Good spectator sports share certain fundamentals. Their competitors battle head-to-head. Their winners are determined objectively: fastest runner, most points. They are refereed, not judged.
Downhill track sports like luge are technology battles, as exciting as a NASCAR qualifying day.
Economics pretends to be a science. Its practitioners fill blackboards with equations and clog computers with data. But it is really a faith, or more accurately a set of overlapping and squabbling faiths, each with its own doctrines.
Did anyone in the White House or the N.S.A or the C.I.A. consider flying to Hong Kong and treating Mr. Snowden like a human being, offering him a chance to testify before Congress and a fair trial?
It’s no secret that big institutional investors have a lot of advantages on Wall Street. They get the first chance to buy hot initial public offerings. They get to meet in person with companies’ managements.
Big banks have long had private equity divisions that put up capital for deals too complex or risky for individual shareholders to finance.
To finance deficits, the government must sell bonds to investors, competing for capital that could otherwise be used to invest in stocks or corporate bonds. Government borrowings raise long-term interest rates, stifling economic growth.
African runners regularly work out in the United States and Europe, and the International Olympic Committee sends some of the cash from the Games to Olympic committees in poor nations, which use the money to finance their own programs.
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.
Whatever the potential pitfalls, banks are increasingly enthusiastic about venture capital, particularly in new companies with strong prospects in fields like health care and technology.
I know it’s a cliche, but trust me on this. I once dated a Canadian. Canada = boring.
Trust the Canadians to produce a game about mutual funds that is actually more boring than the real thing.
Every public company depends to some extent on the trust of its investors.
Technology investment drove growth in the 1990s, both directly and by fueling a rising stock market that led to increased consumer spending.
Information technology departments must spend enormous amounts of time and money worrying about integrating big computer systems with billions of pieces of customer data.
Even technology companies get good news sometimes.
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.
Many legal experts note that prosecutors regularly seek indictments of people or companies for destroying evidence or impeding investigations, even if they cannot prove other charges.