Top of the agenda at this week's G20 summit in Moscow: Currency Wars. The G7 put out a statement earlier in the week to dispel fears over competitive devaluations. It ended up sending a muddled message that resulted in more volatility in currency markets.

One constant question in the currency war debate is this: is concern over a new round of currency wars merited? Or are central banks carrying out policy in-line with their mandates, as unconventional as those policies may be (an argument the former chairman of the Swiss National Bank made in the Financial Times)?

Mohamed El-Erian, CEO and co-CIO of PIMCO, which runs the largest bond fund in the world, tells The Daily Ticker it’s both.

“It’s important to understand that,” he says, “because that means it’s not going away, it’s going to get worse.”

El-Erian explains that central banks have been compelled to undertake unconventional measures, things they haven’t done before, because other policymakers are not stepping up to take

During his State of the Union address last Tuesday, President Obama made only one tangible, simple proposal:

"A family with two kids that earns the minimum wage still lives below the poverty line. That's wrong... Tonight, let's declare that, in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full time should have to live in poverty, and raise the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour."

Immediately the idea was embraced by the left. Those on the right who objected, were considered elitist haters willing to trample the poor in pursuit of the mighty buck. Suffice it to say, caring about humanity and objecting to the proposed minimum wage hike are not mutually exclusive.

Peter Schiff of president & CEO Euro Pacific Capital isn't likely to cool the heated rhetoric but he does know how to make his point. Characterizing the proposal as the "stupidest" of the President's ideas, Schiff says a hike in the minimum wage would have exactly the opposite of the intended effect. "It's not going to lift the wages of workers," Schiff says in the attached video. "What it's going to do is diminish employment opportunities."

Companies paying minimum wage aren't necessarily rapacious. Being a cashier at Wal-Mart (WMT) or McDonalds (MCD) was never supposed to be considered a lifelong full-time job. However that makes one feel, is beside the point. It's capitalism. A higher minimum wage means lower margins. When you raise hiring costs you reduce the number of jobs available. Period.

"What we really should do is completely abolish the minimum wage, that would make a lot of sense," says Schiff, using Singapore as an example of a strong economy with no minimum wage. "We didn't have a minimum wage for most of American history. It's something that started in the 20th Century. It was a bad idea and we ought to admit that it was a bad idea and get rid of it completely."

Shares of Herbalife (HLF) are up 20% in early trading after it was revealed late yesterday that billionaire investor Carl Icahn filed a 13D disclosing that he'd taken a 13% stake in the company.

Those familiar with the story of Herbalife understand that Icahn's move was likely driven by his ongoing and very public spat with fellow billionaire, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman. Ackman has a large short position in Herbalife, leaving him vulnerable to a short squeeze. In an instant classic on-air argument last month on CNBC, Ichan suggested that HLF could become "the mother of all short squeezes."

Related: Who's Winning the Battle Over Herbalife?

The Icahn-Ackman brawl is the most public instance of what has become a recurring market theme: Hedge funds taking big positions then touting them on financial television. It makes for great theater but Lee Munson of Portfolio LLC and author of Rigged Money, says it's all part of a strange new world.

"Hedge funds back in the '80s and '90s used to be private, we used to be secretive. Nobody told anyone about their positions," Munson explains in the attached clip. "Nowadays you go on TV and you jack with the system."

Following President Barack Obama's State of the Union address earlier this week, Mohamed El-Erian, CEO and co-CIO of PIMCO, the world's largest bond fund, is cautiously optimistic that Washington will get out of the way of the economy. He outlines his reasons why with The Daily Ticker's Lauren Lyster.

Related: U.S. Still Suffering Depression Conditions: Paul Krugman

1. Obama Gets Real: "The president was very realistic in where the economy stands," says El-Erian. "He basically said we have overcome the crisis phase and now we have to get into the growth phase."
2. The Roadmap: "[Obama] set out conditions we need in order to [grow] and they basically come down to investing in education, infrastructure, private-public partnership and also dealing with promises that unfortunately we can no longer meet as a society because the world has changed," he says. "He was very explicit on what is at stake."
3. Accountability: "[Obama] made it very clear who is accountable for what. Now the hope is that

President Barack Obama this week in his State of the Union Address asked Congress to raise the hourly minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 to help fight poverty. While Obama said Thursday that raising the minimum wage as he has proposed could trim corporate profits, some argue the impact would be felt beyond companies’ bottom lines.

Related: There’s No Money for the President’s Economic Proposals: Fmr. CBO Dir. Douglas Holtz-Eakin

Amity Shlaes, author of the new Calvin Coolidge biography Coolidge, argues unemployment tends to go up with a minimum wage increase and says Coolidge’s legacy as president during the 1920s supplies us with a different approach.

She tells The Daily Ticker Coolidge’s administration “believed the market should supply higher wages, and following their policies wages went up and the unemployment was very low. That’s a less government approach, the Coolidge approach.”

According to Shlaes, during that period productivity gains drove wages up, and corporations invested in

Rachel Fox isn’t an ordinary 16-year-old. She's already graduated from high school and has been a working Hollywood actress for years, appearing in shows like Desperate Housewives as evil Kayla Scavo and in the film Dream House with Daniel Craig and Naomi Watts. When she’s not on set she can often be found on stage, singing and playing guitar in an indie rock band.

That would be a packed schedule for most of us, but Rachel has another activity that’s a real passion. For the last year-and-a-half she’s been actively day-trading stocks with her own money. She says she's been racking up stellar returns, claiming a 30.4% gain in 2012, versus the benchmark S&P; 500 which gained 13% for last year.

While she’s doing it all, she’s also helping teach people about investing via her website FoxOnStocks.com. On the site she updates her thoughts on the markets and posts videos for those new to the game; teaching them how to do the basics like finding quotes and understanding what a stock option is. For now, the blog is just for fun, she has no plans to monetize; just teach others how to invest, the way her Mom taught her.

From the time she was 8-years-old her mother would read to she and her sister from a book on finance that was kept in the house. Even as she was teaching her daughters fundamental investing, Rachel’s mom was warning them about the stock market.

“She had explained that the market is different nowadays; it’s not so ‘oh you buy something, you hold it for a long time, and can grow with the company,'” Rachel says in the attached video, casually dismissing 100 years of stock market theory. “Nowadays we have day traders, institutional investors and people who just rip the market up and make stocks go like crazy.”

When President Obama gave his State of the Union address Tuesday he said the country deserves a tax code that follows these three tenets:

1. Is less complicated for everyone.
2. Ensures that billionaires don’t pay a lower rate than their secretaries.
3. Increases incentives for businesses to create jobs in the U.S. and keep them here.

He proposed “closing tax loopholes and deductions for the "well-off “ to help reduce the deficit and prevent deeper cuts to education and Medicare and using tax credits to reward companies hiring the long-term unemployed. “Now is our best chance for bipartisan, comprehensive tax reform that encourages job creation and helps bring down the deficit,” Obama said.

Amity Shlaes, a columnist for Bloomberg View and author of the new book, Coolidge says tax cuts are the way to go because they will yield higher revenues. During Coolidge’s presidency from August 1923 to March 1929 the top income tax rate was cut in half, from 50% to 25%.

“The Coolidge experiment” shows

After 15 years of cutting costs, hoarding cash and lowering debt, it's go time for corporate America.

That's the crux of a bullish investment case being fostered by Brian Belski, chief investment strategist at BMO Capital Markets. He says we are on the cusp of a major cycle of Capex or corporate reinvestment. "We want to see them invest in their own company, and we think it's actually going to be forced upon them," Belski says in the attached video.

While much has been said about the country's cash-rich corporations, Belski says there are really only four things companies can do with their money: buy back stock, initiate/increase/continue to pay dividends, buy other companies or invest in themselves. While we have seen numerous examples of the first three cash uses, the fourth has been largely MIA, and Belski thinks that's going to change.

"This trade has a very long tail and will last at least for the first three to five years of this new bull market," he predicts. Further driving this pent-up demand, he says, will be a furthering of the onshoring trend, so to speak.

"We believe because of the consistency and stability of U.S. corporate fundamentals that business volumes will come back to America because of the volatility (overseas)," says Belski. "We believe that we're in the midst of the beginning stages of a super bull market that could be 15 to 18 years in length, and this is the first stage of it."