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By Nicole Goodkind

The Winklevoss twins can breathe a sigh of relief.

After seven years of litigation their lawsuit against Facebook (FB) founder Mark Zuckerberg has come to an end. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are using their $65 million settlement to move forward by starting Winklevoss Capital, a venture capital firm.

[Related: Winkelvoss Twins Return to Their Social Networking Roots]

The Winklevoss' struggle against Zuckerberg is famously documented in Aaron Sorkin's 2010 film "The Social Network." The movie recounts Cameron and Tyler's early partnership with Harvard classmate Zuckerberg on "ConnectU" and the resulting fallout and legal battle over ownership of Facebook.

The Winklevoss twins and "ConnectU" partner Divya Narendra recently sat down with The Daily Ticker's Aaron Task to discuss whether they use Facebook, what's Facebook's problem and how they would run the social network differently.

Aaron Task: Do you guys have profiles on

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It has been just over a week since Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke pulled out his monetary policy bazooka and announced a third round of quantitative easing. This time QE is open-ended and tied to unemployment, which remains staggeringly high.

[Related: Bernanke's Bazooka: Open-Ended QE3 Is "Very Aggressive" ]

Markets cheered the news, even though many economists and analysts expected the Fed would take further monetary action at its September policy meeting.

The S&P 500 (GSPC) is up nearly 15% since the beginning of the year and the Dow Jones (DJI) is up roughly 10%.

[Related: Don't Fight the Fed: Market Has "More Gains Ahead," Fund Manager Says]

Despite being the worst kept secret, the Fed's new policy had a positive effect on the markets because "[Bernkane] is breaking the link between monetary policy and inflation," says Axel Merk, president and CIO of Merk Investments and a long-time opponent of Bernanke's easy policy measures. "He is tying monetary

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Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss will never forget their first brush with social networking.

The twins hired fellow Harvard classmate Mark Zuckerberg in 2003 to code and program their fledgling social network website "ConnectU." But Zuckerberg had other ideas and soon formed his own online social networking site "Facebook."

The twins sued, Facebook's popularity exploded, "The Social Network" movie won three Oscars and Facebook (FB) went public in May at a valuation of $104 billion -- one of the biggest tech IPOs in history. The rest, shall we say, is history.

[Related: Facebook Effect: How The Social Network Changed the World]

These days the Winklevoss brothers are returning to their social networking roots.

The reportedly $65 million in cash and Facebook stock the twins agreed to late last year as part of their settlement with Zuckerberg has allowed them to launch Winklevoss Capital. The retired Olympic rowers are backing a few hand-picked tech

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The United States has the highest marginal corporate tax rate in the world, at 39.2%.

Corporations, Wall Street, Mitt Romney and even President Obama all argue that rate is too high for U.S. companies to be competitive in the global economy.

[Related: America Is #1...In Corporate Taxes]

That would be the case if corporations paid such high rates but often they don't. Take Microsoft. The company avoided at least $6.5 billion in taxes using transactions with subsidiaries in Puerto Rico, Ireland, Singapore and Bermuda that were perfectly legal, according to the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which held a hearing Thursday on corporate tax avoidance.

Carl Levin (D-Michigan), chairman of the subcommittee told reporters, "These loopholes and abuses exact a tremendous cost…What these gimmicks do is shift the burden of taxes onto citizens and business who don't use armies of lawyers and accountants."

"The scandal is the law," says David

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Fifteen years ago, Apple (AAPL) was left for dead.

Vanquished by Microsoft (MSFT) in the operating system wars, and badly mismanaged in the wake of the firing of founder Steve Jobs, the company was running on fumes.

Then Steve Jobs came back.

And, over the next decade, Jobs led what is probably the most remarkable turnaround in corporate history. Thanks to a host of amazing products that Jobs and his team invented, Apple has become the most valuable and profitable company in the world.

[Related: iPhone 5 Pre-Orders Blow The Doors Off—But Is Apple Losing Its Edge?]

Importantly, though, Apple's current wealth and power makes the company much less sympathetic than it was in the early years of its turnaround.

In those years, the only people who cared about Apple, were its devoted faithful--folks who believed in "Think Different," hated the Microsoft empire, and believed that, with Steve Jobs back at the helm, Apple could pull off a miracle. As Apple

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What do you do if your stock is trading 75% below the IPO price set less than a year ago? If you're Groupon, you look to break into a new market. And that's exactly what the king of online daily deals announced yesterday. The company launched Groupon Payments, a mobile payment system that can be used for any credit card transactions, not just Groupon deals. That announcement pushed Groupon shares up almost 14% yesterday to close at $5.34 but by mid-morning on Thursday they had retreated to $5.08.

"Groupon is casting around for other businesses," says The Daily Ticker's Henry Blodget. "They've gone into direct sales of goods, a rapidly growing business for them. Now they're coming out with this big new business: payments. The idea is to become the operating system for local commerce."

Blodget says Groupon had no choice but to start something new because it had already saturated the daily deal market.

[Related: Groupon Slumps as 'Daily Deal Fatigue'

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Mortgage rates are at record lows and the current rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage stands at 3.34%, according to Zillow Mortgage Rate Ticker. But banks are approving fewer loan applications and have tightened lending standards, resulting in a delayed housing recovery.

A new government report found that banks processed 7.1 million mortgages in 2011 — a 10% drop from 2010 — and the lowest level in 16 years. Lax reporting standards and a willingness to provide mortgages to homebuyers who could not afford them turned banks into villains when the housing bubble crashed. Now, banks have become more cautious with their money and are screening applicants with increased scrutiny, a major headwind for a still-weak housing market, says Kermit Baker, a senior research fellow at Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies.

[Related: Getting a Mortgage Shouldn't Be This Hard: Housing Finance Gets 'Taken to Task']

"A lot of banks are ignoring the