Last year's Academy Award Winner No Country for Old Men was released November 21, 2007. This was about two months after the top of the SPX but well after the municipal bond market had turned south.  IT was the story of a brutal killer attempting to recover money from a drug deal gone bad. Subsequently the…

I find that most students do not even scan the weekend papers, friday thru saturday.  Yet lots of news happens then. The reason is that newsmakers do not want to announce changes in the middle of market trading. Reagan foolishly announced that Greenspan would replace Folcker during bond market trading hours. Bond prices immeditaely dropped…

I decided to make a longer post about labor management after a student comment on my previous post. I compared strikes to war. The commecnt was that I was a bit overboard, really? Read about the Battle of the Overpass on how Ford 'security guards' treated Union Organizers. Read how many people including women and children…

Machinists at Boeing approved a strike but did not initiate it yet.  This is the last thing that Boeing needs as they try to get the Dreamliner 787 completed.  Strikes are a negative manifestation of human emotion as are wars between nations.  A strike might be viewed as a sort of war between workers and management.…

I have mentioned in class the importance of measuring market captilaizaiton. You will recall this is the price per share times the number of shares outstanding.  Right now that is $11.6 B  for Lehman.  Lehman was asking $6B for a 25% share from the Korean Group. But wait, 25% of $11.69 B is about $3B,…

One might think that higher oil prices would have gurt stock prices, wrong. Oil and stock prices rose from 2002 thru most of 2007.  The fact was that the economy could afford higher oil prices, to a point. At times since 2007, lower oil prices have boosted stocks. This last few days fear of oil…

The thing that makes a disaster a disaster is the element of surprise. If the cunard Line had anticipated the iceberg, the Titanic sinking might have b een better managed.  Gustav was anticipated and indeed not a Katrina, but had it ben a Katrina, the loss of life would have been much lower due to…

Numerati author  Baker would have us believe that behavior and outcomes can be reduced to a number diagram.  And so number geek companies like IBM are trying to categorize employee activities by the number. Take a click and see what you think. Frnakly ths sounds like the old conundrum, unless you have exerpience doing this you…

I am aware that many of you are having trouble logging on to both websites and Homework Manager   Rest assured that I understand and have had plenty of trouble with all sorts of such things since my arrival. We will work this out and you will not be penalized in any way for such…

Increasingly employers are interested in 'extra curricular' employee activities.  Increasingly employers are doing searches of You Tube and such sites looking for inappropriate behavior. Well that just happened to the President of Iowa Central Community College.  Robert Paxton will receive a $400,000 severance package but will no longer be President of that school.  We caution…