As traders and investment bankers near the finish line of what looks like a boom year for pay, some are spending money like the financial crisis never happened. From $15,000-a-week Caribbean getaways to art auctions to $200,000 platinum wristwatches that automatically adjust for leap years, signs of the good life are returning.
Why do investors and business leaders continue to focus on the short-term and ignore the fact that businesses that think long-term end up more competitive and profitable? Behavioural economists believe they have the answer: our brains are hard-wired to think short-term because evolution has rewarded serial short-term successes such as avoiding predators and other dangers that faced our ancestors. Their survival ensured our existence – but predisposed us to the same kind of short-term thinking. As a result, even though our world is very different from theirs, long-term decision-making remains the exception, not the rule.
After 100 years of competition, the record seems to show that Marx was right – the end result of competition is the end of competition. Marx foresaw constant internecine warfare among capitalists, resulting in fewer and fewer controlling vaster and vaster empires. Any current description of the financial services sector can validate that.
Franz Paasche, a reputations specialist at Communications Consulting Worldwide in New York, argues that a bad reputation can also harm a company’s ability to fight for what it wants in Washington.
“Reputation has value and strong reputations create permissions to grow and prosper,” he said. As Wall Street banks’ reputations sink, “they are losing the more active seat at the table in discussions about policy.”
Although many governments and activist groups say landmines should be scrapped, to avoid endangering innocent people and children, the Pentagon has long argued that such a policy would tie US hands.
[C]ertain strikes are better examples of direct action than others. [A] favorite example is a strike by transit workers in Melbourne in the 1980s in which, rather than walking off their jobs, bus drivers and train conductors stayed on, but stopped collecting fares -- effectively making mass transportation free until the action was over. Imagine...what would happen if, for just one day, workers in every branch of industry and service trade did the same. This alone could be a major step in showing how a capitalist economy could be transformed into an economy of freedom.
Both women have demonstrated curious judgment in the way they conduct themselves in public. If you were Ms Prejean, and knew an ex-boyfriend was lurking somewhere with a tape, would you publish a book advocating traditional values? If you were Ms Palin, nurturing presidential ambitions, would you give up your gubernatorial office and its political advantages before completing a single term?
Politics isn’t only that which has no immediate application to reality. “Immediate concerns” like being able to feed your family are political. It isn’t that women aren’t interested in politics. It is that some people define politics so narrowly that it only applies to pseudo philosophers.
Some lawmakers briefed Tuesday on the Fort Hood shooting said the suspect, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, was most likely a self-radicalized extremist.
But the [Government Accountability Office] report cited several academic studies that found that [the Occupational Health and Safety Administration] data failed to include up to two-thirds of all workplace injuries and illnesses.
The report noted that because of OSHA's “sole reliance on employer-reported injury and illness data” in one of its major surveys, “some academic studies have reported that the survey may undercount the total number of workplace injuries and illnesses.”
The US social contract needs to be revised, so that the elderly, many of whom are comparatively well off, receive less so that the poor can get more.
If the preponderance of women report that things are a certain way, then it would behoove men to fucking listen.
The rape jokes on ‘‘Family Guy’’ make me nauseous. About three years ago, Lakshmi Chaudhry wrote this great piece called ‘‘Men Growing Up to Be Boys.’’ It’s about how the new model of masculinity is perpetual adolescence.
Amid the tumult of the past year, financial advisers are telling us that the Great Recession has produced one invaluable benefit: an education.
We now know, for instance, that our nest eggs can lose almost half their value in a matter of months; that "diversifying" our holdings doesn't necessarily safeguard those holdings; and that our homes -- our one investment for later life that was supposed to be foolproof -- can make us look like, well, fools.
Although Mr Micheletti is hardly an Augusto Pinochet or a Fidel Castro, his government has occasionally been heavy-handed. At least three people have been killed by the security forces.
In the 1980-2007 era of cheap credit and deregulation, banks had every incentive to move from real-economy projects, yielding a profit, towards lending against rising asset prices, yielding a capital gain. In the 1990s and 2000s, loan volumes rose to unprecedented levels, supporting global assets booms in property, derivatives and the carry trade. The share of lending by US banks to the US financial sector – instead of to the real economy – went from 60 per cent of the outstanding loan stock in 1980 (up from 50 per cent in the 1950s) to more than 80 per cent in 2007.
Yoani Sanchez, Cuba's most prominent dissident blogger, was walking along a Havana street last Friday along with two other bloggers and a friend when two men she says were Cuban agents in civilian clothes forced her inside an unmarked black car and beat her, telling her to stop criticizing the government.
This brings to mind the life and death of Victor Kravchenko, the Soviet engineer who, in 1944, defected during a trade mission to Washington and then wrote a best-selling memoir, "I Chose Freedom." His first-person report on the horrors of Stalinism included a detailed account of the mass hunger in early-1930s Ukraine, where Kravchenko -- then still a true believer in the system -- helped enforce collectivization.
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Kravchenko also became more and more obsessed with the inequalities of the Western world, and wrote a sequel to "I Chose Freedom" that was titled, significantly, "I Chose Justice." He devoted himself to finding less exploitative forms of collectivization and wound up in Bolivia, where he squandered all his money trying to organize poor farmers. Crushed by this failure, he withdrew into private life and shot himself in 1966 at his home in New York.
First the bad news: The economy is weak. And now the good news: The economy is weak.
...[A]n ailing economy requires the Federal Reserve to keep its short-term interest-rate targets near zero and continue pumping billions of dollars into the financial system.
That is great for stocks because much of that money eventually finds its way into financial markets, and because cheap money keeps financing costs low and pushes corporate profits higher.
Unemployment in management and professional occupations is less than 5 per cent, about a third of the level in production jobs and a quarter of that in the construction sector. Those disparities, as well as record levels of long-term unemployment, leave scope for structural hangovers in the labour market even as a cyclical rebound takes hold. After all, the new world is familiar to some. The broadest measure of US unemployment, including those wanting work but not searching recently and those forced to work part-time, passed the 10 per cent mark 16 months ago.
Democratic strategists say the president needs to be more energetic in pursuing his agenda – particularly his healthcare plan. But “special interests” are no longer the big obstacle here, if ever they were. The obstacle is that the public now disapproves of it. Eugene Robinson, the Washington Post columnist, wrote in defence of the president: “What many progressives (including me) sometimes see as Obama’s temporising on issues ... might be sensible politics.” Mr Robinson mentioned public health funding and gays in the military. It is a wise insight. But it differs little from what Mr Obama’s harshest detractors say: that the president’s real political programme is something he dare not avow in public. If that is right, we can expect his support to erode further.
Employers may not fully grasp what it takes to retain good people. In its latest biannual survey, released in October, temp firm Spherion Staffing Solutions asked about 300 employers and about 2,500 workers to name the top "drivers of retention." As they did in 2007 and 2005, the bosses listed soft stuff: "management climate" and "supervisor relationship," for instance. Employees' top two in all three surveys? Benefits and compensation.
[T]he union leaders have been frustrated on their No. 1 goal, the card check bill that would effectively abolish the secret ballot in unionization elections. A couple of bulky guys in varsity jackets visit your home and, um, persuade you to sign a card, and later the union -- with the help of a mandatory arbitration clause -- impose contracts on employees and rake in the dues money.
SEPTA's board is demanding that TWU members pay for a greater share of their pension to make up for their mismanagement of the plan. Meanwhile SEPTA is increasing pension benefits for managers who make lower contributions -- which we find completely unfair.
Reaching a milestone birthday also can enhance an executive's pension. Altria Group Inc. CEO Michael E. Szymanczyk's pension rose when he turned 60 last year, triggering a subsidy built into the pension formula, boosting its total value to $23.5 million.
Critics will say that businesses’ focus on ethical values is self-serving, superficial and likely to be shortlived. But self-interest can be a powerful agent of change, too. As the [Confederation of British Industry's] Richard Lambert pointed out last month: “If business is regarded as a pariah by the public and the politicians . . . there will be a price to be paid – probably in the form of regulation, higher taxes, or a combination of the two.” Morality: welcome back.
That moral spirit is distilled in the simple principle: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The wording is biblical but the precept is echoed across religions, cultures and time. Its practical power is evident: if the purveyors of sometimes dishonest sub-prime mortgages had followed this golden rule a lot of misery would have been avoided.
Unfortunately they did not follow the golden rule. We are suffering the consequences, even though everyone in financial markets knew the rule and few would dispute it. The failure to act on a universally-recognised principle is not just down to the strong attraction of short-term gains, seductive as they are. A more profound reason is that we lack a way of embedding the rule in everyday actions.
... Mr. Eisenberg does eventually stumble onto the overarching argument inherent in his title: Shopping, in modern America, is fundamentally an optimistic activity. While our shopping habits are easily manipulated, they are not quite as irrational as critics like to believe. For most of us shopping, when done right, really does make us feel better. We buy because it "confers instant membership in a community."
