In confusing stock options with ownership, corporations confuse trappings with substance.
A general principle of good taxation is that similar jobs, and similar kinds of compensation, should be taxed the same way: otherwise, the government is effectively subsidizing some jobs over others.
The Xbox 360 is the best game console ever designed. It’s fast and powerful – games look as good on the 360 as on high-end PCs that cost six times as much. It’s easy to navigate and has lots of useful secondary features – the ability to play digital video, stream MP3s, and so on.
In the business world, bad news is usually good news – for somebody else.
Speculators get a bad rap. In the popular imagination they’re greedy, heedless, and amoral, adept at price manipulations and dirty tricks. In reality, they often play a key role in making markets run smoothly.
On Wall Street, fraudulent schemes tend to thrive during economic booms, and to blow up when times turn tough.
In the days when corporate downsizing was all the rage, Wall Street took a lot of flak for judging companies too harshly and setting the bar for corporate performance so high that executives felt their only option was to slash payrolls.
Traditionally, tours were a means of promoting a record. Today, the record promotes the tour.
The desire for reinvention seems to arise most often when companies hear the siren call of synergy and start to expand beyond their core businesses.
Businesses that have gone through an episode of hyperinflation become understandably alert to the threat of it: at the first hint of inflation, they’re likely to increase prices, since they’ve learned that if they don’t, and inflation hits, their businesses will be wrecked.
The oil market is especially sensitive even to a hint of expansion or contraction in supply.
Workers who come to the U.S. see their wages and their standard of living boosted sharply simply by crossing the border. That’s a good thing, and one of the best arguments for immigration reform, even if you’ll rarely hear a politician make it.
You might say that economic history is the history of people learning to manage risk.
Popular as Keynesian fiscal policy may be, many economists are skeptical that it works. They argue that fine-tuning the economy is a virtually impossible task, and that fiscal-stimulus programs are usually too small, and arrive too late, to make a difference.
Sometimes even a smart crowd will make a mistake.
The history of the Internet is, in part, a series of opportunities missed: the major record labels let Apple take over the digital-music business; Blockbuster refused to buy Netflix for a mere fifty million dollars; Excite turned down the chance to acquire Google for less than a million dollars.
In practice, downsizing is too often about cutting your work force while keeping your business the same, and doing so not by investments in productivity-enhancing technology, but by making people pull 80-hour weeks and bringing in temps to fill the gap.
Companies often become victims of their own mythologies.
The paradox of Steve Jobs’s career is that he had no interest in listening to consumers – he was famously dismissive of market research – yet nonetheless had an amazing sense of what consumers actually wanted.
Patrimonial capitalism’s legacy is that many people see reform as a euphemism for corruption and self-dealing.
Of course, presidents are always blamed or rewarded for the state of the economy.
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