Lots of people have been wondering when one of the big oil-exporting countries, fed up with the weakening dollar, will demand to be paid in euros. But few had been paying attention to the far greater threat that supermodels might demand payment in currency harder than the greenback. Until now:
According to Brazil’s weekly magazine Veja,
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Imagine coming to work every day and having to pretend to be someone else. Imagine you’re Joe Smith from Indianapolis, but you have to remember to be John Sales from Boston. You’ve got to do the accent, to have a whole back story, cover up the inevitable slips.
Stressful, right? That’s what closeted gay workers say they experience every …
One great thing about business crises is the way they turn so many of us semi-amateurs into temporary financial geeks. Five years ago it was all about stock-option accounting and special purpose vehicles. Now it’s collateralizalized debt obligations, special investment vehicles, and my personal favorite of the moment, “level 3 …
You might have read about the collapse of Japan’s largest English-teaching school, Nova. From the Wall Street Journal:
…more than 4,000 foreign-language teachers working for Nova [were] slammed by the biggest scandal in Japan’s foreign community in years. The company, renowned in Japan for the hip-shaking pink bunny in its
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Federal Reserve governor Frederic Mishkin gave a speech Monday at the Risk USA 2007 conference in New York. He said some interesting stuff:
Two types of risks are particularly important for understanding financial instability. The first is what I will refer to as valuation risk: The market, realizing the complexity of a security or the
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Nope. Turns out a “homer” is something a worker makes, using company resources and on company time, for use at the home. This from Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge web report:
A factory worker uses company time and materials to fashion a lamp he will take home for personal use—an artifact called a “homer.” The practice is
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Something struck me in the article in today’s New York Times about Maria Bartiromo. If you recall, 2007 started out kind of sucky for the Money Honey:
It was only in January that Ms. Bartiromo’s name was tied — through leaks from Citigroup — to the company’s decision to oust its chief of global investment, Todd S. Thomson.
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Not long after the AOL-Time Warner merger was announced in 2000, Steve Case and Jerry Levin came to London to talk to all the UK AOLians and Time Warnerites about the deal. I had just moved to London a few months before, and the main thing I remember from the gathering was Case declaring that his goal was to make AOL Time Warner “the …
In the comments to my post on Chuck Prince’s resignation, somebody with the very creative handle “Anonymous” makes an excellent point:
You may recall that Prince got the job when Citi was reeling from one legal scandal after another, which was not a Weill forte. If the trend continues, the next CEO will be good at sorting out subprime
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This just in! From AccountingWeb:
While 34 percent of people who call in sick to work at the last minute do so because of illness, 66 percent are taking time for other reasons, according to the 2007 CCH Unscheduled Absence Survey.
No kidding! So what were we doing–hitting the salon for a mani-pedi? Hitting that Super Wednesday sale at …
As expected, CEO Chuck Prince stepped down at Citigroup’s extra special board meeting Sunday. As not entirely expected, former Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs co-CEO Bob Rubin took over as interim chairman and Citi Europe’s Win Bischoff as interim CEO. And the WSJ, NYT, and FT are all reporting (Sunday night) that Citi will announce …
Wondering why the banking sector’s problems keep failing to go away? Take a look at this chart:
Since the early 1980s, we Americans have been piling on debt. Much of that surely has been to the good, enabling us to enjoy our houses and cars and fridges while paying for them rather than waiting until we’ve saved up all the money. The …
