The correct response, when your superior requests you to stop doing something that harms their interests, is “Yes, SIR, Sorry, SIR,” preferably accompanied by a smart salute. Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina seems to have omitted this essential piece of Marine Corps training.

The argument over globalization has a tired quality to it, with primitive protectionists battling against dogmatic free traders, who cite the doctrine of comparative advantage and correctly term their opponents economically illiterate. Yet true economic understanding, not simply of the theory but of the second order effects that trade can produce, may not lie entirely […]

Every month, bullish Wall Street pundits predict that the monthly employment report will show gains of 150,000 jobs or more, the number needed to begin absorbing the 2.2 million jobs lost since President George W. Bush took office. Every month the economy, like Lucy, whips away the football and Wall Street falls flat on its […]

The Martha Stewart trial and the approaching Jeffrey Skilling trial certainly provide soap-opera-style entertainment for the financial pages, but as the storylines get more complex, the doubts should grow: does all this courtroom activity actually benefit the retail investor in stock markets?

British prime minister Tony Blair’s Berlin summit last week with French president Jacques Chirac and German chancellor Helmut Schroder raised fears in other European Union members that the three leaders were about to form a “super-core” that could preserve Franco-German dominance of the EU’s agenda even after the EU expands to 25 members in May. […]

Thursday’s announcement that a South Korean team has cloned human embryos and grown them to the point awhere they could be implanted in a surrogate mother makes one thing clear. The religious scruples of the George W. Bush administration, if continued, may prevent the United States from participating in the next economic “Big Thing.”

The George W. Bush administration’s 2004 Budget announced Monday aroused the ire of many conservatives and led me to wonder: if that archetypal small government Republican Calvin Coolidge were brought back to us in 2004, which way would he vote?

The International Monetary Fund announced Wednesday that it had voted to release $350 million of a $13.3 billion program to roll over outstanding IMF loans to Argentina. That decision reportedly met with considerable opposition in the IMF’s board, since Argentina is currently attempting to default on about 90 percent of its private sector outstanding debt, […]

Much to commentators’ surprise, the United States Treasury bond market has been strong over the last few weeks, with the 10 year bond’s yield declining to 3.94 percent Thursday and mortgage originations for home purchase setting a new weekly record Wednesday. Happy Days, it is generally felt, are Here Again. High liquidity, like alcohol, generally […]

According to the Census Bureau, the median earnings of U.S. workers of 25 and over in 2001 was 6.78 percent above its level in 1973. However, according to the International Labor Organization, the average U.S. employee worked 1,978 hours in 2000, compared with 1,883 in 1980. In other words, remuneration per hour was pretty well […]