Is anyone else a little wigged out at the gross displays of wealth among Americans recently?
Just over the past week, my local paper, The New York Times, published two consumer lifestyle articles featuring ridiculously expensive items: $60,000 mattresses and $225,000 parking spots.
Then there’s this piece about what portion of the …
In the new Time Asia, Wharton School prof and market guru Jeremy Siegel has a mostly optimistic take on the weak dollar and U.S. stocks (to be contrasted with the more sour one that I posted Thursday):
The weak dollar … makes U.S. asset prices attractive to foreign investors. U.S. interest rates are higher than those in Continental
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It’s not technically a column. It is, in Time parlance, a story in the well of the new issue, with “IRAQ” (or is it “A IRQ”?) on the cover. But you can’t tell the difference online. It begins:
Again and again in these past few months, financial markets have appeared to be on the verge of something very scary. It happened first and most
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The stock market has been breaking lots of records lately. Sort of. Wowsers! The Dow closed above 14,000 for the first time! Isn’t that exciting? Not really. In his NYT column Wednesday David Leonhardt made the point that it’s silly to get excited about such nominal-price milestones:
The S.& P. 500, which is a much better measure than
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All eyes (okay, some eyes; certainly not mine) have been on Ben Bernanke as he testified about monetary policy yesterday in the House and today in the Senate. In an interesting little essay in the latest Economist’s Voice, though, veteran Chicagoan Lester Telser argues that the Fed’s monetary decisions get far more attention than their …
No, say half of CFOs. Yes, say half of CFOs.
Great. Thanks for settling that for us.
A survey released this week by staffing company Accountemps posed this question to CFOs. It focused on the hiring of finance majors, but we might infer how hiring executives view the question for the general populace. When CFOs were asked how important …
…so is the war for talent. That’s according to the PriceWaterhousecoopers Saratoga survey on the subject. Saratoga’s 2007-2008 Human Capital Effectiveness Report contains results from over 300 organizations, a majority of in the Fortune 1000.
From these numbers, it appears that even as employers spend more and become more desperate …
Why is that 1,800 buildings in New York still get their power and heat from a century-old network of steam pipes? I mean, I know it’s all about the installed base. If you currently rely on steam, it would cost a lot to switch to more modern power sources. But at some point doesn’t the system become so archaic and dangerous that it’s …
Time‘s man in New Delhi, Simon Robinson, has an article on Time.com that deserves some more attention than it’s been getting. He writes:
As U.S. politicians line up to bash Beijing for its weak currency and gigantic trade surplus, one message they might want to offer their constituents is, buy Indian. Unlike China, Asia’s other emerging
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Last summer, I was asked to talk about my job to a roomful of Time Inc. interns. This is just about my favorite thing to do: I love to tell doe-eyed young journalists about all the crappy moves I’ve made so they won’t have to repeat ’em. Not that they’ll listen. Smart, experienced journalists gave me good advice, too, such as: don’t be …
The real estate boom/bubble of the past few years had a lot of interesting effects on the American economy that are now being unwound. One was that everybody’s brother in law became a mortgage broker. Another was that consumer spending kept rising even though incomes were stagnant. Yet another, which I hadn’t really thought about before, …
The WSJ has a very interesting article today explaining that Ford’s main motive for thinking about selling off Volvo is the need to raise money to pay for a deal with the UAW:
General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. have moved in recent months to pare assets and build up cash as they seek answers for their loss-plagued North American
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