Individual income can grow only as fast as productivity rises.
Business cycles lengthened greatly during the 20th century, as central banks learned to manage national economies by raising and lowering interest rates.
It’s one of the fundamental principles of the stock market: When interest rates go up, stocks go down. And along with financial companies and cyclicals, technology companies – with their sky-high price-to-earnings multiples – should be among the biggest losers in an environment of rising rates.
The world is filled with great sporting events.
While Wall Street firms typically underwrite offerings in teams, the lead underwriter, or manager, of the offering has primary responsibility for selling the offering and reaps much of the fees and profit.
It has been said that the Fed’s job is to take the punch bowl away just as the party gets going, raising interest rates when the economy is growing too fast and inflation threatens.
As a public servant, William H. Webster has an impeccable resume.
Economics pretends to be a science. Its practitioners fill blackboards with equations and clog computers with data. But it is really a faith, or more accurately a set of overlapping and squabbling faiths, each with its own doctrines.
Hedge funds try to produce above-average investment returns using tactics ranging from traditional stock-picking to complex derivative and arbitrage plays. High minimum investments, redemption restrictions and aggressive strategies make them suitable mainly for more sophisticated and well-heeled investors.
Most of America never noticed, but the 1990s were good times for trailer homes, a.k.a. manufactured housing. From 1991 to 1998, annual sales of manufactured homes more than doubled, to 374,000 from 174,000.
As they grow, companies saturate their markets, become more complex and difficult to manage, and face larger and more entrenched competitors.
Normally, banks record profits on loans only as they are repaid, whether they securitize the loans or hold them on their books.
I think when you have lawyers arguing over whether you can keep a detainee at 46 degrees… for two hours, that’s not torture. It may be unpleasant, it may be coercive… but let’s say what torture actually is, and that’s not it.
In Ghazalia, Mr. Hussein showed his contempt for the majority Shiites in ways large and small. He refused to allow them even one mosque, while the Sunnis had nearly a dozen. To worship, the Shiites had to cross an inconveniently located bridge over the sewage canal to Shula.
Information technology departments must spend enormous amounts of time and money worrying about integrating big computer systems with billions of pieces of customer data.
African runners regularly work out in the United States and Europe, and the International Olympic Committee sends some of the cash from the Games to Olympic committees in poor nations, which use the money to finance their own programs.
One of the Internet’s highest-profile companies, Priceline once dreamed of transforming the way consumer goods are bought and sold by offering customers the chance to ‘name your own price’ for a variety of products, including airline tickets.
Financial news services and other media organizations get press releases 15 minutes before they are distributed to the general public, fueling a furious competition among the news services to rewrite them for their subscribers during their window of exclusivity.
The difference between microeconomics and macroeconomics is a bit like the difference between biology and medicine. Knowing that certain genes increase the risk of cancer is relatively easy. Figuring out exactly which people will get sick, or how to cure them, is a lot more complicated.
Institutions like mutual funds often worry that if they disclose their plans to buy a stock, copycats will move quickly and drive up the stock before the purchase is completed.
Downhill track sports like luge are technology battles, as exciting as a NASCAR qualifying day.
Benefits are rarely made public in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, where companies must report the pay and options that their five highest-paid executives receive.
Mr. Hussein began building Ghazalia in the early 1980s as a home for army officers and other members of his Baath Party. Concrete mansions with pillars and domes are common in the southern half of the district.
In the short run, using militias might be the quickest and easiest way to improve order on Iraq’s streets and uproot the terrorists and guerrillas who routinely attack American troops and civilian targets.
Most companies can survive even if their debt ratings are lowered below investment grade, although they will have higher borrowing costs.
For years, critics of Fannie Mae have warned that it does not give them enough information to judge its risks.
Automated call centers are only the most obvious way speech recognition will be used. The software is now becoming sophisticated enough to identify speakers through ‘voiceprints,’ akin to fingerprints, eventually reducing the need for personal identification numbers.
Like many other banks and finance companies, Green Tree used a process called securitization to resell its home loans to outside investors. Green Tree grouped thousands of these small loans into a pool worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Did anyone in the White House or the N.S.A or the C.I.A. consider flying to Hong Kong and treating Mr. Snowden like a human being, offering him a chance to testify before Congress and a fair trial?
Plumbing is usually boring.
From 1983 to 2000, William Goren stole more than $30 million from investors on Long Island and in Queens. His favorite targets were widows and retired couples, like Helga and Simon Novack, Holocaust survivors who gave Mr. Goren their life savings.
Big companies, which spend tens of billions of dollars annually on ‘call centers’ to take orders and provide customer support, increasingly rely on speech recognition not just to handle requests for information but to process customer orders.
The stock prices of networking equipment companies like Cisco Systems and Nortel Networks sometimes seem as if they are priced for perpetual success.
At first glance, Martha Stewart, queen of artfully distressed home furnishings, might not seem to have much in common with Michael R. Milken, one-time king of junk bonds.
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