He held off for a while in hopes that maybe Washington could come through with enough monetary and fiscal stimulus to stave it off, but now Mr. Business Cycle himself is saying it: We’re in a recession. From CNNMoney:
Lakshman Achuthan, the managing director of the Economic Cycle Research Institute, said the economy has now fallen into
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The news that something like one-third of Bear Stearns stock, which ain’t worth what it used to be, is in the hands of employees has raised lots of hue and cry about the idiocy of putting your retirement savings in company stock. Writes Megan McArdle:
Unbelievable. Five years after Enron and WorldCom went down, taking not only thousands
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From a small item the other day in The New York Times:
In an interview on Monday, Warren Vandeveer, senior vice president for operations and engineering at Fox News, said the cable channel had realized it had a problem a few weeks ago, when an employee “caught a bug and showed it to us.” An exterminator determined that the incursion
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I have a piece in this week’s cover package about mandatory health at the office. Check out the issue; it’s a serious-but-fun, thinky take on 10 ideas that we think will shape Americans’ lives in the year to come.
In my piece, I talked about the trend among employers to get serious about workers’ health. Why? Duh: money.
Health-care
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So it turns out that Darren Gersh, Washington Bureau Chief for the Nightly Business Report, addressed the question of what we should call this financial crisis of ours way back in January. He even did some actual research on the subject. What a concept!
Anyway, Gersh shared my concern that any name with “subprime” in it is too limiting. …
It was with a sigh of relief that I read that Visa went through with its record-breaking IPO and started trading on the New York Stock Exchange today. Not because I have any money at stake, but because the column I wrote a couple of weeks ago would have looked pretty silly if the IPO hadn’t happened. An excerpt:
Giant IPOS are usually a
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New Delhi-based economist Ajay Shah has a fascinating column in India’s Business Standard (via Bayesian Heresy) in which he makes the case that the current financial troubles in the U.S. may bring a recession, but can’t really be called a crisis. I recommend reading the whole thing, but here are a couple of key passages:
In such
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Fo’ real: it was 40 years ago that the geniuses in office design came up with the soul-destroying workspace we call the modern cubicle.
In celebration, office designers IDEO have teamed up with Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, to create the ideal cubicle. I swear. No punchline. Check it out here. My favorite feature: the hideaway …
Okay, so we’re in a middle of a big crisis brought on, in part, by the failure of financial institutions to maintain large enough capital bases as insurance against the risks they’re taking. So now, in an effort to make the crisis go away, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight announces this morning that it’s going to let …
Being in the company of outstanding minority journalists at a leadership workshop last week made me realize: I need a mentor.
I’m at that sort of halfway point in my career where I’m often tapped to be a mentor to entry-level journalists, but no one really thinks to offer me the same kind of guidance. My company, in a shockingly …
So they went with 75 basis points (that’s three-quarters of a percentage point to you and me). Big, but slightly less than markets were expecting. Which would seem to mean that Bernanke & Co. are convinced that the economy really is in a recession now, but would prefer not to be seen as entirely doing Wall Street’s bidding. Or something …