This afternoon I’m driving home to Salisbury, which for a Manhattanite like me means renting a car and realizing, suddenly, that gas is expensive. $3.50 a gallon? Dang. When I go for my $40 fill up, though, I will try not to guffaw too loudly in the direction of the person running the gas station, [...]

Earlier this month, Justin told you about Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz popping by our offices and saying, among other things, that the coffee chain was really starting to feel the pinch from sluggish consumer spending. Let’s put that one in the “you heard it here first” column. Today in reporting preliminary Q2 results, Starbucks played [...]

On Monday I got an email from the University of Iowa telling me that Barack Obama had a 75% chance of winning the Democratic nomination; Hillary Clinton was at 21%. I’m guessing I’m not the only business reporter out there who is most comfortable processing the horse race elements of national politics through Iowa’s prediction [...]

Lots of excitement at Citigroup’s annual meeting today, as recounted in Crain’s New York Business. Shouting shareholders, wailing employees, an angry, overflowing crowd. New chief exec Vikram Pandit tried to calm everyone down: We’re now closer to the end of the write-down cycle than we are to the beginning, he said. With more than $40 [...]

Hello! And Hej! to you, Henri. It’s great to be back. So, last week Justin mentioned that Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper is looking to outsource some copy editing to the U.S. Foreigners? Hiring Americans? As my colleague Coco Masters recently reported, they’re after our pilots, too. In a slightly different sort of turn-about, I recently [...]

My colleague Andrea Sachs has a story in the Global Business section of this week’s magazine about Seth Godin’s latest book. Godin is something of a character, a marketing guy who sells a ton of books largely by feeding people recycled common sense. I met him last year and asked him about that — why [...]

The Associated Press had a great piece of enterprise reporting earlier this week about how much money California could get for privatizing its lottery. Governor Schwarzenegger has been throwing around the figure $37 billion — a particularly nice number considering the state faces a $14.5 billion budgetary shortfall — but the AP got its hands [...]

The Nobel-Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz, who is a professor up at Columbia University, swung by the office this morning for a meet-and-greet. Noble-Prize-winning… must be a nice way to be introduced. Stiglitz was here to promote his soon-to-be-published book on the true cost of the Iraq war, which he and Linda Bilmes of Harvard University [...]

The other day I was told that most blogging is pretty much about linking to things other people have written. I’ve got to get to a meeting now, so I’m leaving you with these: The Wall Street Journal The New York Times The Financial Times