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How Legacy Airlines Can Be Competitive Again
Tweet Share on Facebook March 23, 2012 CommentThomas C. Lawton is a visiting professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business.
The lethal cocktail of economic recession, high oil prices, currency instability, and a drop in demand for expensive seats has hit the international air transport industry hard. Budget carriers aside, airline companies traditionally make most of their money from business and first class passengers, and commercial cargo. Air freight volumes have declined and premium seat occupancy has slumped as the air transport industry has been rocked by corporate cutbacks and a decline in consumer spending. Once dominant companies such as American Airlines have been forced to seek the relative protection of chapter 11 bankruptcy to restructure their costs and debt. This has prompted many to question how certain airlines will survive.
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The Coming Age of the Entrepreneur
Tweet Share on Facebook March 22, 2012 CommentRobert Hahn is director of economics at Oxford's Smith School, chief economist at the Legatum Institute, and a senior fellow at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. Peter Passell is a senior fellow at the Milken Institute in Santa Monica and the editor of its quarterly economic policy journal, The Milken Institute Review. They co-founded Regulation2point0.org, a web portal on economic regulation.
Is this (in the immortal words of James Rado and Gerome Ragni) the dawning of the Age of Aquarius? No, seriously: Are we 21st century humans about to experience an era of unprecedented growth and increase in well-being?
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Greg Smith, Goldman Sachs, and the Death of Professionalism
Tweet Share on Facebook March 22, 2012 Comment (5)David Brodwin is a cofounder and board member of American Sustainable Business Council.
Last week, when Goldman Sachs's executive director Greg Smith resigned, he blasted his former employer's culture as "toxic and destructive." Goldman "rips off" its clients, Smith declared, allowing "morally bankrupt" people to put the firm's trading profits ahead of their clients' needs. Unless you've been living in a cave since 2008, you have to wonder if Mr. Smith isn't the last one to figure this out.
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Paul Ryan Budget Won't Solve Deficit Crisis
Tweet Share on Facebook March 22, 2012 Comment (8)Chad Stone is chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The House will soon pass the budget blueprint of Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's The Path to Prosperity. Budget hawks like Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, give the Ryan budget their customary salute for its aspirations to cut federal deficits and reduce federal debt (as a share of the economy). But even they recognize that it does not really advance the ball in addressing the nation's fiscal challenges.
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Why War With Iran Is Likely
Tweet Share on Facebook March 20, 2012 Comment (8)James Rickards is a hedge fund manager in New York City and the author of Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis from Portfolio/Penguin. Follow him on Twitter: @JamesGRickards.
War with Iran hangs over global markets like the sword of Damocles. Markets are already fragile as a result of body blows suffered in 2007 to 2009 from the housing bubble, the Madoff fraud, the Lehman and AIG collapses, and the severity of the depression. Uncertainty reigns because of doubts about the sustainability of the recovery without continual doses of more zero-cost money from the Federal Reserve. The last thing capital markets need is an exogenous shock in the form of war in a critical part of the world, but that is exactly what is coming.
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Why the Federal Budget Matters
Tweet Share on Facebook March 20, 2012 Comment (3)Antony Davies is an affiliated senior scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and an associate professor of economics at Duquesne University.
House Republicans are expected to release a budget today that includes more than $1 trillion in discretionary spending—the part of the budget that includes everything except mandatory programs like Social Security, Medicare, and interest on the debt.
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Obama's Energy, Tax, Monetary Policies Are Crippling the Economy
Tweet Share on Facebook March 19, 2012 Comment (3)Joseph Mason is the Moyse/LBA Chair of Banking at the Ourso School of Business at Louisiana State University and a senior fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Politicians and talking heads dedicate countless hours to theorizing about the measures we can take to "fix" the economy. While this issue is infinitely complex, the pillars of generating economic growth can be broken down quite simply.
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What Government Can Actually Do About Gas Prices
Tweet Share on Facebook March 19, 2012 Comment (6)David Shulman is a retired Wall Street executive who is now a senior economist at the UCLA Anderson Forecast. He is also affiliated with Baruch College (CUNY) and the University of Wisconsin.
With the national average price for regular grade gasoline hitting $3.83 a gallon last week and well on the road to over $4.00 a gallon, the public and politicians of all stripes are screaming to do something. However, the grim reality is that government policy can't do all that much in the short run. Of course oil can be released from the strategic petroleum reserve, a step that would offer minimal short term relief. However, with tensions rising over Iran's nuclear ambitions, it hardly seems sensible to unilaterally disarm ourselves in the face of a threatened supply shock.
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How Apple Gets Away With Things Other Companies Couldn't
Tweet Share on Facebook March 16, 2012 Comment (8)Paul Argenti is a professor of corporate communication at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.
Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of News International, was arrested earlier this week on obstruction of justice charges along with her husband, a former chum of U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, and four others. This event marks the beginning of the end of a very long, hard fall for the once mighty Rupert Murdoch and his media empire. Ostensibly, Brooks got nailed for doing something we all do many times a day: eliminating E-mail messages. Yes, what NewsCorp did—hacking into private voicemails to retrieve damaging information for salacious news stories—was deplorable, but does the punishment fit the crime?
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Congress Should Enable 'Crowdfunding'
Tweet Share on Facebook March 15, 2012 Comment (1)David Brodwin is a cofounder and board member of American Sustainable Business Council.
To start or expand a business, you need to raise money—and it can be harder to raise the money than to actually build a business. Banks now balk at lending to small businesses; their balance sheets remain in tatters from the mortgage meltdown. Entrepreneurs, unable to borrow what they need from banks, tap their credit cards, and then they must search elsewhere for the capital they need.
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