For a presentation May 8 to the Washington Alaska Chapter of the Healthcare Financial Management Association, I added to my talk a few comments on income inequality. It is not hard to find ways of illustrating growing income inequality in the United States and elsewhere. Here a few slides prepared [continue reading . . . ]
Beginning in May 2010 and continuing for almost three years, aerospace employers in Washington State added to their payrolls at the rate of nearly 600 a month. Over eight months starting in April 2011, the pace of hiring was almost frantic, averaging about 900 a month, as Boeing scrambled to [continue reading . . . ]
Three questions that we’ll know the answers to before 2013 is over: 1. Will Steve Ballmer remain in the driver’s seat at Microsoft? He’s been responsible for day-to-day operations for more than 14 years and CEO for a nice round dozen years. During his tenure, Microsoft has missed the boat [continue reading . . . ]
I’ve been working on some new charts that I will present to U.S. Bank customers in Bellingham Tuesday. I’m on a panel for the bank’s 23rd annual economic outlook forum. I plan on saying what I have said in this space and on KUOW’s air: Amazon.com’s hiring and building sprees [continue reading . . . ]
Are America’s best days in the rear-view mirror? The Economist‘s Lexington columnist reminds us (May 12, 2012, print edition) that bouts of what it labels “declinism” are, well, almost as American as apple pie. It wasn’t so long ago that Japan was buying up iconic U.S. real estate (New York [continue reading . . . ]
I drove to Portland from Seattle starting at mid-day Friday and so saw first hand the mess that is northbound I-5 in the Rose City at afternoon rush. Bumper-to-bumper traffic crawled between Portland’s Rose Quarter, across the Willamette River from downtown, and the Columbia River bridge (aka the Interstate Bridge) [continue reading . . . ]
Facebook worth $76 billion, more than Boeing ($57.9 billion) or Ford ($57.8 billion)? LinkedIn, a Facebook for professionals, worth $3.3 billion, 200 times 2010 profit? Microsoft pays 400 times operating profit for Skype, where only a tiny minority of registered users pay anything. What’s wrong with this picture? Does this [continue reading . . . ]
Delivered with my New York Times on May 6, what is labeled the “Seattle Inaugural Issue” of China Daily, self-described as “the national English-language newspaper of the People’s Republic of China.” The paper runs 20 pages and is relatively unremarkable, with a couple of exceptions. First, there are almost no [continue reading . . . ]