What I said on Monday was that how the private-equity shop KKR “stacks up in terms of influence over worker-lives” isn’t too shabby.
KKR had said it would go public—partly as a way to take over its struggling affiliate KKR Private Equity Investors (KPE)—and in the process, bragged that the 46 companies it has in its portfolio employ …
Remember a few weeks ago when Justin spent some time playing with Fed data on home mortgage lending and made us this nice chart?
And he wrote:
The basic picture is pretty clear: Fannie and Freddie [i.e., GSEs, or government-sponsored enterprises] have dominated U.S. mortgage lending since the early 1980s—except from 2004 through
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The WSJ’s article about Kohlberg Kravis Roberts’s latest plan to go public points out that with a market value between $12 billion and $15 billion, the buyout shop would be worth more that Lehman Brothers and half the size of Merrill Lynch.
A few other numbers from KKR’s morning presentation caught my eye. With its portfolio of 46 …
Yesterday I made an argument for ignoring the debate around the minimum wage. I said the number we should really care about is the median wage of workers paid by the hour. That figure, for the 75.9 million Americans paid hourly rates, is $11.95. (The mean is higher—$14.25—but the Bureau of Labor Statistics thinks the median is a …
Tomorrow the federal minimum wage goes up 70 cents to $6.55 an hour. Rather than join in either side of the outrage—the people who think $6.55 is still way low (including, ostensibly, the 23 states with higher floors) or the people who think the minimum wage is an unforgivable distortion of supply and demand that leads to greater …
Fannie who? Freddie what? I’m on va-ca-tion.
The only potentially work-related thing I did today was try the new we-can-do-healthy-too drinks that launch tomorrow at Starbucks.
The Vivanno–in orange mango banana and banana chocolate–is a $3.95 smoothie made with a whole banana, whey protein and fiber powder, and then some …
I’m at work late. Why? I don’t know. I should go.
Anyway, I’m here, so I saw that Starbucks just announced its first round of store closings. Go here to see if your favorite store is set to be axed. They’ve only posted the first 50 (out of about 600), so no one is out of the woods yet.
The first volley hit Mobile and Las Vegas …
Justin may have a column in this week’s magazine, but I have a 200-word book review. Here, I’ll give you the whole thing:
When no one owns a resource, we tend to overuse it–winding up with polluted skies, fished-out oceans and battles over access to freshwater. But too much ownership leads to problems too. A pharmaceutical company is
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Yesterday, I wrote about Boone Pickens’s plan to plaster the center of the country with windmills. He’s on a PR blitz, trying to convince the country and its politicians—especially those two guys running for President—that we need to go hog wild into wind energy. (Could maybe have something to do with the massive wind farm he’s …
In the last Presidential election, Texas-oilman-turned-corporate-raider-turned-alternative-energy-believer T. Boone Pickens plowed money into the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth—even offering to pay $1 million to anyone who could disprove a single claim from one of the group’s John-Kerry-bashing TV ads.
This election cycle he’s …
Guinea pigs are pretty cool, Justin, but I spent my weekend reading the Harvard Business Review. Now who’s the sad one?
The article you want to check out in the July-August issue is the one in which Anita Elberse calls into question the whole notion of the long tail. Elberse, an associate prof at HBS, analyzes music and home-video sales …
I wrote a piece for Time.com about the decision at Starbucks to shutter 600 stores. You can read it here. It’s brilliant and all, but the real reason I’m blogging is so that I can pass along this text my friend Richard sent me over the weekend:
Starbucks is toast—waiting in line for the bathroom at the brighton beach location—two
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