Private equity in the doldrums, and that may be a good thing:The mathematics of buyouts, for one, are not favorable. If a sponsor has to kick in 40% to 50% equity on a deal, it's going to be harder to earn huge returns. So financial sponsors have to be a lot more selective. In this climate, they have to make their money the old fashioned way -- improving a company's operations and growing it faster than its industry peers. That growth and the multiple paid when the… More »
Immediately after Lehman Brothers failed, a money market mutual fund called Reserve Primary "broke the buck"--it did not have enough money in its coffers to pay the shareholders what they'd had. Since money market funds are essentially used as bank accounts, this was a big problem--and it triggered a bank run on the money markets, which ended only when the government stepped in and said it would backstop these funds.Despite their major role in the financial crisis… More »
More than 100 employees were caught collecting unemployment while employed More »
Ten things your IT guy wants you to know:Yes, I can read your e-mail, yes, I can see what web pages you look at while you're at work, yes, I can access every file on your work computer, and yes, I can tell if you are chatting with people on instant messenger (and can read what you're typing, as well). But no, we don't do it. It's highly unethical and, perhaps more importantly, you really aren't that interesting. Unless I am instructed to specifically monitor or… More »
One way to control the flow of pseudoephedrine to meth labs is to make it prescription only, but that would increase costs for consumers. More »
GM’s stock price has sunk by a third since its IPO. Why is corporate turnaround so difficult and rare? The answer is often culture—the hardest thing of all to change.
Debt negotiations usually seem to get resolved at the very last minute. After all, the resolution is almost always that someone is not going to get paid as expected, and this gives every "someone" strong incentive to hold out as long as possible, in the hopes that intransigence will get them a slightly better deal.But even by these standards, the negotiations over Greek debt are really pushing the limit. It's been hard enough getting the private creditors--on… More »
Is it too late? How badly has the organization already damaged its brand? More »
Why Your Prius Will Kill our Highways:This isn't a new problem, but it's getting worse. Since back in the Eisenhower era, the federal government has maintained a Highway Trust Fund, paid for mostly by taxes on fuel, that helps cover the repair and construction of our country's roads, bridges, and mass transit. The idea was that drivers themselves should bear some of the cost the roads they used. Unfortunately, Congress hasn't raised the gas tax since 1993. Since… More »
So naturally, posting on abortion has caused a swarm of very angry people from both sides to show up in my comments. A couple of them are demanding that I "educate myself" about "the facts" on Planned Parenthood and Susan G. Komen, such as the fact that only a minority of the procedures performed at Planned Parenthood are abortions, and that Susan G. Komen spends about 20% of their money on admin and fundraising.I'm aware of the former, but thought it was obvious… More »
The two organizations seemed like natural allies. Why cut ties now? More »
Greek technocrats have a hard time of it: Greece has won strong endorsements in the past year for shoring up its economic statistics after years of fudging data to conceal its deficits and financial mismanagement, but the man who's responsible for restoring the country's reputation is now the target of possible prosecution. He's been accused of exaggerating Greece's deficits in a conspiracy to strengthen the hand of the European Union and the International… More »
Details of the American Airlines bankruptcy are emerging. And the details are that AMR wants all of its creditors to take a deep haircut, especially the workers:The company aims to cut labor costs 20% under bankruptcy protection, and will soon begin negotiations with its three major unions. Some management jobs would also be cut. AMR also proposes to end its traditional pension plans. The move has been strongly opposed by the airline's unions and the U.S.… More »
Stainless steel has become a status good. And yet, it's a very strange status good. What signal, with its name on the outside, is it sending? More »
The latest Budget and Economic Outlook is out from the CBO, and boy is it grim reading. The projections continue to deteriorate, largely because the recession has been longer and deeper than the CBO projected. We can now expect $1 trillion deficits even past Obama's first term.Aha! You want to say. "It's mostly the fault of George Bush and his nefarious tax cuts for the rich!"If only it were so simple. The ten year cost of the Bush tax cuts is $2.8 trillion,… More »
Links I've been thinking about.Can brain calisthenics make you better at math?In a 2010 study, researchers at UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania had sixth graders in a Philadelphia public school use a perception-training program to practice just this. On the computer module, a fraction appeared as a block. The students used a "slicer" to cut that block into fractions and a "cloner" to copy those slices. They used these pieces to build a new block from the… More »
Kevin Drum is not very sympathetic to the Catholic Church's complaints about being forced to provide insurance coverage for contraception to workers in its hospitals and other public institutions:'m just a big ol' secular lefty, so I guess it's natural that I'd disagree. And I do. I guess I'm tired of religious groups operating secular enterprises (hospitals, schools), hiring people of multiple faiths, serving the general public, taking taxpayer dollars -- and then… More »
Links I've been thinking about:When science goes off the deep end.There's a difference between a work that makes you think "Boy, I don't understand this" and one that makes you think "Boy, this person has lost it". The near-infallible signs of scientific derangement include the "Why, this explains everything" aspect, the "Everything you thought you knew is wrong" one, and the intricate details-within-details style, almost always taken to unbearable… More »
Via Greg Mankiw, I see that the CBO is saying that yes indeed, most federal workers make more than their counterparts:Differences in wages between federal employees and similar private-sector employees in the 2005-2010 period varied widely depending on the employees' level of education.Federal civilian workers with no more than a high school education earned about 21 percent more, on average, than similar workers in the private sector. Workers whose highest level… More »
An apparent paradox that frequently puzzles journalists is that Europeans work fewer hours than workers in the United States, while in some countries, hourly productivity appears to be the same, or even higher, than that of American workers.This is not actually a paradox at all. Much of the decline in European hours worked per-capita came in the form of unemployment. Rigid labor laws which make it hard to fire (and thus, risky to hire) shut less productive… More »
And how an upstart company may change that
The Continent’s problems are as much demographic as financial. They won’t go away soon.
GM’s stock price has sunk by a third since its IPO. Why is corporate turnaround so difficult…
