulatory oversight. The Fed's seven-member Board of Governors has two longstanding vacancies. One of those slots should be held by a new vice chair of supervision. The 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law created the job -- effectively a formal regulatory boss at the Fed -- but it has never been filled.

"The Fed board vacancies -- we want reformers for those positions and people who are focused on better regulation of the financial sector," Stanley said. "And this kind of thing shows why."

One person who's been touted as a potential pick for vice chair of supervision is Elise Bean, a longtime staffer with Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Investigations. Bean has done extensive financial research for the subcommittee, addressing everything from offshore tax evasion to high-frequency trading. In fact, the committee released a much more extensive report on the London Whale mess in March of this year.

But the New York Fed's mishandling of the London Whale situation also raises questions about the central bank's dual structure as both a public and private sector entity. The Fed Board of Governors is a public institution that writes regulations, among other responsibilities, and the governors themselves are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. But much of the Fed's actual regulatory enforcement is delegated to the 12 private sector Fed banks.

These branch banks are controlled by their own nine-member boards. Three of those directors are chosen by the banking industry, three are chosen to represent other industries, and three are selected to broadly represent public interests. The president of each branch is named by the corporate and public interest directors.

In practice, this has meant that banking and other corporate interests are really running the show at most Fed branches. A 2011 Government Accountability Office report found that regional Fed bank directors are disproportionally white men who overrepresent business management, while labor and consumer groups have few voices on those boards. The New York Fed presidency has been held since early 2009 by a former Goldman Sachs banker, William Dudley.

Moreover, not all Fed branches are equal. The New York Fed, cheek by jowl with Wall Street, is by far the most dominant, and its president exercises enormous power. During the financial calamities of 2008, then-New York Fed President Timothy Geithner served as one-third of a crisis team that included then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. Since the New York Fed isn't subject to limits on government pay, Geithner was the best paid of the trio, and he would take a significant pay cut to become treasury secretary in January 2009.

While the Fed Board of Governors is a notoriously secretive institution, the New York Fed is even more protective of its internal operations, officially contending that it's exempt from the Freedom of Information Act because it is not a government agency.

The tension between the Fed's public service functions and its ties to private banks is highlighted by the Fed IG report itself. The central bank's independent watchdog is confining public disclosure of its report to a four-page summary, arguing that the full report has too much "privileged and confidential" information. The Office of Inspector General declined to comment on the decision to keep the full report a secret.

During the debate over Dodd-Frank, many reform advocates called for revamping the Fed's internal structure, but only modest changes were made, and some of those, like naming a vice chair of supervision, have not yet been implemented.

All The Wealth The Middle Class Accumulated After 1940 Is Gone

Here's more proof the middle class is dying.

The middle-class share of American wealth has been shrinking for the better part of three decades and recently fell to its lowest level since 1940, according to a new study by economists Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics.

In other words, remember the surge of the great American middle class after World War II? That's all gone, at least by one measure.

In this case, "middle class" is defined rather expansively as the bottom 90 percent of all Americans. "Wealth" is the total of home equity, stock and bond holdings, pension plans and other assets, minus debt. As such assets are mostly owned by mid- to higher-income households -- and considering most Americans define themselves as "middle-class" -- it seems reasonable to use the bottom 90 percent as a proxy for the "middle class."

Saez and Zucman discussed their paper in a blog post for the Washington Center For Equitable Growth on Monday that included this stark chart:

Debt has been the big force driving net wealth lower for the middle class, according to Saez and Zucman. Brief bubbles in stock and home prices in the 1990s and 2000s only temporarily offset the steady, depressing rise in mortgage, student-loan, credit-card and other debts for the bottom 90 percent.

"Many middle class families own homes and have pensions, but too many of these families also have much higher mortgages to repay and much higher consumer credit and student loans to service than before," Saez and Zucman wrote.

Another important factor has been that incomes have stagnated for most Americans over the past few decades, once adjusted for inflation. Along with rising debt levels, stagnant wages have made it impossible for most families to save very much money.

And who has been the beneficiary of this middle-class misery? The top 0.1 percent of Americans, whose incomes have just kept rising, and whose share of wealth has soared to levels not seen since Jay Gatsby was still staring at the blinking green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan's dock:

In fact, the middle class is not alone in suffering from shrinking wealth. The rest of the top 10 percent of Americans below the 0.1 percent -- the "merely rich," Saez and Zucman call them -- have also suffered from falling household wealth over the past four decades.

This rising inequality of wealth can only lead to more inequality of income and wealth in the future, Saez and Zucman warned, echoing French economist Thomas Piketty. The very rich will just keep getting richer by living on the returns from their wealth, while the rest of us will keep falling behind.

The 5 Worst States For Women

Based on recently released Census Bureau data, women made up almost half of the workforce last year. Yet, even working full-time and year-round, they were paid only 79 cents for every dollar men made. The wage gap varies considerably between states. Women receive 86 cents for every dollar men make in New York, for example, while in Louisiana, women are paid just 66% of what men earn.

Income inequality is only one of the challenges women face. Across the nation, women are less likely to serve in leadership roles both in the private and public sectors. Health outcomes among female populations also vary considerably between states. Based on 24/7 Wall St.’s analysis, Mississippi is the worst state for women in the nation.

Click here to see the 10 worst states for women

In all of the worst rated states, women were less likely than their male peers to hold private sector management positions. In two of the worst states — South Dakota and Utah — women held fewer than one in three management jobs. According to Ariane Hegewisch, study director at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, women are discriminated not just in base pay, but also lack career opportunities available to men. “A lot of [the wage gap] is also promotions, recruitments, and networking,” Hegewisch said. Perceptions of performance can also be affected by gender, meaning “the more the pay is related to performance and bonuses, the bigger the wage gap.”

Women in the worst rated states were also less likely to have leadership roles in government compared to women in the rest of the country. Only six of the 10 states had any female representation in Congress. Many of these states were among the nation’s worst for female representation in their own state legislatures as well. State Senates usually have between 30 and 50 Senators. Of the 10 states on this list, however, only Kansas had more than 10 female senators.

While the United States is among the most developed countries in the world, it was one of just a handful of nations where maternal mortality actually rose over the last decade, according to a recent study published in The Lancet, a respected medical journal. Pregnancy related mortality rates vary considerably between states.

To determine the worst states for women, 24/7 Wall St. developed on a methodology based on the Center for American Progress’ 2013 report, “The State of Women in America.”

We divided a range of variables into three major categories: economy, leadership, and health. Data in the economy category came from the U.S. Census Bureau and included male and female median earnings, the percent of children enrolled in state pre-kindergarten, state spending per child enrolled in pre-kindergarten, and education attainment rates. The leadership category included data on the percent of women in management occupations from the Census. It also includes the share of state and federal legislators who are women, and states that currently have female governors. The health section incorporated Census data on the percent of women who were uninsured as well as life expectancy. Infant and maternal mortality rates came from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Data on the expansion of Medicaid, as policies towards maternity leave, sick days, and time off from work came from the National Partnership for Women and Families.

State rankings on each of these measures were averaged to determine a score for each category. Possible scores ranged from 1 (best) to 50 (worst). The three category scores were averaged to create an indexed value that furnished our final ranking.

Go to 24/7 Wall St. to see the 10 worst states for women.

Why Coca-Cola Classic Will Soon Have A Big Red Dot In The U.K.

Some Coke cans in the U.K. will soon get marked with a red dot because of the drink's high sugar content.

The labels are part of a voluntary program launched in the U.K. in July of last year. Food and drink get tagged red, yellow and green according to its nutritional value. Healthier fare gets a green label.

What three Coke products look like with the new health labels. Notice the big red mark on the left.

Along with Cadbury and other large food companies, Coca-Cola first fought against the labels. It's changed its tune after it "gauged British consumers' views on the scheme," according to a post on Coca-Cola Great Britain's website Friday.

"The adoption of the voluntary, colour coded front-of-pack scheme in Great Britain is consistent with The Coca‑Cola Company’s global commitment to provide consumers with transparent nutrition information," Coca-Cola wrote in the same post.

Coke has made no mention of bringing the labels stateside. But it is making more of an effort on the behalf of its customers' health. A recent Coke ad prompted consumers to think about the nutritional value of Coke by revealing that it takes 23 minutes to bike off the calories in a single can.

While the red label could hurt Coke sales, the company has a lot of green label products to fall back on. Its green-rated Diet Coke and Coke Zero brands account for more than 40 percent of its UK sales, the BBC reports.

Coke says the new labels will begin appearing on products in the first half of next year.

New Leaked 'iPhone 6' Photos? New Leaked 'iPhone 6' Photos!

Apple's widely rumored unveiling of the new iPhone on September 9th is still a ways off. Until then we have these leaked photos to sustain us.

Five photos leaked on the Chinese social network Feng.com show what may be the components for the new iPhone, according to Business Insider. While they may not show the new Apple smartphone fully assembled, they are similar to leaked photos we've seen before and give a clear sense of what the so-called iPhone 6 might look like:

Here’s a photo of the outside of the back of the case:

Some have criticized the plastic lines on the phone which according to schematics are believed to house the antenna, BGR reports. Rumors had circulated that the lines would instead be made of glass but they appear to have remained plastic.

A shot of the casing in profile:

Rumors have circulated that the new iPhone will be thinner, as well as bigger with a 4.7 inch screen.

From the bottom:

Based on this photo it appears that the iPhone will feature the headphone jack on the bottom, like on the iPhone 5, as well as a newly designed speaker.

The front screen:

The new iPhone 6 has long been rumored to feature more sapphire glass, a new material that will be both harder and more scratch resistant than the iPhone's Gorilla glass. More recently, analyst Matt Margolis has said that all versions of the new 5.5 inch iPhone will feature sapphire glass, while only high-end versions of the 4.7 inch will. If the photos are any indication, the new iPhone will likely come in both black and white.

(Hat tip: Business Insider)