January 27, 2012
The departure of New York Times Co. (NYT) Chief Executive Officer Janet Robinson last month leaves the company with a leadership vacuum amid falling revenue, profit squeezed by pension costs and pressure from family members to restore a dividend once worth more than $20 million a year.
Robinson, 61, was pushed out by Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and his cousin Michael Golden, said a person familiar with the...
January 27, 2012
Firms Sidestep Rule Limiting Rewards for Executives
On the way to bankruptcy court, Lear Corp., a car-parts supplier, closed 28 factories, cut more than 20,000 jobs and wiped out shareholders.
Still, Lear sought $20.6 million in bonuses for key executives and other employees, including an eventual payout of more than $5.4 million for then-Chief Executive Robert Rossiter.
The Justice Department objected, arguing that...
January 25, 2012
Simply looking over the numbers, it might be hard to wrap your head around what Apple just announced for their Q1 2012 results.
A company this big is not supposed to be able to nearly double revenue year-to-year. Nor are they supposed to more than double profit. But Apple did both.
The numbers are so big that they almost seem like they should be typos — especially coming after a quarter that was a “miss” (though we...
January 25, 2012
"The whole perspective of how firms influence policy environments is a relatively new question to economists."
It's a truism for many that in American politics money buys influence. In one recent poll, 75 percent of respondents said they believed "money buys results in Congress." But the question of whose money and what results is not so easy to answer. There's hardly a straight line to be drawn in the...
January 18, 2012
Rob Lake, Director of Strategic Development for the United Nations-backed organization Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), has years of experience in socially responsible investing.
His SRI experience in Europe and the UK has given him unique insights to share in the US – a market in which, he says, there is still ‘a certain amount of uncertainty and skepticism’ about SRI, as well as misunderstanding about the...
January 18, 2012
The Obama administration will announce this afternoon it is rejecting a Canadian firm’s application for a permit to build and operate a massive oil pipeline across the U.S.-Canada border, according to sources who have been briefed on the matter.
However the administration will allow TransCanada to reapply after it develops an alternate route through the sensitive habitat of Nebraska’s Sandhills. Deputy Secretary of State...
January 9, 2012
The enrichment of bankers, corporate chiefs, flash traders and their cronies is testing tolerance of inequality, argues John Plender in the first part of an FT series
Greedy bankers, overpaid executives, anaemic growth, stubbornly high unemployment – these are just a few of the things that have lately driven protesters on to the streets and caused the wider public in the developed world to become disgruntled about capitalism. The...
December 28, 2011
The news about narcotic painkillers is increasingly dire: Overdoses now kill nearly 15,000 people a year -- more than heroin and cocaine combined. In some states, the painkiller death toll exceeds that of car crashes.
The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has declared the overdoses from opioid drugs like OxyContin an "epidemic." And a growing group of experts doubts that they work for long-...
December 26, 2011
Brazil has overtaken the UK as the world's sixth largest economy, an economic research group has said.
The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) said its latest World Economic League Table showed Asian countries moving up and European countries falling back.
The CEBR also predicted that the UK economy would overtake France by 2016.
It also said the eurozone economy would shrink 0.6% in 2012 "if the euro problem is...
December 26, 2011
$41 Billion: That is the total amount of money on gift cards that went, or is likely to go, unspent from 2005 to 2011.
Gift cards are becoming an increasingly popular holiday present, but as the market grows in value the question of what happens to money that goes unspent still looms large. Some 80% of respondents to a National Retail Federation survey said they planned to buy gift cards during the 2011 holiday season, while for...
Value is the only commonality in an increasingly complex, challenging and interdependent world.