Bernard Watcher 2

The following is an example of Time Magazine’s  Business Competitivenes indicator in an overall new section called Global Business on its website. It seems that Tom Friedman in his book The World is Flat, may have tripped off the publishing of reports comparing the effective business infrastructure and competitiveness of various world countries. Time Magazine […]

The New York Times and the Economist rarely agree on economic  outlooks but of late they have begun to converge. The graph below shows the problem: The New York Time is calling this 21st century boom -> The Good Times that were Mostly a Mirage. In surprising agreement,  the Economist is seeing red signals all

The Toronto Star’s Saturday January 26th, 2008 Business section (page B3) has a couple of very interesting stories on litigation ensuing from recent major financial transactions. Both suits  will be  tests on the extent of legal liabilities in various recent financial “transactions”. The first story is about the exposue of 3 large Canadian banks to

Well Greed Guts are now into round 4 of the debacle – the Tag Team Match known as the Blame Game: See You in Court. It will not be pretty if the New York Times and/or The Economist are right on Denmark . Take a 5th of your favorite hooch if you are a spectator

I have been arguing that US Executives have been missing a)world market opportunities and b)have become too reliant on the fact that North America’s 4% of the World’s population will continue to account for 20-25% of the World’s consumption. I have been watching the US auto industry – one of the most “international” of American

Globalization and widening income inequality/disparity in the US appear to be driving events in the US Presidential election. Lest the debate get lost in shades of gray or deliberate ambiguities let me offer a list of helpful and clear writing on the nature of the events. Globalization: IMF – the strategic view UofFlorida Globalization Booklist

Bank of America is buying Countrywide Financial – chief instigators of the subprime mess that is wracking  the US and World Financial markets. Countrywide according to several reports was on the verge of bankruptcy. Why should Bank of America buy when it could get the same assets in bankruptcy court for pennies on the dollar

The Fed is to the rescue again of supposedly the economy in general but some would argue Fed Chairman Bernanke and company are  rescuing the Greedy-Guts-Itself US Financial Industry. And there is strong evidence from the Federal Reserve Board itself that is actually what is going on. The Chicago FRB in its February 2008 Outlook

In Sweeny Todd fashion the Financial industry has chosen, on first blush, a rather unexpected target for its financial rapacity – itself. And recent articles in the prestigious MIT Technology Review- The Blow Up and The Economist-the Darkside of Debt detail how the jugular cuts, more appropriate to a cheap Hollywood Slasher flick, were done

The upcoming US election has been predicated on two major issues: the Iraq War and the dissipation of American power and influence over the past seven years. The recent assassination of Benazir Bhutto has apparently escalated this issue back to the top of the Primary Elections agenda including the various world entanglements the US has

The depth of Greedy Gutting Itself is beginning to emerge. Paul Krugman at the NYTIMES has this estimate of the depth and breadth of the problem . If you do the math on homes averaging $250,000 in value one has between$3-5 trillion on the line. And Allan Greenspan is calling it Turbulent Times – its

In our initial Greedy article, I have argued that Financial Institutions have largely put aside Fiduciary Trust – and now have a new primary goal – their own wealth with perhaps some coincident client gains but only for a carefully selected class. In this article by Steven Pearlstein at the Washington Post – you see

Take the 5th Amendment Jeff & fellow Amazonians, as repeat offenders you are way past “three strikes”.

The OECD-Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development is the Economic In-club. The economic place you want to be beyond WTO-World Trade Organization and the G8. And part of that reason is because the OECD plays a scorekeeping function, mesauring how its members are doing on a number of economic,political and social measures. Sort of a

In our observation on Top Management Awry we have posited that IT-Information Technology is simply being hopelessly mismanaged with a finger pointing towards CEO’s and Boards of Directors. They are treating a vital, strategic, and rapidly evolving IT assets (people, software and hardware) as cost centers to be bean-counter minimized. CEOs will cite Harvard Business

In the October 8th issue of Information Week the article by Marianne McGee indicates how badly awry management at the top of corporations is now. The Society of Information Management does an annual survey of what are the top ten concerns for CIOs and IT management. This is one of the strategic polls that I

When the Wall Street Journal picks up the story on income inequality, you know the situation maybe getting out of hand. Here verbatim is  some of the WSJ coverage – go here for the complete story: “The wealthiest 1% of Americans earned 21.2% of all income in 2005, according to new data from the Internal

In landscape photography there are two terms for how photographers try to enhance a scene – one is called “sweeping” and the other is called “gardening” . Sweeping involves removing all the obvious defects from a scene that might well be done later in Photoshop-post processing. Remove that cup or other junk; crop down to