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	<title>Business &#38; Money &#187; Christopher Matthews &#124; TIME.com</title>
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		<title>Business &#38; Money &#187; Christopher Matthews &#124; TIME.com</title>
		<link>http://business.time.com</link>
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		<title>Jay-Z, Samsung and the 21st-Century Patrons of the Arts</title>
		<link>http://business.time.com/2013/06/18/jay-z-samsung-and-the-21st-century-patrons-of-the-arts/</link>
		<comments>http://business.time.com/2013/06/18/jay-z-samsung-and-the-21st-century-patrons-of-the-arts/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Jun 2013 09:45:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Christopher Matthews</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Media]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Music Industry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Technology & Media]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://business.time.com/?p=82029</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When you&#8217;re locked in a global war to dominate the smartphone market, every little advantage helps. And now Samsung has enlisted one of the most brilliant musicians and promoters of the past two decades to its arsenal: Jay-Z. During game 5 of the the NBA finals on Sunday, Samsung aired a three-minute ad announcing the release of the rapper&#8217;s upcoming album Magna Carta Holy Grail, due out on July 4. According to The Wall Street Journal, the cellphone maker is paying the rapper $5 per album to issue his newest LP, through a dedicated app, to the first million Samsung Galaxy users 72 hours before its wider release. For Jay-Z, the deal will provide a nice supplement to the wider album sales, which even in this age of rampant piracy should be significant. Jay-Z&#8217;s last LP, Watch The Throne, sold 436,000 copies in its first week, according to Nielsen Soundscan. (MORE: Why YouTube is Launching a Music Service) Samsung&#8217;s motivation, however, is a bit more complex. As TIME contributor Eliot Van Buskirk has pointed out, content distributors are increasingly vying to have exclusive access to new music as it debuts, before it&#8217;s proliferated widely via radio, satellite radio, streaming services, and piracy. But surely Samsung doesn&#8217;t believe that offering access to a rap album three days early is going to generate enough extra Galaxy sales to justify the $5 million investment. Indeed, Samsung probably just views this deal as another advertising expense, and a way to get its brand associated with one of the biggest and hippest names in music. This is the same strategy that companies like Mountain Dew and Converse have taken by launching their own record labels. These companies aren&#8217;t getting into the music business so much as trying burnish their image by linking their brands to hip, young musicians. In fact, when you look at it that way, and consider the staggering amount of money Samsung spends on marketing each year, the deal begins to look like a real coup for Samsung. Industry analyst Horace Deidu estimates that Samsung Electronics spends more than $10 billion per year on ads, sales promotions,<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=business.time.com&#038;blog=31173800&#038;post=82029&#038;subd=timebusinessblog&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Music Industry</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://business.time.com/category/technology-media/music-industry-technology-media/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timebusinessblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/151128253-copy.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Budweiser Made In America Festival Benefiting The United Way - Day 1</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">christopherrmatthews</media:title>
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		<title>5 Negotiation Tips From Steve Jobs</title>
		<link>http://business.time.com/2013/06/17/5-negotiation-tips-from-steve-jobs/</link>
		<comments>http://business.time.com/2013/06/17/5-negotiation-tips-from-steve-jobs/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 17 Jun 2013 15:40:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Erik Sherman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Small Business]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://business.time.com/?p=81918</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=business.time.com&#038;blog=31173800&#038;post=81918&#038;subd=timebusinessblog&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Small Business</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://business.time.com/category/small-business/</primary_category_link>
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		<title>Why All Eyes Are on Ben Bernanke This Week</title>
		<link>http://business.time.com/2013/06/17/why-all-eyes-are-on-ben-bernanke-this-week/</link>
		<comments>http://business.time.com/2013/06/17/why-all-eyes-are-on-ben-bernanke-this-week/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 17 Jun 2013 09:45:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Christopher Matthews</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy & Policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Federal Reserve]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://business.time.com/?p=81949</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The S&#38;P 500 closed lower on Friday, capping off another shaky week for stock markets, which have pulled back of late after a torrid start to the year. Though weak consumer-confidence data likely contributed to Friday&#8217;s declines, many market observers are blaming the recent weakness in the stock market on fears that the Federal Reserve will begin to taper its bond-buying program as soon as this week. The evidence for this point of view is pretty strong. On May 22, in a briefing to Congress, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said that the central bank could possibly begin to downsize its $85 billion per month bond-buying program &#8220;in the next few meetings,&#8221; if the economy sees enough improvement and it looks sustainable. And since that time the S&#38;P 500 has fallen 1.7%. (MORE: Uh-Oh: We Already Started Spending Like It’s 2005) As Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research, wrote in a research note: &#8220;The recent decline in bullish sentiment mostly reflects investors&#8217; confusion and uncertainty about the monetary policies of the major central banks &#8230; The fear is that the monetary authorities will start cutting back on the high-octane liquidity they have been adding to the financial markets&#8217; punch bowl.&#8221; But markets are prone to overreaction, especially during times of economic uncertainty. What Bernanke said in May was really just a reiteration of his explicit promise not to raise short-term interest rates at least until the unemployment rate falls to 6.5%, and not begin to reduce its buying of long-term bonds until &#8220;the outlook for the labor market has improved substantially.&#8221; The problem is that this latter promise is extremely vague. Nobody knows exactly what the labor market improving substantially means, and given the fact that the members of the Federal Open Market Committee themselves are in disagreement over what the appropriate policy is, the market is right to be confused over what exactly future central-bank policy will look like. (MORE: Japan Market Crash: A Slow Leak in the ‘Central-Bank Bubble’) While it would be preferable if the Federal Reserve were more of<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=business.time.com&#038;blog=31173800&#038;post=81949&#038;subd=timebusinessblog&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://business.time.com/2013/06/17/why-all-eyes-are-on-ben-bernanke-this-week/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Federal Reserve</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://business.time.com/category/economy-policy/federal-reserve-economy-policy/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timebusinessblog.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/1500_fed_1212.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">U.S. Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bernanke speaks during a news conference in Washington</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">christopherrmatthews</media:title>
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		<title>No, the Lululemon CEO Didn&#8217;t Get Fired for See-Through Yoga Pants</title>
		<link>http://business.time.com/2013/06/14/no-the-lululemon-ceo-didnt-get-fired-for-see-through-yoga-pants/</link>
		<comments>http://business.time.com/2013/06/14/no-the-lululemon-ceo-didnt-get-fired-for-see-through-yoga-pants/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Jun 2013 13:00:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Christopher Matthews</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Companies & Industries]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Retail]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://business.time.com/?p=81880</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Earlier this year, yoga-wear company Lululemon had to initiate a massive recall of its popular luon yoga pants, which failed to fulfill one of the main duties of pants: opacity. The see-through-pants debacle cost the Vancouver-based firm an estimated $67 million in sales, and gave the press enough material for headline puns to last a lifetime. So when it was announced Monday that Lululemon CEO Christine Day would be stepping down from the top job, many assumed that it was a result of the costly recall. Despite protestations from the company, news outlets from CNN to the Consumerist linked the departure to the see-through-pants fiasco. But investors were telling a different story, as Lululemon shares fell 12% in after-hours trading following the news. In fact, for many observers, the recall episode just reinforced Day&#8217;s competence. After the news of the malfunction spread, Day moved quickly to recall product and fired the companies Chief Product Officer Sheree Waterson. As retail analyst Patty Edwards of Trutina Financial told Forbes, “They handled the whole situation incredibly well.&#8221; (MORE: Lululemon Yoga Pants Return to the Market After Recall) So if Day wasn&#8217;t forced out because of the recall, why is she leaving? Few companies in the world have succeeded as well as Lululemon has during Day&#8217;s five-and-a-half-year tenure. The company&#8217;s stock has risen in value from under $4 per share in March of 2009 to a high of more than $80 before Day&#8217;s resignation. At the same time, Lululemon was able to aggressively grow its total number of stores, which according to Morningstar sat at 186 by the end of 2012, up from a single outlet ten years before. And while much of Lululemon&#8217;s revenue growth has come from this rapid expansion of stores, its not been a slouch when it comes same-stores sales, which have grown at a double-digit pace for much of Day&#8217;s tenure. With this kind of track record it would seem very odd if Day is leaving under anything but her own accord. (It should be noted that a CEO jumping ship when things<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=business.time.com&#038;blog=31173800&#038;post=81880&#038;subd=timebusinessblog&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Retail</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://business.time.com/category/companies-industries/retail-big-companies/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timebusinessblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/71e9e550025c40f79b0da8d72fc60ac1-0.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">recalls_01</media:title>
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		<title>The Recovery Stays the Course with 175,000 New Jobs in May</title>
		<link>http://business.time.com/2013/06/07/the-recovery-stays-the-course-with-175000-new-jobs-in-may/</link>
		<comments>http://business.time.com/2013/06/07/the-recovery-stays-the-course-with-175000-new-jobs-in-may/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 07 Jun 2013 13:25:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Christopher Matthews</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Economy & Policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jobs]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://business.time.com/?p=81447</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In recent years, when the weather begins to heat up, the job market has gone cold. This so-called &#8220;spring swoon&#8221; has time and again dashed many hopes for a more sustained and vigorous economic recovery. But with today&#8217;s report from the Labor Department that the U.S. economy added 175,000 jobs, and that the unemployment rate remaining &#8220;essentially unchanged&#8221; at 7.6%, there&#8217;s more reason to believe we&#8217;ve escaped this pattern in 2013. But wasn&#8217;t the unemployment rate 7.5% last month? Yes, it technically was, but one must remember that these figures are rounded to the nearest tenth of a percent, so even if the headline numbers appears to jump, that may be the result of only a slight increase (the same goes for decreases as well). Furthermore, the unemployment rate is derived from a survey of households that has a much higher margin of error than the so-called establishment survey of businesses &#8212; and so small changes in the unemployment rate are less meaningful than the total number of jobs added. That said, the report isn&#8217;t quite as impressive as the 175,000 headline number would suggest. Revisions to the past two month&#8217;s data show that March and April produced 12,000 fewer jobs than we had thought. Furthermore, the three-month trend of job growth now sits at 155,000 jobs per month versus 233,000 from December through February. When looking at it in this light, we still see hints of the spring slowdown that we&#8217;ve experienced in previous years, though it&#8217;s much less pronounced in 2013. Other key figures within the report changed very little. Total hours worked per week stayed flat, while average hourly earnings increased by just one cent. Alternative measures of employment, like the employment population ratio, which measures the ratio of those with a job to the entire working-eligible population, remained unchanged, as it has for much of the past year. This ratio is important to pay attention to because the headline unemployment rate can fall simply due to people dropping out of the labor force. A decline in<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=business.time.com&#038;blog=31173800&#038;post=81447&#038;subd=timebusinessblog&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Jobs</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://business.time.com/category/economy-policy/jobs-economy-policy/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timebusinessblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/152830344.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Jobs Recovery</media:title>
		</media:content>

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			<media:title type="html">christopherrmatthews</media:title>
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		<title>Uh-Oh: We Already Started Spending Like It&#8217;s 2005</title>
		<link>http://business.time.com/2013/06/05/uh-oh-we-already-started-spending-like-its-2005/</link>
		<comments>http://business.time.com/2013/06/05/uh-oh-we-already-started-spending-like-its-2005/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 05 Jun 2013 09:45:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Christopher Matthews</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy & Policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Wall Street & Markets]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://business.time.com/?p=81253</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The two-faced recovery soldiers on. One day, indicators like the Case-Shiller housing index give us hope that the economic recovery is finally gaining steam, and the next day the ISM Manufacturing Index shows the sector actually contracted in May. Amid the confusion, however, some commentators see a fate much worse than a tepid recovery. News organizations from Bloomberg to Yahoo have been wondering whether the recent gains in the housing market are setting the stage for another real estate bubble. The reasons for this concern: home values are increasing far faster than wages, while retail sales and GDP growth seem to be accelerating faster than the fundamentals would allow. And if retail spending, home prices and economic activity are growing faster than worker paychecks, it means we&#8217;re taking on more debt — and at some point that will become an unsustainable situation. It&#8217;s the same unsustainable situation, in fact, that characterized the run-up to the housing crisis. In the early 1990s, the average American&#8217;s debt load was 83% of his income, but by 2007 that number reached a staggering 130%. Americans compensated for stagnant wage growth by &#8220;using their homes as ATMs,&#8221; as the catch phrase has it, taking out more and more mortgage-backed debt with the belief that home prices would always continue to rise. And a reckless banking system was only too happy to oblige. The Great Recession was supposed to have changed all that. In the wake of the financial crisis we read story after story of chastened Americans socking away more money in their retirement accounts, paying down debt and saving for their children&#8217;s educations. The national savings rate, which had averaged just 2.84% between 2000 and 2007, climbed above 6% in 2008. But it would seem that this postrecession parsimony has ended. One of the main reasons why tax increases and sequestration-related spending cuts haven&#8217;t slowed consumer spending or GDP growth is that Americans have given up on the whole savings thing once again. According to William Emmons, an economist at the St. Louis Federal Reserve, &#8220;the rise in consumer spending is<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=business.time.com&#038;blog=31173800&#038;post=81253&#038;subd=timebusinessblog&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Economy</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://business.time.com/category/economy-policy/economy/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timebusinessblog.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/openwalletempty1.jpeg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Open Wallet</media:title>
		</media:content>

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		<title>The &#8216;World&#8217;s Longest Labor Strike&#8217; Ends in a Whimper</title>
		<link>http://business.time.com/2013/05/31/the-worlds-longest-labor-strike-ends-in-a-whimper/</link>
		<comments>http://business.time.com/2013/05/31/the-worlds-longest-labor-strike-ends-in-a-whimper/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 31 May 2013 09:45:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Christopher Matthews</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Economy & Policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Labor]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://business.time.com/?p=81057</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[On Fathers Day 2003, all of the 130 workers at the Congress Hotel in Chicago walked out on the job, protesting management&#8217;s decision to cut wages and bring in minimum-wage, subcontracted workers. Ten years later, the union &#8212; United Here&#8217;s Local 1 &#8212; is giving up its fight, and not because management gave in to any of the union&#8217;s demands. It simply decided that the fight had gone on long enough, and that its resources and attention would be better spent elsewhere. &#8220;The decision to end the Congress strike was a hard one, but it is the right time for the Union and the strikers to move on,&#8221; said Local 1 President Henry Tamarin. &#8220;The boycott has effectively dramatically reduced the hotel’s business. The hotel treats their workers and customers equally poor and the community knows it. There is no more to do there.&#8221; Of course, the point of a strike isn&#8217;t just to hurt the employer&#8217;s business, it&#8217;s to improve pay and working conditions for employees. And after a staggeringly long strike, which United Here claims is the &#8220;worlds longest,&#8221; they came up empty handed. The significance of this particular loss for labor is probably not all that great in the grand scheme of things. These are just 130 workers, and sometimes management will resist demands even if strikers are able to hurt business significantly. But the United Here&#8217;s loss in this battle is symbolic of more than just one unsuccessful strike. During the 2008 primary, when organized labor split its support between Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama, United Here was the first union to back Obama. As a Senator in 2007, Obama even picketed with Strike First outside the Congress Hotel, in solidarity with striking workers. And when President Obama was first elected in 2008, the labor movement was optimistic that it would finally have the support it needed in Washington to reverse decades of decline in the power of private sector unions. According to Randy Shaw, an attorney and labor activist, President Obama&#8217;s background as a community organizer<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=business.time.com&#038;blog=31173800&#038;post=81057&#038;subd=timebusinessblog&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Labor</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://business.time.com/category/economy-policy/labor-economy-policy/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timebusinessblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/biz-congress-hotel-130530.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">The Congress Plaza Hotel in Chicago, on May 30, 2013.</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">christopherrmatthews</media:title>
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		<title>Viewpoint: A Balanced Budget Amendment That Might Actually Work</title>
		<link>http://business.time.com/2013/05/30/viewpoint-a-balanced-budget-amendment-that-might-actually-work/</link>
		<comments>http://business.time.com/2013/05/30/viewpoint-a-balanced-budget-amendment-that-might-actually-work/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 30 May 2013 09:45:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Christopher Matthews</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Economy & Policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://business.time.com/?p=81010</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The current debate over national economic policy has drawn to standstill in recent months, amid falling unemployment, budget deficits, and the sundry scandals that have consumed much of Washington. But just because the problems of unemployment and the unsustainability of our long-term budget appear less severe than they did a year ago doesn&#8217;t mean they don&#8217;t deserve to be addressed. The conventional wisdom is that nothing is getting done on either of these fronts because the Republican Party isn&#8217;t interested in compromise; or, as my colleague Rana Foroohar recently suggested, because conservatives are simply out of ideas that don&#8217;t include radical budget slashing or tax cuts for the rich. Politics has surely dampened the appetite for compromise on the Republican side of the isle, but it turns out the GOP is not entirely lacking in fresh ideas. A new book called Balance, by right-leaning economists Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane, offers some policy proposals that ought to be taken seriously, even by those who don&#8217;t agree with all their premises. At the very least, some of these ideas could be used as blueprints for the rare politician seeking some acceptable grounds for compromise. Balance is a work of economic history: Its goal is to examine why great powers decline, and how the United States can avoid a similar fate. From Rome to the Ottoman Empire, Hubbard and Kane argue that the real cause of superpowers decline was not because of outside threats but because of decay from within. Though certainly not an original insight, it&#8217;s an important one because too many of us view economic development as a zero-sum game played between competitors. Over the past fifty years, the popular imagination has held that first the Soviet Union, then Japan, and now China were competitors for a limited supply of global wealth rather than potential partners working towards shared prosperity. (MORE: Austerity Strikes Back: Budget Hawks Regroup After the Reinhart-Rogoff Affair) Unshackling ourselves from a declinist mindset that states that the U.S. cannot compete with an ascendant nations like China is an important first step toward sober-minded<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=business.time.com&#038;blog=31173800&#038;post=81010&#038;subd=timebusinessblog&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://business.time.com/2013/05/30/viewpoint-a-balanced-budget-amendment-that-might-actually-work/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Government</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://business.time.com/category/economy-policy/government-economy-policy/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">christopherrmatthews</media:title>
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		<title>How to Give (and Receive) Positive Criticism</title>
		<link>http://business.time.com/2013/05/27/how-to-give-and-receive-positive-criticism/</link>
		<comments>http://business.time.com/2013/05/27/how-to-give-and-receive-positive-criticism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 27 May 2013 13:00:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Kevin Daum</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Small Business]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://business.time.com/?p=80814</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=business.time.com&#038;blog=31173800&#038;post=80814&#038;subd=timebusinessblog&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Small Business</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://business.time.com/category/small-business/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">christopherrmatthews</media:title>
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		<title>The Next Real Estate Bubble Has Already Begun (But It&#8217;s Not What You Think)</title>
		<link>http://business.time.com/2013/05/23/the-next-real-estate-bubble-has-already-begun-but-its-not-what-you-think/</link>
		<comments>http://business.time.com/2013/05/23/the-next-real-estate-bubble-has-already-begun-but-its-not-what-you-think/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 23 May 2013 09:45:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Christopher Matthews</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Agriculture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Companies & Industries]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy & Policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Real Estate]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://business.time.com/?p=80612</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The American public is, for obvious reasons, a bit gun-shy when it comes to asset bubbles. Ever since the financial crisis, market watchers have worried about bubbles in the stock market, in high yield debt, and even the reinflation of the real estate bubble. The latest asset class to receive worried attention from policy makers? Farmland. That&#8217;s right, according to The Financial Times prices on U.S. farmland have doubled over the past decade, and are on pace to rise more than 10% again this year, even in the face of weaker grain markets of late. The main force that has been driving the increases in farmland prices has been a steady bull market in agricultural commodity prices. But according to the FT report, lately &#8220;big investors&#8221; have been dipping their toes into the farmland market in an attempt to take advantage of high agriculture profits and as a hedge against inflation. (MORE: The Accounting Trick Behind Thirty Years of Scandal) This run up in prices, combined with the fact that interest rates are at historic lows, have some land owners and policy makers worried that this bull market could end in heartbreak for many of America&#8217;s farmers &#8212; especially in the Midwestern corn belt, where price increases have been most pronounced. The dynamic has gotten the attention of the Federal Advisory Council, a group which advises the Federal Reserve on monetary policy. According to Bloomberg, the council warned the Fed in February that, &#8220;Agricultural land prices are veering further from what makes sense . . Members believe the run-up in agriculture land prices is a bubble resulting from persistently low interest rates.” The effect of a farmland bubble bursting, however, probably shouldn&#8217;t be of much concern to those of us not directly involved in agriculture. As real estate economist Robert Shiller wrote back in 2011, &#8220;farmland is much less important than other speculative assets. For example, U.S. farmland had a total value of $1.9 trillion in 2010, compared with $16.5 trillion for the U.S. stock market and $16.6 trillion for the U.S. housing market.&#8221; Since the value of farmland<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=business.time.com&#038;blog=31173800&#038;post=80612&#038;subd=timebusinessblog&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Real Estate</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://business.time.com/category/economy-policy/real-estate-economy-policy/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timebusinessblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/168780384.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Corn is planted in a field outside in Henry, Ill., U.S., on May 14, 2013.</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">christopherrmatthews</media:title>
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		<title>The Unspeakably Wonky Idea That Can Solve the Corporate Tax Debate</title>
		<link>http://business.time.com/2013/05/21/formulary-apportionment-the-unspeakably-wonky-idea-that-can-solve-the-corporate-tax-debate/</link>
		<comments>http://business.time.com/2013/05/21/formulary-apportionment-the-unspeakably-wonky-idea-that-can-solve-the-corporate-tax-debate/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 21 May 2013 19:12:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Christopher Matthews</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Economy & Policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://business.time.com/?p=80518</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Kentucky Senator Rand Paul isn&#8217;t happy that Apple executives are being questioned by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations today regarding their tax avoidance strategies. Apple is completely justified, Paul argued, in paying as little in taxes as is legally acceptable. &#8221;Instead of Apple executives we should have brought in here a giant mirror,&#8221; he said. &#8220;&#8221;Congress should be on trial here for creating a byzantine tax code.&#8221; Though committee chair Carl Levin would probably disagree with Paul&#8217;s characterization of today&#8217;s hearing as a politically motivated witch hunt, Paul&#8217;s analysis is at least correct in the sense that corporations will always pay the least amount of taxes they can within the bounds of the law &#8212; and if anybody is to blame for low effective corporate tax rates, it&#8217;s Congress. (MORE: The Corporate Tax Rate Is Lowest in Decades; Is Business Paying Its Fair Share?) So how can the law be crafted so that companies can&#8217;t engage in the sort of tactics that have allowed Apple to pay much lower tax rates that the law intends? One idea that&#8217;s been bandied about for many years, but which hasn&#8217;t made a lot of headway, goes by the not-so-glamorous name &#8220;formulary apportionment.&#8221; Under this system, the U.S. could tax companies based on what percentage of sales occur here. For instance, if Apple sold 30% of its products in America, then the U.S. government would tax 30% of Apple&#8217;s income at the statutory corporate tax rate of 35%. This sort of system would work best if it were implemented internationally, but as the Brookings Institute points out in its analysis of formulary apportionment, the U.S. could move to this sort of system unilaterally because the move would actually incentivize companies to report their profits in America. This is because we&#8217;d be taxing only a fraction of profits regardless of where they&#8217;re reported, and this dynamic would motivate other countries to jump aboard a formulary apportionment system as well. Some powerful, multinational corporations may oppose such a move for several reasons. The current system allows multinational corporations to play<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=business.time.com&#038;blog=31173800&#038;post=80518&#038;subd=timebusinessblog&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Taxes</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://business.time.com/category/economy-policy/taxes-economy-policy/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">christopherrmatthews</media:title>
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		<title>14 Simple Ways to Get Considerably More Done</title>
		<link>http://business.time.com/2013/05/20/14-simple-ways-to-get-considerably-more-done/</link>
		<comments>http://business.time.com/2013/05/20/14-simple-ways-to-get-considerably-more-done/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 May 2013 18:57:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Jeff Haden</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Small Business]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://business.time.com/?p=80260</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=business.time.com&#038;blog=31173800&#038;post=80260&#038;subd=timebusinessblog&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Small Business</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://business.time.com/category/small-business/</primary_category_link>
		<media:content url="http://2.gravatar.com/avatar/8f9a71742e964af96ca58c01a0577a0d?s=96&#38;d=http%3A%2F%2F2.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D96&#38;r=G" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">christopherrmatthews</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">125x57-inc</media:title>
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		<title>Rejoice! The End of &#8216;User Name and Password&#8217; May Be Nigh</title>
		<link>http://business.time.com/2013/05/16/rejoice-the-end-of-the-user-name-and-password-is-nigh/</link>
		<comments>http://business.time.com/2013/05/16/rejoice-the-end-of-the-user-name-and-password-is-nigh/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 16 May 2013 09:45:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Christopher Matthews</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Digital Privacy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Google]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Technology & Media]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://business.time.com/?p=80006</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What&#8217;s the absolute worst part of the Internet? Reasonable folks may disagree, but most would say keeping track of an endless string of passwords ranks somewhere at the top. Nobody, of course, can remember a unique password for the dozens of sites we each sign into each day, so we end up using the same one over and over again. But as recent breaches of high-profile websites like LinkedIn and Gawker show, this practice makes us increasingly vulnerable to hackers who can find valuable passwords for our bank accounts and e-mail by breaking into other less secure sites. (VIDEO: How Silicon Valley Is Hollowing Out the Economy and Stealing From You to Boot) This is why a consortium of tech companies, including PayPal and Google, have joined together to dream up the future of passwords. And the future, according to this FIDO Alliance (which stands for Fast Identity Online) is to have no passwords at all. &#8220;Passwords are just not working terribly well anymore,&#8221; says Michael Barrett, chief information-security officer of PayPal and president of FIDO. &#8220;And they&#8217;re starting to impede the development of the Internet ecosystem.&#8221; A recent study released by Nok Nok shows just how bad many of us are at protecting our online identities. On average, it says, an Internet user has 6.5 passwords, and they share one password between 3.9 websites. Furthermore, ever growing computer power is causing even safe passwords to be vulnerable. According to a report released earlier this year from consulting firm Deloitte, more than 90% of user-generated passwords are &#8220;vulnerable to hacking.&#8221; Reads the report: &#8220;Most organizations keep usernames and passwords in a master file. That file is hashed: a piece of software encrypts both the username and password together. Nobody in the organization can see a password in its unencrypted form &#8230; So far, so secure. However, master files are often stolen or leaked. A hashed file is not immediately useful to a hacker, but various kinds of software and hardware &#8230;  can decrypt the master file and at least some of the usernames and<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=business.time.com&#038;blog=31173800&#038;post=80006&#038;subd=timebusinessblog&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Technology &amp; Media</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://business.time.com/category/technology-media/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timebusinessblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/485_biz_passwords_0516.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">Aerial View Of People Attending A Talk While Working On Laptops</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">christopherrmatthews</media:title>
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		<title>The Mystery of the Incredible Shrinking Budget Deficit</title>
		<link>http://business.time.com/2013/05/15/the-mystery-of-the-incredible-shrinking-budget-deficit/</link>
		<comments>http://business.time.com/2013/05/15/the-mystery-of-the-incredible-shrinking-budget-deficit/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 15 May 2013 18:24:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Christopher Matthews</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Economic Indicators]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy & Policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://business.time.com/?p=80083</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Obama Administration is having pretty much the worst week ever, but somewhere amidst the fog of scandal lies some pretty good news about the budget deficit, namely that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is predicting it will be much smaller in 2013 than was projected just a few months ago. That&#8217;s right, the federal budget deficit, which topped $1.4 trillion in 2009, or 10.1% of GDP, and dominated the political discourse over the past several years, is shrinking rapidly. The CBO is now saying that the deficit will be less than half that amount in 2013: $642 billion, or 4% of GDP. That&#8217;s $200 billion less than the CBO predicted just a few months ago. What gives? (MORE: This Housing Upturn Looks Like the Real Thing) Basically, the change can be explained by a combination of a recovering housing market &#8212; which has improved the finances of government-owned Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac &#8212; combined with a better-than-expected economy overall, which is boosting corporate and personal income tax revenues. This economic improvement is happening despite higher taxes and budget cuts enacted as part of the fiscal cliff deal reached in December, and the sequestration-related budget cuts that went into effect recently. This change is yet another vindication of economists and commentators who argued that large budget deficits are the natural outgrowth of effective economic policy in the wake of a severe recession. Economic recession reduces employment and corporate profits, lowering tax revenues. At the same time, safety net programs like unemployment insurance and food stamps must spend more to accommodate the larger number of people who need them. Congress and President Obama did take measures to permanently increase taxes and government spending through the healthcare overhaul, but it&#8217;s clear now that the historically large budget deficits we saw immediately following the financial crisis were mostly a result of the recession rather than new government programs. In addition, the CBO notes that the growth in healthcare spending has slowed in recent years. For instance, spending on Medicare and Medicaid in 2012 was 5% below<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=business.time.com&#038;blog=31173800&#038;post=80083&#038;subd=timebusinessblog&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Government</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://business.time.com/category/economy-policy/government-economy-policy/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">christopherrmatthews</media:title>
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		<title>7 Employees You Should Fire Now</title>
		<link>http://business.time.com/2013/05/14/7-employees-you-should-fire-now/</link>
		<comments>http://business.time.com/2013/05/14/7-employees-you-should-fire-now/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 14 May 2013 16:15:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Steve Tobak</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Small Business]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://business.time.com/?p=79859</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=business.time.com&#038;blog=31173800&#038;post=79859&#038;subd=timebusinessblog&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Small Business</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://business.time.com/category/small-business/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">christopherrmatthews</media:title>
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		<title>5 Lessons from Warren Buffett&#8217;s Letters</title>
		<link>http://business.time.com/2013/05/13/5-lessons-from-warren-buffetts-letters/</link>
		<comments>http://business.time.com/2013/05/13/5-lessons-from-warren-buffetts-letters/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 13 May 2013 15:32:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Francesca Fenzi </dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Small Business]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://business.time.com/?p=79519</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=business.time.com&#038;blog=31173800&#038;post=79519&#038;subd=timebusinessblog&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Small Business</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://business.time.com/category/small-business/</primary_category_link>
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		<title>The Made-Up Numbers Dominating the Immigration Debate</title>
		<link>http://business.time.com/2013/05/10/the-made-up-numbers-dominating-the-immigration-debate/</link>
		<comments>http://business.time.com/2013/05/10/the-made-up-numbers-dominating-the-immigration-debate/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 10 May 2013 16:18:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Christopher Matthews</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy & Policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://business.time.com/?p=79710</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Heritage Foundation made a splash early this week with a report predicting that the current immigration reform bill being debated in the Senate would cost the U.S. government $6.3 trillion dollars in benefits like Social Security, Medicare, means-tested welfare, and other programs over 50 years. The basic logic behind the study is that undocumented immigrants are far lower skilled and less educated than the average American, and therefore these folks will, on average, take more in benefits than they will contribute in taxes. (MORE: The Gang Reaches Across the Aisle as Senate Immigration Debate Kicks Off) The analysis fomented significant backlash, not just from the liberal outfits you&#8217;d expect but also from conservative groups like the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute that support immigration reform. The two biggest flaws in the report, according to these critics, were that it did not take into account any of the economic benefits of immigration and previously undocumented immigrants coming out from the shadows; and that it underplayed the high costs of the status quo. As Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute puts it: &#8220;Heritage &#8230; largely ignores the wage increases experienced by immigrants and their descendants over the course of their working lives, how those wages would alter after legalization, and the huge gains in education amongst the second and third generation of Hispanics.&#8221; In addition, the Heritage report assumes that undocumented immigrants mostly up and leave when they reach the age of 55 &#8212; whereas under the reform bill they would remain in the U.S. and draw heavily on government programs. But this assumption doesn&#8217;t make a lot of sense: As Dylan Matthews points out  in the Washington Post, the reason there currently are not more older, undocumented immigrants in the U.S. is that they were legalized by a 1986 amnesty law. Regardless of the Heritage study&#8217;s flaws, it set many conservative supporters of immigration, like Florida Senator Marco Rubio, back on their heels. The last thing a deficit hawk wants is a proposal that will add trillions to the deficit over the next several<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=business.time.com&#038;blog=31173800&#038;post=79710&#038;subd=timebusinessblog&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Economics</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://business.time.com/category/economy-policy/economics-economy-policy/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timebusinessblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/rtxyof1.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">U.S.-born boy waves the U.S. flag as his family members from Lebanon wait to take the oath of citizenship during a naturalization ceremony in Los Angeles</media:title>
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			<media:title type="html">christopherrmatthews</media:title>
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		<title>Stripping Jamie Dimon&#8217;s Chairmanship May Feel Good, But Won&#8217;t Fix What&#8217;s Broken</title>
		<link>http://business.time.com/2013/05/09/why-jamie-dimon-is-fighting-for-his-jpmorgan-chairmanship/</link>
		<comments>http://business.time.com/2013/05/09/why-jamie-dimon-is-fighting-for-his-jpmorgan-chairmanship/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 09 May 2013 09:45:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Christopher Matthews</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Companies & Industries]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Corporate Governance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy & Policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Too-Big-To-Fail]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Wall Street & Markets]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://business.time.com/?p=79538</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Way back in 2011, JPMorgan Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon was on top of the world. TIME selected him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and even Charles Ferguson, director of the scathing, anti-Wall-Street documentary Inside Job praised his performance during the financial crisis: &#8220;Dimon had the wisdom and the long view to prevent his employees from succumbing to the insane greed that enriched so many bankers while destroying their firms, not to mention ruining millions of lives. As a result, JPMorgan caused far less damage during the financial crisis and emerged more powerful than ever, while Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG, Countrywide and WaMu collapsed. For this, Dimon deserves enormous credit.&#8221; Less than a year later, Dimon suffered one of the most humiliating setbacks of his career, when the so-called &#8220;London Whale&#8221; trades cost the firm approximately $6 billion, and shook Wall Street&#8217;s faith that Dimon was adequately managing risk at his too-big-to-fail bank. Dimon did as a good a job as anyone could to reassure the markets and public of his and his firms&#8217; competence. He even went down to Washington to show his contrition and submit himself to a Congressional inquiry into the matter. And for the most part it was effective. The media firestorm over the trading debacle ultimately settled down, and JPMorgan&#8217;s stock price has recovered from the deep hit it took following the loses. (MORE: Too Big To Fail: 3 Lessons of the “London Whale” Debacle) But Dimon isn&#8217;t quite out of the woods yet. Due in part to the London Whale mess, shareholder advisory firms like Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis are recommending that JPMorgan shareholders vote to split the roles of CEO and Chairman, and hand the Chairmanship over to another director &#8212; effectively demoting Dimon, though he would remain CEO of the bank. Meanwhile, according to The Wall Street Journal, JPMorgan directors are lobbying their biggest shareholders like Blackrock, Vanguard, and Fidelity to vote to keep the positions merged. It&#8217;s worth noting that in the grand scope of these things, $6<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=business.time.com&#038;blog=31173800&#038;post=79538&#038;subd=timebusinessblog&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Wall Street &amp; Markets</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://business.time.com/category/wall-street-markets/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">christopherrmatthews</media:title>
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		<title>How Silicon Valley Is Hollowing Out the Economy (and Stealing From You to Boot)</title>
		<link>http://business.time.com/2013/05/07/how-silicon-valley-is-hollowing-out-the-economy-and-stealing-from-you-while-theyre-at-it/</link>
		<comments>http://business.time.com/2013/05/07/how-silicon-valley-is-hollowing-out-the-economy-and-stealing-from-you-while-theyre-at-it/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 07 May 2013 09:45:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Christopher Matthews</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Silicon Valley]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Technology & Media]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://business.time.com/?p=79359</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Jaron Lanier&#8217;s latest book, Who Owns the Future?, begins by noting an instructive coincidence: the bankruptcy of the photography giant Kodak occurred within months of Facebook’s billion-dollar acquisition of the photo-sharing site Instagram. This would be just one example of the destructive dynamism of American capitalism, a process through which old companies are overtaken by new technology and new firms more in tune with the needs of customers &#8212; and that perhaps benefits us all. Except for one thing, that is: whereas Kodak employed 140,000 workers during its heyday, Instagram employed just 13 people when it was purchased in April 2012. &#8220;Where did all those jobs disappear to?&#8221; Lanier asks. &#8220;And what happened to the wealth that those middle-class jobs created?&#8221; Lanier&#8217;s answer is that the new &#8220;information economy,&#8221; which is now superseding the manufacturing economy, is developing in such a way that the rewards are filtering to an elite few at the expense of everybody else. Lanier is certainly not the first public intellectual to expound upon rising income inequality or the fact that the emergent information economy isn&#8217;t able to produce the sort of middle-class jobs that automation is destroying. But Lanier, a computer scientist who made his name in the field of virtual reality (a term he coined) in the 1980s, is one of the few conversant enough in the necessary disciplines &#8212; namely history, economics and technology &#8212; to approach the problem holistically.  (MORE: Can Robots Bring Manufacturing Jobs Back to the U.S.?) One popular view of the American economy&#8217;s recent troubles is that we&#8217;ve become too decadent, that we no longer make anything the rest of the world wants, and that our economy will not recover until we can learn to overcome our addiction to debt and cheap, foreign-made goods. And if one were to look at where the average American gets his paycheck these days, there&#8217;s evidence to support this worldview. Fewer and fewer Americans are employed in making physical goods &#8212; just 9% of the population works in manufacturing, compared with 40% during World War II. But total manufacturing output &#8211; that is, the dollar value of<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=business.time.com&#038;blog=31173800&#038;post=79359&#038;subd=timebusinessblog&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Silicon Valley</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://business.time.com/category/technology-media/silicon-valley/</primary_category_link>
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		<title>Jobs Report: Economy Avoids &#8216;Spring Swoon&#8217; As Unemployment Rate Falls</title>
		<link>http://business.time.com/2013/05/03/jobs-report-economy-avoids-spring-swoon-as-unemployment-rate-falls/</link>
		<comments>http://business.time.com/2013/05/03/jobs-report-economy-avoids-spring-swoon-as-unemployment-rate-falls/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 03 May 2013 13:34:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Christopher Matthews</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Economy & Policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jobs]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://business.time.com/?p=79205</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In recent years, the U.S. economy has performed like a once dominant, but now aging ballplayer. It shows flashes of greatness, but the risk of injury looms large. Last winter, for instance, the job market started the year with a bang, adding roughly 275,000 jobs per month. But sometime last spring, it pulled up lame &#8212; at one point the three-month average of job gains stalled to 108,000, possibly not even enough to keep up with population growth. But if this month&#8217;s jobs report is any indication, the economy is managing to avoid the disabled list this year, despite the risks from higher taxes, lower government spending, and economic weakness around the globe. The Labor Department announced this morning that the U.S. economy added 165,000 new jobs and that the unemployment rate fell slightly to 7.5%.  More important, the previous two months of employment gains were revised upwards: February job growth was estimated to be 332,000 rather than 268,000, and March job growth was revised from 88,000 to 138,000. In other words, there are 279,000 more jobs in the economy this month that we had previously thought. (MORE: New Hope for Underwater Homeowners) The report showed strength in other ways as well. Average hourly earnings rose last month by four cents to $23.87, which brings the increase so far this year to 1.9%, more than enough to keep pace with inflation. On the other hand the average length of the work week decreased by 0.2 hours, indicating that while employers have hired more, this may be eating into the hours of the already employed. The politically inclined will surely be parsing today&#8217;s report for effects of the so-called &#8220;sequester&#8221; as well as the various tax increases that have gone into effect this year. Conservatives will likely point out that there isn&#8217;t much evidence in this month&#8217;s numbers that government cuts are worsening the employment picture, as government employment remained steady. That being said, most of the sequester is taking the form of furloughs rather than outright job cuts, and the effects<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=business.time.com&#038;blog=31173800&#038;post=79205&#038;subd=timebusinessblog&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Jobs</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://business.time.com/category/economy-policy/jobs-economy-policy/</primary_category_link>
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