Why American Consumers Will Spend Lavishly Again

Monday, November 30th, 2009

Via Harvard Business -An excerpt:

Let me introduce you to Susan Householder.* Here she is, standing in the entrance of her garage in a middle class suburb of Ridgefield, New York. She is surveying a mountain of stuff: bicycles, toboggans, a work bench, exercise equipment, canned goods, Christmas decorations, a picnic hamper, board games, lots of wrapping paper, several boxes of stem ware, and lots and lots of containers, contents unknown. There’s so much stuff here, this ceased to be a garage a long time ago. It’s now a storage locker, Susan’s very own U-Store-It. (Cars are consigned to the drive way.) If we wanted a monument to all the spending Susan did in the 00s, this is it.What created this mountain of stuff? Was it irrational exuberance and cheap money? It was not. This crowded garage springs from cultural motives. These things were not purchased to express vanity or pursue status. They were purchased to help Susan build a life.

Source: Harvard Business

Tags: American Consumers, Bicycles, Board Games, Business Advertisement, Canned Goods, Cheap Money, Christmas Decorations, Christmas Hamper, Class Suburb, Excerpt, Exercise Equipment, Harvard Business, Householder, Irrational Exuberance, Life Source, Middle Class, Motives, Mountain Bicycles, Picnic Games, Picnic Hamper, Storage Locker, Vanity, Work Bench, Wrapping Paper
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Breakingviews: Sovereign Wealth Funds Risk Index

Friday, January 25th, 2008

Jan. 25, 2008 - Today, we received this piece about Breakingviews.com’s new SWF Risk Index:

Breakingviews sovereign wealth fund risk index

By Una Galani AND Simon Nixon

To see the full index with detailed rankings, click on the link below

Sovereign Wealth Fund Index: Sovereign wealth funds were hardly talked about twelve months ago. Now they are one of the hottest topics in global financial markets. Over the last year, these state-owned entities have spent over $75bn snapping up stakes in some of the world’s biggest banks, taken big positions in stock exchanges on both sides of the Atlantic and even attempted a takeover of one of Britain’s leading supermarkets.

Such funds have existed for decades, but the shift in global economic power and the current weakness in western markets has given SWFs – forecast to grow assets fivefold to $13.4tr by 2017 – new influence and raised new fears about their motives. Critics such as President Sarkozy of France and some US politicians worry that SWFs tend to be secretive, target political as well as financial returns, and operate at the whim of governments not always sympathetic to western economic and political interests…

Tags: Banks, Biggest Banks, Brazil, Breakingviews, BRICs, China, Economic Power, Emerging Markets, France, Fund Index, Fund Risk, Galani, Global Financial Markets, Markets, Miscellaneous, Motives, Nixon, Political Interests, risk, Risk Index, Russia, Sarkozy, Stock Exchanges, Supermarkets, Swf, SWFs, Takeover, Target, Twelve Months, Western Markets, Whim
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