The Government Can’t Count Right

Apparently our economy has been much slower than reported for years:

Growth: Why the Stats Are Misleading – BusinessWeek.

The Oldest Government Run Business

In these days of bailouts and government intervention, there is much talk about how effectively the Government can run any business.

To see what the future for GM and others may hold, it pays to take a look at how the US Postal Service is run.

Most American citizens are blissfully unaware of the degree [...]

I’ll have some eggs, milk, and a mortgage please

An Ad for a mortgage I found at a supermarket chain's checkout counter

Ralphs is a supermarket chain out west, a cross between Publix & Whole Foods.  I was waiting in the check out line, looked to my left, and saw the usual assortment of candies, mints, and… mortage applications?  The area of the [...]

A Lack of Innovation?

What if our current economic crisis was not just caused by poorly designed financial markets, but by a lack of growth driving innovation?

what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if outside of a few high-profile areas, the past decade has seen far too few commercial innovations that can transform lives and move the [...]

The Fat Tail by Ian Bremmer and Preston Keat

The Fat Tail’s central argument is that businesses rarely forecast and prepare for political risks as well as they do economic ones, which is a mistake because most political risks can be found in the “Fat Tail” of probability charts, where unlikely but high impact events reside.

The first chapters make the case for [...]

Financial Fix

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the focus has been on better accounting for risk, better matching employee pay with the long term value they generate, and creating new regulations to “fix” the markets.

Arguably, better matching pay with value created is ideal, but it is also difficult to measure, which is why we [...]

Rewrititng the Rules of Monopoly

Next time you are playing monopoly and your opponent snaps up too many properties, get the justice department to step in.

Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Christine Varney claims that the Justice Department can aid economic recovery by prosecuting businesses that have been successful in gaining large market shares. In her announcement last month she [...]

Secrets From the School of Googlenomics

Witness the birth of Google, the business giant:

Veach and Kamangar argued that all the ad slots should be auctioned off. In search, Google had already used scale, power, and clever algorithms to change the way people accessed information. By turning over its sales process entirely to an auction-based system, the company could similarly upend [...]

Job Security

Whenever we had a long discussion/disagreement in my Financial Management class, the professor, Dr. Joel Houston, always said something along the lines of “There is no right answer for every situation, learn to love it – that’s job security.”

Much of what Financial Analysts do is made up.  That’s not to say that they are [...]

Time to pull the plug on GM?

President Obama is nearing the most important decision a President has made in modern times regarding the American economy. On or about June 1, he will push General Motors (GM), the nation’s largest industrial company, into bankruptcy.

via Why a GM Bankruptcy Would Be a Disaster – BusinessWeek.

Let’s be honest, President Obama has put [...]