Early last week, UBS hosted its 13th annual Reserve Management Seminar in Thun, Switzerland. In attendance were the people whose job it is to figure out what to do with the foreign currency reserves held by their country’s central banks. They came from 78 nations, representing institutions with reserves totaling $4.8 trillion.
In other …
In this week’s TIME, I wrote about a burgeoning workplace trend: green offices. Over the past year, I’d begun to hear from employers touting their various green efforts: “we’re the most environmentally correct law firm in L.A.! We use recycled printer paper! We built a tree house on the corporate campus for meetings!” (Honest to John: …
MasterCard released a report today ranking the 50 most important “centers of commerce” around the world. Here’s the top ten:
1. London
2. New York
3. Tokyo
4. Chicago
5. Hong Kong
6. Singapore
7. Frankfurt
8. Paris
9. Seoul
10. Los Angeles
I had breakfast this morning with Yuwa Hedrick-Wong, the Singapore-based MasterCard economic …
A while back, Karen Tumulty linked on Swampland to a Washington Post article about John Edwards’ ties to hedge fund operator Fortress Investment Group and asked me to comment on whether we should care. I said we should, although I couldn’t really tell how much, and both Karen and I got some grief from commenters for purportedly flogging …
The latest guest blogger over on Swampland, Democratic political consultant Dave “Mudcat” Saunders, has been stirring things up bigtime with his condemnation of the “Metropolitan Opera Wing” of the Democratic Party. I initially thought this was because his loyalties lay with the party’s notoriously combative Lyric Opera of Chicago Wing. …
I realized on the bus ride home yesterday (yes, I was still mulling over the final Sopranos episode, because I apparently have no intellectual life) that Tony and Carmella are the most fearsome breed of helicopter parents: Blackhawks.
That, I learned from (of all places) The New York Post, is what we call Baby Boomer parents who not …
Harvard Law professor and bankruptcy guru Elizabeth Warren has a really interesting proposal out today in the journal Democracy (I first heard about yesterday in Gretchen Morgenson’s column in the NYT):
It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house. But it is possible
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My manager announced a week ago that my unit would be undergoing performance reviews. This would not be news at most American corporations; from Whirlpool to IBM, General Electric to Microsoft, regular reviews by management of staff performance have long been, well, regular. But my manager may as well have told us that the Pope had just …
*Spoiler alert, you Tivo-ers–although I don’t know why you’d bother delaying viewing of a cultural event like this one; it’ll require serious strategizing to avoid hearing the outcome.
Is anyone talking about anything else at the office this morning? I think not, so let’s hash. Did anyone else hit rewind five times to make sure they …
A reader named Greg from Sunnyvale, Calif., writes, regarding my column about how ExxonMobil is devoting a significantly smaller share of its resources to developing new sources of oil than it did back in the late 1970s and early 1980s:
I was thinking that, as a journalist, you might want to investigate an alternative explanation for
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As my fellow Time.com blogger Lisa Takeuchi Cullen reports, somebody from LinkedIn stopped by Time Thursday to try to convince people here to make more use of the professional networking site (or whatever you want to call it). I missed the tutorial, but I am a LinkedIn member (albeit one with a piddling 27 connections). A sample tip:
3.
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For those who, like me, are not entirely sure what to make of (occasional Time columnist) Jeff Sachs’s conversion from prophet of sound-money capitalism to would-be savior of Africa, my old friend Nina Munk has a very entertaining piece in the new Vanity Fair that will probably leave you no surer:
When I ask Sachs about his failure in
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