The notion that employees and companies have a social contract with each other that goes beyond a paycheck has largely vanished in United States business.
With 950 reporters and 79 bureaus, Bloomberg competes to break news with Dow Jones, Reuters and Bridge News along with newspaper Web sites, dozens of smaller Internet sites, and even gossipy chat rooms.
Information technology departments must spend enormous amounts of time and money worrying about integrating big computer systems with billions of pieces of customer data.
The thing to do with mutual funds is to buy a couple of decent ones, set up an investment plan and then never, ever think about them again, except maybe once a quarter or so when you take a peek at your statements to make sure that you have not accidentally been buying the Fidelity Peace-in-the-Middle-East fund.
Some companies use off-balance-sheet partnerships to raise money or to buy assets without ever telling their shareholders in their financial statements.
Of course, the discounting of future earnings should hurt all stocks. But it should hurt technology stocks more than others, because so many of them are valued at extremely high levels relative to their current earnings.
Macroeconomics is the analysis of the economy as a whole, an examination of overall supply and demand. At the broadest level, macroeconomists want to understand why some countries grow faster than others and which government policies can help growth.
John W. Snow was paid more than $50 million in salary, bonus and stock in his nearly 12 years as chairman of the CSX Corporation, the railroad company. During that period, the company's profits fell, and its stock rose a bit more than half as much as that of the average big company.
For value investors, General Motors is a tempting target. The company's share of the North American auto market has steadily declined for two decades, and analysts say the company suffers from weak management and unexciting cars.
For a spy novelist like me, the Edward J. Snowden story has everything. A man driven by ego and idealism - can anyone ever distinguish the two? - leaves his job and his beautiful girlfriend behind. He must tell the world the Panopticon has arrived. His masters vow to punish him, and he heads for Moscow in a desperate search for refuge.
Sochi started with the same problem as every Winter Olympics. Forget the crass commercialism, the fake amateurism, NBC's refusal to televise important events live to all its viewers. As an event, the Winter Games fail on the most basic level. They're lousy to watch.
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.
