Where is Nintendo Ranked on the Tokyo Stock Exchange
This is bordering sickening. If there is a way to resurrect your company, it is tech company. Just take some funny idea and you can re-establish yourself. Ask Apple that.
Nintendo, who used to be the pioneer when i started playing console games when i was young (still remember those super mario dayz!), got into problems not too long ago since then, their stock wasn’t doing very well. Certainly not better than Canon. Take a look at the recent rankings:
1. Toyota Motors: 10.160 trillion yen
2. NTT Docomo: 7.915 trillion yen
3. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group: 6.5109 trillion yen
4. Nintendo: 4.7813 trillion yen (US$52,732,987,757.80)
5. Tokyo Electric: 4.586 trillion yen
6. Takeda Pharmaceutical Company: 3.7823 trillion yen
7. Canon: 3.6945 trillion yen
8. Honda: 3.4971 trillion yen
9. JT: 2.95 trillion yen
10. KDDI: 2.8478 trillion yen
If you play with the Wii, you would know about its universal appeal. In the most recent news, they manage to sell more Wii’s in US then before, despite the recent recession!
Living on less for next year [Personal Finance]
It is coming to the end of another eventful year and i hope every one had enjoyed their 2008 and looking forward to 2009.
I certainly have.
- Work wise i manage to engage in a completely different scope compared to a year ago.
- Been to South Africa and Taiwan this year. Taiwan was tiring, i think my trip to South Africa looks better managed then the Taiwan trip.
- The Financial crisis was expected. The fall out was expected. What i didn’t expect is the massive fall in oct-nov. That really makes me understand my risk appetite and the strategy that i will take moving forward.
- The psoriasis problem is getting bad. I really hope i can find a sustainable cheap solution to this. I have been spending too much in this area. I need to cut down on it.
Looking towards 2009, i have a few goals roughly that i would like to achieve:
Be a better manager of things
I haven’t really gotten the hang of team management as an application. The dynamics of managing a group of people with different goals, attitudes and behavior is a true monster.
Managing key performance indicators and execution in a timely manner are areas that i hope to improve on.
Develop more alternative stream of income
First and foremost in these uncertain economic times is to hold on to the damn job. But perhaps that is not enough. They always say you should cut down on what you spend but i think what is equally important is increase how much you earn. It creates additional safety net in the event that Income Stream 1 suddenly gets cut off. Do you guys have any good suggestion? Teaching tuition? Working as pimp?
Be more frugal
![annualspendinglq5 Living on less for next year [Personal Finance]](http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/6756/annualspendinglq5.png "2008 spending")
The good thing about categorizing your spending, income and using virtual accounts, leveraging Quicken and MS Money, is that at the end of the year, you can see how your spending pattern is.I will write a guide on this when i have the time.
I mentioned above that i been hoping to find some good solution to my psoriasis problem and that is what i spend most of my money on. to the tune of 5.15% of my annual income this year. As you can see, being unhealthy and suay with skin problem is not really a good thing. My goal is to cut down from 5.15% to 2.25%
I am pretty done with vacation this year. Especially the bombastic sort. Will look to cut down this area from 3.54% to 0% if can. One thing i do is that i maintain a virtual travel account where i deposit money for vaction. its -700 bucks right now. so i will need to spend 1.5 years to make up for it.
Savings have been good at 39%. I look to keep it up in absolute terms but not to increase it. The cash free up will go into my emergency buffer account which is around 2k now.
Improve on investing , money management and trading
Difficult year but i learn much abt the market this year and much about myself. I look to leverage more and trust myself more in areas which i am good at rather then suppress them.
I also look into creating better risk controls so that i minimize downside risks. The key to this game is still to lose less money than you make.
Develop a new software
I didn’t expect that i would create anything this year. But i did. I got sick on using to-do list that isn’t to my liking and coded one myself based on GTD concepts.
I find that it is really good way to keep in touch with the development side of things which i am slowly doing less this past year. I find that i can still do a good job. Next year I hope to create another one. maybe i will work on embedded system like windows mobile or what.
As for the new software, its still very rough. I named it Snowflake GTD and i hope it becomes polish enough for u guys to try it. Do higlight to me some of the things u guys find missing in to-do list. I would try to incorporate them in if it makes sense.
Conclusion
All in all i hope that 2009 we will be able to scrape through. The fengshui for 2009 seems bad. Lets all do our best!
People aren’t buying during this festive period
Drizzt here. Well it looks like consumers in US are in a really defensive mode. I think its bad for the economy but for an individual shopping like this is what is really the right way and its a by product of this very depress economic situation.
Dec. 27 (Bloomberg) — Mariel DeBernard was ready to be wowed by the post-Christmas sales when she turned up at the Fashion Centre at Pentagon City mall in Arlington, Virginia. It wasn’t to be.
“Normally I’d be loaded down with things, but there just aren’t that many deals, particularly for clothing,” DeBernard, a 40-year-old homemaker, said yesterday. “For most things, the prices aren’t that different than before Christmas.”
Retailers, which started offering discounts of 50 percent or more weeks ago, had been counting on post-Christmas sales to help rescue what will probably be the worst holiday season in four decades. That’s not going to happen, said Burt Flickinger, managing director of Strategic Resource Group, a retail-industry consulting firm in New York.
“This week isn’t going to do it,” Flickinger said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “Consumers are more cash- and credit-constrained than ever before. After a 25-year spending tsunami, they’ve shifted from spending to savings.”
Customer traffic at malls run by Taubman Centers Inc. was “light” early yesterday and picked up in the afternoon, said spokeswoman Karen Mac Donald. Taubman owns or manages 24 shopping centers in 11 states.
Advertising post-Christmas sales before the holiday, as retailers did this year, “really smacks a little bit of desperation,” said Patricia Edwards, a retail analyst and the founder of Seattle-based Storehouse Partners LLC.
Retailers count on the holiday season for as much as 35 percent of annual sales. They’re now scrambling for business as consumers retrench to cope with shrinking home and stock values, tightening credit and the highest unemployment rate in 15 years.
Spending Drop
Discounts of 70 percent off or more by Macy’s Inc., AnnTaylor Stores Inc. and other retailers failed to prevent a spending drop of as much as 4 percent during the last two months of 2008, according to data from SpendingPulse, owned by MasterCard Advisors. Including fuel, sales tumbled as much as 8 percent.
That’s the steepest drop since it started tracking the data in 2002, said Michael McNamara, MasterCard Advisors vice president of research and analysis. He estimates sales, excluding autos and gasoline, fell 2 percent to 4 percent from Nov. 1 to Dec. 24.
That projection follows forecasts of falling sales from industry trade groups. Sales at stores open at least a year may drop as much as 2 percent in November and December, the International Council of Shopping Centers said Dec. 23. That would be the steepest decline since at least 1969.
Too Much Inventory
“It is the worst kind of picture,” Michael Niemira, chief economist for New York-based ICSC, said in a Bloomberg TV interview.
Retailers still have too much inventory, said Edwards.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which said yesterday it would start selling Apple Inc.’s iPhone on Dec. 28, is one of the country’s few retailers still boosting sales. The discounter is one of two companies on the 30-member Dow Jones Industrial Average with shares gaining this year.
Meg McGuire, a county health inspector in Eden, North Carolina, spent a third of the $1,200 she and her husband had budgeted for the holiday on bicycles, toys and other discounted items at Wal-Mart on Black Friday, as the day after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday in November is known.
The couple decided to not buy each other Christmas gifts for the first time in their 11 years of marriage.
“A lot of people are concerned about their jobs,” said McGuire, 30.
More than a dozen retailers, including electronics chain Circuit City Stores Inc., have sought bankruptcy protection this year as the credit squeeze and the U.S. recession drained sales. The holiday results indicate possible consolidation and further bankruptcy filings, said Gilbert Harrison, chief executive officer of retail advisory firm Financo Inc.
“It’s been difficult, much more difficult than anyone expected,” Harrison said in a Bloomberg Television interview from West Palm Beach, Florida.
Saving and scrimping like its the great depression [Thrift]
Drizzt here. Personally, I haven’t been badly hit during this past year, other than the portfolio. I’m poorer but by no means am i very badly affected. Here in Singapore more i see are.
Last week, I had the whole week off, went to the local mall, another neighboring mall,Vivocity. This week i went IKEA. They are still pulling in the crowd.
But i do not make a mistake that we won’t be affected. Its sooner or later. We are an exporting economy and we are going to get pulverize for some time. Therefore, what one needs really is to watch what you spend on. we spent the large part of our working lives not caring so much about preservation of what you haves, and spending on what you need and also what you want.
Sometimes the trick to getting more out of that salary is to focus on what you can conserve back home.
Over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house. You remember. And perhaps you also remember the house.
Plastic slipcovers on the furniture. Mothballs in the closet. And in the cupboard: a little ball of string, scrap tinfoil or balled-up rubber bands.
Grandmother’s habits were formed during the Great Depression, where thrift was paramount. Furniture, clothes, food — whatever it was, it had to last as long as possible.
And you smiled as she balled up each bit of string, thinking how tough it must have been to grow up in an era before credit cards, throwaway products and throwaway income.
Well, somewhere up in heaven, Granny is laughing her head off.
The current economic crisis is sparking the return of habits — even institutions — long thought dead and gone. The layaway plan — that antique form of consumerism where you actually pay for the goods before you take them home — has made a smash comeback, with stores like Kmart, T.J. Maxx and Burlington Coat Factory offering step payment plans this holiday shopping season.
‘Throwaway society’
Meanwhile, homemaking experts are coaching the current generation of spendthrifts on how to mend instead of discard, how to hoard instead of waste and how to save their pennies for the rainy day that now, finally, seems to be upon us.
“We’re a throwaway society,” says Pat Brennan, a certified financial planner who teaches adult-education courses with names like “What to Do in Scary Economic Times” for the Rutgers (N.J.) Cooperative Extension.
“We don’t repair anything anymore,” Brennan says. “We don’t repair appliances, we throw them out. We have built-in obsolescence. That’s kind of like a public policy.”
Consumerism, for the boomers and Gen-Xers, has become a civic virtue — just as “blood, toil, tears and sweat” were for our grandparents. “I encourage you all to go shopping more,” said President Bush in a December 2006 speech. And two weeks after 9/11: “Get down to Disney World in Florida.”
Penny pinching
It was a very different world when Anita Rejmaniak, 88, was growing up.
She was 9 years old when the stock market crashed in 1929; during the Depression and the world war that followed, she was taught to squeeze a penny — so the saying went back then — until Lincoln grinned.
“We couldn’t be frivolous and just get something and throw it away,” Rejmaniak says. “If you didn’t have the money, you had to save up for it, so much a week. I remember … there was a dress I liked — it was $5. I had to wait five weeks. I saved up a dollar a week.”
Others could tell you stories, too, of belt-tightening and penny pinching; of Christmas decorations made from construction paper; of table settings collected, one piece at a time, at the “dish night” of the local cinema; of “oleo margarine” that had to be kneaded by hand.
“It came in a plastic bag,” Brennan recalls. “There was an orange spot in this lump of lard, and you pressed it to release the color, and you kneaded it to look like butter. It was too expensive to get real butter.”
There’s no question that most of us will be seeing difficult times in the months ahead. And now might be the time to revisit some of those quaint habits of our grandparents that might not be so quaint after all.
“It’s a lot about going back to basics,” says Barbara O’Neill, financial management specialist for Rutgers Cooperative Extension. “When you’re buying run-of-the-mill things, pay cash for them. What a concept.”
Using cash
Teaching cash consumerism to three generations of Americans used to bingeing on credit cards is a daunting prospect, O’Neill says. Though the modern credit card was introduced in 1950, it was not until the 1990s that “buy now, pay later” really got out of control, she says.
“In the decade of the 2000s, the average household credit card debt is over $9,000,” she says.
In her co-authored book “Small Steps to Health and Wealth,” and in classes she teaches for the Rutgers Cooperative Extension, O’Neill promotes the small behavior changes that can lead to a better — and more frugal — life. Turn down thermostats. Buy generic brands. Balance your books. And don’t be in such a rush to throw everything out.
“If the couch or chair is structurally sound but with worn-out upholstery, you could have it reupholstered, or buy a colorful slipcover,” she says. And collecting bits of string?
OK, maybe things aren’t quite that bad yet.
Do you need gifts for christmas?
its about 1 hour from Christmas and its been a nice end of the year break for me since i have quite a lot of time off in december.
Was browsing through my RSS feed when i got to Get Rich Slowly’s feed. normally his postings are objective and informative but he is away during this period and most of his posts were guest post. so he got many people to guest post for him.
today it is from his aunt. Its the kind of story which every one of us can draw upon during this economically bad times. sometime it is the family that you turn to for support and comfort, to find the energy and courage to move on and push through things. I shall post a bit on this and you read the rest from his blog.
And btw, MERRY CHRISTMAS!
On Christmas Eve 1958, I had been married two months and seven days.
We were sixteen and eighteen — young but in love. Pop had a good job in a mobile home factory. The pay was $2.10 per hour. They gave him a week off for our honeymoon. On Monday morning, ten days after we were married, he went back to work, worked three days and was laid off for the winter.
We had no groceries in the house because we were waiting for payday, so the first thing we did was go shopping. The cupboards were bare, so we needed everything. The total bill came to $28. That included flour, sugar, butter, bread, lunch meat, and all the spices, plus whatever else one needs to stock a cupboard.
Through the fall and early winter Pop worked at odd jobs for his dad, who was self-employed buying wool, cow and deer hides, cascara bark, beaver pelts and other furs. Pop and a friend also cut wood for my dad. Dad paid them $6.00 a cord, and by splitting it two ways they each got $3.00 per cord. We stayed with my folks about five or six weeks during the time he was working for Dad.
[Read more at Get Rich Slowly]
Sti: Which direction would you go?
The weekly charts seems to indicate that the general global stock market should head higher. However, my gut feel is that there is somemore to go down. Lets see if the 2 support below at 1600 and 1500 will hold.
The test that failed [Financial Dilemma]
This has got to be the most absurd WTF thing that one can get and frankly speaking, if i were the employer i would be dumbfounded as well.
THE doctor’s tests on Oct 8 had given the maid the all-clear — so employer W L Lim was shocked when, just two months later, Nina gave birth to a premature baby after checking herself into hospital.
“Can you imagine the shock I had when a policeman rang me and told me my maid had just given birth?” said Madam Lim, 48, a systems analyst.
An even bigger bombshell was the bill.
In addition to paying $5,500 for her maid’s Caesarian delivery on Dec 11, Mdm Lim was asked to fork out $67,000 in medical costs for the 27-week-old infant boy, now warded at the KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital (KKH) Intensive Care Unit.
Migrant welfare organisations tell Today it is very rare for maids to give birth in Singapore. That’s because under government regulations, the moment employers find out their maid is pregnant, she must be repatriated or they stand to lose their $5,000 security deposit, said Ms Bridget Lew of the Humanitarian Organisation for Migrant Economics, who personally knows of only one other case.
But Mdm Lim finds herself in an unusual quandary. She claims she was unaware Nina was pregnant and, more significantly, so was the medical expert. “How is it that the doctor failed to detect my maid was four months pregnant?” she asked.
The pregnancy tests currently administered comprise a urine check and an abdominal examination. According to Dr Juliana Abu-Wong, a gynaecologist and obstetrician with more than 10 years’ experience, the accuracy of urine-based pregnancy tests vary from 90 to 95 per cent.
Mdm Lim said when she met with the Ministry of Manpower last week, she learnt a blood test was more accurate. But it is up to employers to order it.
While she acknowledges that her case was an exception, Mdm Lim wonders if more can be done to spare employers the agony of coping with a pregnant maid and medical bills. “If these two tests are insufficient to detect pregnancy, perhaps the blood test should be included.”
When asked, the Association of Employment Agencies Singapore (AEAS) told TODAY it was not keen on making the blood test mandatory as this would increase the cost for the employer. Moreover Mdm Lim’s situation was more an exception than the norm.
But Mdm Lim, a mother of two teens, feels the added cost is a small price to pay. “Can you imagine the stress I am going through? Wouldn’t you rather pay a little bit more and not have to fret over an even bigger medical bill or deal with the emotional stress?”
SUBHD: Maid’s friend signed undertaking
For now, a more immediate concern is who will foot the bill for Nina’s boy, who weighed just 1.2 kg at birth. Dr Bhavani Sriram, a senior consultant at KKH’s department of neonatology, said “generally, babies are deemed healthy to be discharged when they are at least 2kg and 35 weeks old”.
Mdm Lim’s lawyer, Mr Mark Goh, is of the view that she is not liable for the medical costs of her maid’s baby. He noted that the hospital’s admission records show the undertaking was signed by Nina’s friend, a maid.
“Though the Ministry of Manpower’s rules require the employer to bear the full cost of the maid’s medical care, including hospitalisation, nowhere does it say the employer should bear the medical cost of her kin,” said Mr Goh.
According to KKH, Nina’s friend, Ms Shushma Sari, was made aware of what she was signing for. Nina’s baby was dangerously breached and had to be immediately delivered by emergency C-section.
Said Mr Johnny Quah, KKH’s chief financial officer: “Part of the admission process includes financial counselling. As the staff was unable to contact Nina’s employer, she explained the estimated charges to Nina’s friend and the signature obtained was more as an indication that she understood the charges and would convey it to Nina’s employer whom she said she will continue to call.
“The hospital would not use this to pursue payment from (Ms Shushma).”Mr Quah added that when she was notified, Mdm Lim came to KKH’s business office “the following day” to provide Nina’s passport details and the estimated bill size was explained to her.
Spain’s Chief:Total Freeze
The governor of the Bank of Spain on Sunday issued a bleak assessment of the economic crisis, warning that the world faces a “total” financial meltdown unseen since the Great Depression.
- Meltdown akin to Great Depression
- Lack of confidence total: bank chief
- Economic recovery could be delayed
“The lack of confidence is total,” Miguel Angel Fernandez Ordonez said in an interview with Spain’s El Pais daily.
“The inter-bank (lending) market is not functioning and this is generating vicious cycles: consumers are not consuming, businessmen are not taking on workers, investors are not investing and the banks are not lending.
“There is an almost total paralysis from which no-one is escaping,” he said, adding that any recovery - pencilled in by optimists for the end of 2009 and the start of 2010 - could be delayed if confidence is not restored.
Ordonez recognised that falling oil prices and lower taxes could kick-start a faster-than-anticipated recovery, but warned that a deepening cycle of falling consumer demand, rising unemployment and an ongoing lending squeeze cannot be ruled out.
“This is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression” of 1929, he added.
Ordonez said the European Central Bank, of which he is a governing council member, will cut interest rates in January if inflation expectations go much below two per cent.
“If, among other variables, we observe that inflation expectations go much below two per cent, it’s logical that we will lower rates.”
Regarding the dire situation in the United States, Ordonez said he backs the decision by the US Federal Reserve to cut interest rates almost to zero in the face of profound deflation fears.
Central banks are seeking to jumpstart movements on crucial interbank money markets that froze after the US market for high-risk, or subprime, mortgages collapsed in mid 2007, and locked tighter after the US investment bank Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy in mid-September.
Interbank markets are a key link in the chain which provides credit to businesses and households.
How do you engineer a different kind of layoff?
Layoffs are depressing terms. Its very emotionless for companies to layoff workers like that, but the fact of business and shareholders right that the best action to be taken is to reduce cost during times like these.
Here is an article that shows how companies are doing it nowadays:
Even as layoffs are reaching historic levels, some employers have found an alternative to slashing their work force. They’re nipping and tucking it instead.
A growing number of employers, hoping to avoid or limit layoffs, are introducing four-day workweeks, unpaid vacations and voluntary or enforced furloughs, along with wage freezes, pension cuts and flexible work schedules. These employers are still cutting labor costs, but hanging onto the labor.
And in some cases, workers are even buying in. Witness the unusual suggestion made in early December by the chairman of the faculty senate at Brandeis University, who proposed that the school’s 300 professors and instructors give up 1 percent of their pay.
“What we are doing is a symbolic gesture that has real consequences — it can save a few jobs,” said William Flesch, the senate chairman and an English professor.
He says more than 30 percent have volunteered for the pay cut, which could save at least $100,000 and prevent layoffs for at least several employees. “It’s not painless, but it is relatively painless and it could help some people,” he said.
Some of these cooperative cost-cutting tactics are not entirely unique to this downturn. But the reasons behind the steps — and the rationale for the sharp growth in their popularity in just the last month — reflect the peculiarities of this recession, its sudden deepening and the changing dynamics of the global economy.
Companies taking nips and tucks to their work force say this economy plunged so quickly in October that they do not want to prune too much should it just as suddenly roar back. They also say they have been so careful about hiring and spending in recent years — particularly in the last 12 months when nearly everyone sensed the country was in a recession — that highly productive workers, not slackers, remain on the payroll.
At some companies, employees are supporting the indirect wage cuts — at least for now. The downturn hit so hard, with its toll felt so widely through hits on pensions and 401(k) retirement plans and with the future so murky, that employers and even some employees say it is better to accept minor cuts than risk more draconian steps.
The rolls of companies nipping at labor costs with measures less drastic than wholesale layoffs include Dell (extended unpaid holiday), Cisco (four-day year-end shutdown), Motorola (salary cuts), Nevada casinos (four-day workweek), Honda (voluntary unpaid vacation time) and The Seattle Times (plans to save $1 million with a week of unpaid furlough for 500 workers). There are also many midsize and small companies trying such tactics.
To be sure, these efforts are far less widespread than layoffs, and outright pay cuts still appear to be rare. Over all, the average hourly pay of rank-and-file workers — who make up about four-fifths of the work force — rose 3.7 percent from November 2007 to last month, according to the latest Labor Department data.
Watson Wyatt, a consulting firm that tracks compensation trends, published survey data last week that found that 23 percent of companies planned layoffs in the next year, down from 26 percent that said they planned to do so in October. Companies say they are considering other cost cuts, like mandatory holiday shutdowns, salary freezes or cuts, four-day workweeks and reductions of contributions to retirement and health care plans.
Companies seem particularly determined to find alternatives to layoffs in this recession, said Jennifer Chatman, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. “Organizations are trying to cut costs in the name of avoiding layoffs,” she said. “It’s not just that organizations are saying ‘we’re cutting costs,’ they’re saying: ‘we’re doing this to keep from losing people.’ ”
She said the tactic builds long-term loyalty among workers who are not laid off and spares the company having to compete again to hire and train anew.
That was part of the thinking at Global Tungsten & Powders, a metal plant in Towanda, Pa., whose business has dropped 25 percent from a year ago. The company has already cut overtime and travel, as well as purchases of office supplies and equipment. It is now allowing and indeed encouraging its 1,000 workers to take unpaid furloughs to stave off more drastic cuts.
“We have a very skilled and competent work force and the last thing we want to do is lose them when we’re assuming this economy is going to come back,” said Craig Reider, the company’s director of human resources. Workers, he said, are buying in to the concept.
“In this holiday season, many employees want to support our efforts here to minimize costs,” he said.
In San Francisco, a Web design firm called Hot Studio laid off a handful of workers when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000. But the company’s owner, Maria Guidice, said the tactic was painful, and she did not want to repeat it. This time, her first step is to take away bonuses — for the first time in the company’s 12-year history — and instead give people paid time off over the holidays.
“In 2000, it was like ‘cut the heads,’ ” she said of the ethos of the era. This time, she says, it feels different. “Our No. 1 priority is to keep people employed and to do that we’re going to bank the money and keep it for when we need it,” she said, adding, “I know some people are super bummed, but they understand we’re trying to keep the work force intact.”
Several employees at Hot Studio said they did not mind the policy, particularly as they have heard of layoffs elsewhere in the economy. “People feel they’d much rather have a job in six months than get a bonus right now,” said Jon Littell, a Web designer.
The magnanimous feeling will probably pass, said Truman Bewley, an economics professor at Yale University who has studied what happens to wages during a recession. If the sacrifices look as though they are going to continue for many months, he said, some workers will grow frustrated, want their full compensation back and may well prefer a layoff that creates a new permanence.
“These are feel-good, temporary measures,” he said.
But John Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a company that tracks layoffs, said employers were being driven now not by compassion but by hard calculations based on data they have never had before. More than ever, he said, companies have used technology to track employee performance and productivity, and in many cases they know that the workers they would cut are productive ones.
“People are measured and ‘metricked’ to a much greater degree,” he said. “So companies know that when they’re cutting an already taut organization, they’re leaving big gaps in the work force.”
At the Pretech Corporation, a concrete manufacturer in Kansas City, Kan., that has not had a layoff in 15 years, part of the rationale is pride. To keep the perfect track record, the company has cut overtime, traded a $5,000 holiday party for an employee-only barbecue lunch, and trimmed its pipe-making operation to four days from five, which allows it to save substantially on heating and electrical costs.
Business is down sharply in some of the company’s divisions, but Pretech is also transforming to take on more work making concrete for infrastructure jobs, like the kind the government might support through stimulus efforts, the company’s co-owner, Bob Bundschuh, said. He said employees seemed to embrace the changes, knowing that a small sacrifice in overtime pay could preserve their job and the health insurance benefits that go with it.
“We’re optimistic about the future,” he said, adding that he thought things could turn around in six months. If so, “We want our guys to stay around because they’re good guys and they work hard.”
The college student debt machine [Personal Finance]
I know the kind of tough situation faced by Singapore graduates when they are all of a sudden saddled with 20k of student loans give and take once they got out of university. It is even tougher if you take medical school or overseas education. Then again,if you study med school i would expect that your earnings power is much higher.
Education overseas is much more expensive, at least we get subsidize as Singaporeans for our uni courses if you are a singaporean.
Here, toughmoneylove, wrote about a next bubble waiting to explode, which is the size of college student loan that schools are psyching the parents and students to take.
As you can see, tuition and fees have shown a relentless increase over time at a rate that is four times greater than increases in the consumer price index and three times faster than increases in family incomes. Colleges have been called to the carpet on this many times. I have yet to hear or read any plausible explanation or justification for why this should happen and why it should be allowed to happen. Colleges expect us just to accept this as the way it is. I don’t.
When, it comes to education, no one denies the benefit of it in the long run, but there is a price to pay for everything. My question is, if it is that expensive, what is the alternative for US students? don’t study? Let me hear your thoughts.
[Article: The college student debt machine]
