Ben Stein is the son of the famous economist Herb Stein.  Ben shot to fame in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as the droll assistant principal. In addition to writing about financial matters and appearing on Neal Cavuto’s Saturday morning finance show, he has a successful career in the movies and on commercials.  Here is his…

Imagine  four multi millionaire actors at the top of their game.  Imagine that they  can pick and choose their scripts.  Imagine that they have left B Movie Roles like playing teen age werewolves (don’t laugh, Michael Landon and Michael Fox both did just that starting out)  far behind them.  We can do art, we can…

Dell will restate earngins all the way back to 2003.   As usual, an internal audit revealed, are you ready for this yet again. that numbers had been modifiedfudgedalteredsmoothedyou pick oneto make ”performance targets’  How many times have we read this same story?  Employees are given incentives for stock options or bonuses based on financial performance.…

Regular readers of the blog are aware I have been predicting a real estate and financial meltdown, it is here  now.  Click on the graph of the largest mortgage company in the US at left to see what a real PANIC can do short term.  Only a fraction of CFC’s mortgages are sub prime but…

I suggested on these pages that if a dark horse political candidate wanted to break out of the pack , the best way to do so would be to embrace real tax reform. Well guess what, read on. Huckabee’s Under-the-Radar Tax Plan Did Mike Huckabee have a secret weapon that enabled him to finish second…

San Antonio student JerryHerrera makes the case for reading the  August 13, 2007 issue of Business Week, cover stories, Bonfire of the Builders.  This is of course by the way a play on words mimicing the title of what famous book about Wall Street?  Anyone know?  Hint it was fiction based on fact.  Anyway, get…

I talk a lot about design and its importantce. This is a great interview about innovation versus six sigma. Please read it, we will be discussing six sigma this semester in the cost class.  Six sigma is all about maintaining quality of a known quantity, how we build a car, how we do eye surgery,…

A stated purpose of this blog is to relate what we study in class to real world events. Well it gets no more real world than what is happening to Bear Stearns. We have chronicled and predicted the fallout in the mortgage market for some time here. Now after only two or three months of…

A Bush adviser has actually suggested  re instituting the military draft.    For some history on this click  Kathy Gill’s column.   The minimum age has always been about 18. The maximum age has varied  with demand. During WW II it got as high as 45!  My recollection is that the last time during Viet…

Let’s back up and let me give you some basics to better understand what happened in the real estate market.  Traditionally a home was sold as follows.  The buyer would be required to put up a down payment toward the purchase, once upon a time this was about 20%. That cash payment did at least…