“How much?” In almost every retail environment, this wouldn’t be a difficult question to answer. But at the car dealership, the process of getting a concrete final price can take hours. The folks at Edmunds.com now have a tool that promises to make retrieving car prices as quick and easy as shopping at Amazon.
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China’s ‘Second Tier’ Cities: That’s Where the Money Is
Airports can tell you much about the consumer development of a country. Having just landed in Shanghai on route to Chengdu, a second-tier city in the Southwest, where TIME’s sister publication is holding its Global Forum, I was struck by two things.
First, the amount of smaller Western niche brands that now occupy airport retail …
Home Prices See Double-Digit Jump
With a 10.9% increase from March 2012 to this March, home prices continued their upward trajectory as measured by the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index. The index has been rising for some time, but the pace of the increase is now the highest since the “bubble” days of April 2006.
Some of that is due to an investment push by financial …
Teens Tire of Facebook — but Not Enough to Log Off
Has Facebook lost its cool? That’s a question TIME posed earlier this year to dozens of teenagers, who mostly insisted that newer social networks like Instagram, Tumblr and Twitter were more engaging, even if (and partially
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Sorry, Paul Tudor Jones: It’s Male — Not Female — Traders We Should Be Worried About
Reading hedge-fund giant Paul Tudor Jones’ recent comments that having babies makes women bad traders reminded me of a close friend of mine, a very senior investment banker at a major Wall Street firm, who once worked for …
Lyft-Off: Car-Sharing Start-Up Raises $60 Million Led by Andreessen Horowitz
Popular car-sharing start-up Lyft has raised $60 million in a major new round of funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, the influential Silicon Valley venture-capital firm started by Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen. The new …
Japan Market Crash: A Slow Leak in the “Central Bank Bubble”
There’s a truism in investing that the last one into a market is the first one out. And that certainly seems to be the case today, with Japan’s Nikkei index crashing off the back of two things: First, hints from the Federal Reserve that the U.S. economy is improving enough to justify a slow pull-back from the central bank’s …
Oklahoma’s Dangerous Dearth of Storm Cellars
UPDATED 5/22/13 12:30 pm
The deadly tornadoes that struck outside Oklahoma City on Monday have a lot of people asking why there aren’t more storm cellars and safe rooms in the area, which would have enabled more residents to shelter safely.
Glenn Lewis, the mayor of devastated Moore, Oklahoma, said today that he wants to pass a law …
The Unspeakably Wonky Idea That Can Solve the Corporate Tax Debate
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul isn’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. “Instead of Apple executives we should have brought in …
Inside Yahoo!’s Tumblr Deal: Here’s Who Hit the Billion Dollar Jackpot
It will likely be years before we know if Yahoo!’s blockbuster $1.1 billion deal to buy social blogging platform Tumblr was a success. But 24-hours after the deal was officially announced, a few things are certain: The deal …
Apology Not Accepted: The Right — and Wrong — Way to Say You’re Sorry
A great deal has been written about Harvard University professor Niall Ferguson’s controversial comments about the late economist John Maynard Keynes. (The short version: Keynesian economic theory, Ferguson suggested, is flawed because Keynes himself was gay and childless — and consequently blind to the dangerous long-term
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When Good Things Happen To Bad People: Disturbing News About Workplace Bullies
As if life isn’t unfair enough for the alarming number of people who are bullied at work—or otherwise adversely affected by such behavior—recent research suggests that a lot of workplace bullies achieve high levels of career success. In fact, their bullying and on-the-job achievements might just be related.