Denver Airport Storm Photos
Turbulence at the Michelin Guide
In the Paris banlieue of Boulogne-Billancourt, in an unprepossessing dark stone building, a French institution has a new address. The Guide Michelin had for decades been headquartered in the ultra-smart 7th arrondissement. But a few months ago, it packed up and moved out of Avenue de Breteuil, one of the most elegant streets in Paris, with its lawns, lime trees and direct view of the golden dome of the Hôtel des Invalides.
On the short walk from the Metro station to the new suburban office, I saw a small boy urinating in the street amid piles of rubbish, in the shadows of several grim-looking blocks of flats. It may have been unfortunate timing but it was difficult not to feel sympathy for the staff of the venerable “red book” – which remains, after more than a century of handing out and taking away good food stars, the arbiter of gastronomic excellence in France and beyond.One person who won’t be visiting this new address is Jean-Luc Naret, who quit as director of the Guide Michelin in December. It’s almost impossible to imagine this flamboyant globetrotter making the trip every morning across the Parisian “frontier” of the périphérique ring road.
US Federal Reserve Board Members Release Financial Statements
By Jeffrey Sparshott and Andrew Ackerman
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Federal Reserve Vice ChairmanJanet Yellen stands as potentially the wealthiest member of the central bank’s board of governors since joining in October.
Yellen reported assets valued between $5.1 million and $14.4 million, according to financial disclosure forms released Friday.The disclosure forms, used by officials across the government, report asset valuations and income only in broad dollar ranges and include spouses.
Clash of the Titans, Conclusion
In the first years of the Ford Motor Company, James Couzens had been more responsible than even Henry himself for its success. But Ford took a more active role in his company after the Model T debuted; and Couzens, who hated sharing power as much as Ford did, started looking for other outlets for his talent. His last great contribution to Ford was instituting the $5 workday in early 1914 – which kicked off America’s modern middle class.
However, Ford’s doubling the wages of its workforce was not taken well by other industrialists. The New York Times wrote that Ford’s largesse would create serious disturbances in America. The Wall Street Journal accused the company of “economic blunders, if not crimes;” while the president of Pittsburgh Plate Glass said, “This would mean the ruin of all business in this country. Ford himself will surely find that he cannot afford to pay $5 a day.”
James Couzens knew that all of these assertions were flat-out wrong. He’d run the numbers and predicted that the Ford Motor Company would make more money than ever. And it did.
An Interview with Outgoing FDIC Chair Sheila Bair
‘They should have let Bear Stearns fail,” Sheila Bair said.
It was midmorning on a crisp June day, and Bair, the 57-year-old outgoing chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation — the federal agency that insures bank deposits and winds down failing banks — was sitting on a couch, sipping a Starbucks latte. We were in the first hour of several lengthy on-the-record interviews. She seemed ever-so-slightly nervous.
Buffett on the Economy
Buffett on today’s job numbers and why he’s confident we’ll get the 2.5 million jobs lost in the current recession back:
“Because the American economy works that way. We have gone through, I don’t know how many recessions, perhaps 15 in the history of this country.”
“But, our system over-shoots periodically. And in this particular case we had a huge bubble. So the fact that there’s a correction after that should not be unexpected. But our system always comes back and it will this time. And it already is.”
On whether the country will recover most of the 2.5 million lost jobs by the 2012 elections:
“I think there’s a good chance of that. We will come back big-time on employment when residential construction comes back. And we way over-produced in houses. I mean we were forming a million or 1.2 million households and we were building close to two million residential units.”
“Big surprise, we ended up with too many houses. We’re not going to blow them up. We’re not going to have kids start getting married at 12 or something. There’s a natural correction. The only way a correction takes place is to have households formation exceed new construction by a significant amount for a significant period of time.”
“We’ve had it for quite a while. And when you see these figures of five or 600,000, that means we’re sopping up housing inventory and I don’t know exactly when that hits equilibrium, but it isn’t five years from now I know that. And I think it actually could be reasonably soon.”
Making it in America A man and a firm with a plan to revive American manufacturing
“THE remarkable juxtaposition of American heartland, Midwest values and a whole lot of foreign accents” is what makes Midland, Michigan, a beacon of hope for the country’s manufacturing sector, reckons Andrew Liveris. His is one of those accents, though he no longer sounds crocodile-wrestlingly Australian. The boss of Dow Chemical has lived on and off for years in the company town that grew up around the brine wells that Herbert Dow first tapped in 1897 for his pioneering electrolysis process. The chemical firm still employs 5,500 of the town’s 42,000 inhabitants. (The second-biggest employer is Dow Corning, a silicone-making joint venture.) Dow’s success has delivered the nice homes, good schools and ball parks that make up the American Dream.
Like many immigrants, Mr Liveris shares that dream. But he now fears it is under threat. He has become one of the leading voices calling on the American government to embrace industrial policy. Last July Dow launched a plan to revive American manufacturing, which Mr Liveris then expanded into a book, “Make It In America”. On June 24th President Barack Obama appointed him co-chair of a new “Advanced Manufacturing Partnership” that brings together government, academia and business to “build a roadmap” for a more competitive manufacturing sector.
Clash of the Titans, Part 1
The history of the Ford Motor Company has rarely been told accurately. The moments when facts trump myth are rare; and then immediately, with the sweep of an indifferent hand, the wave of historical misinformation wipes out the truth, reinstating and protecting the legend. Bottom line, “what everybody knows” about Ford is hardly ever all true.
That’s how it is with the creation of Ford’s third car company and its early years. For the truth is that once Ford and his staff of engineers created the original Model A in 1902, the company was organized and primarily run by James Couzens, a minority shareholder foisted onto Ford to keep an eye on the investors’ monies. What no one imagined happening was that from their very first meeting, Ford decided that Couzens and he would partner up against the investment group – and his junior partner didn’t mind going along.
521 – CARTOGRAPHY’S FAVOURITE MAP MONSTER: THE LAND OCTOPUS
Over the centuries, the high seas have served as blank canvas for cartographers’ worst nightmares. They have dotted the globe’s oceans with a whole crypto-zoo of island-sized whales, deadly seductive mermaids, giant sea serpents, and many more heraldic horrors. As varied as this marine bestiary is, mapmakers have settled on a single species as their favourite for land-based beastliness: the octopus.
Real octopi are sea creatures, of course. But the Cartographic Land Octopus – CLO for short – need not worry about being in the right ecosphere. Being fictional, it is not restrained to any biosphere, and has only one iconic function: instilling readers with fear and revulsion. The CLO does have a link to the ocean, though. It is clearly descended from an older fictional monstrosity: the Kraken, a sea-bound giant squid whose enormous tentacles dragged whole ships down to their watery graves.