Speak and Write like The Economist: Говори и пиши как The Eсonomist
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A Polish Jew in an Episcopal graveyard in a largely Dominican neighbourhood. What could be more New York?
Obama sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China.
The average Swiss watch costs $685. A Chinese one costs around $2 and tells the time just as well (see chart). So how on earth, a Martian might ask, can the Swiss watch industry survive? Yet it does. Few can match the precision of a Nivarox ("Nicht variabel oxydfest" (G.) or "Non-Variable Non-Oxidizing") balance spring.
The euro needs French reform, German extravagance and Italian political maturity.
In happier days before the euro crisis, one government in Lisbon rebranded the Algarve as the Allgarve, hoping to appeal to English-speaking tourists. Now a Portuguese wit suggests rebranding the whole country as Poortugal.
The cult of the insider in Japan is rooted in its paddy fields, some scholars argue. To cultivate wet rice, villagers need to work together, sharing land, labour, water and gossip. Anyone not in the group is out of the loop. There is something of the rice paddy about Japan's capital markets, too.
"LVMH is like a mini Germany," boasts an insider. Like that country's Mittelstand, it has built a reputation for craftsmanship and quality that people are happy to pay extra for. The difference is, the Mittelstand makes unsexy things such as machine tools and shaving brushes, whereas LVMH makes champagne, handbags and other objects of desire.
The 1912 games were the last one where gold medals were made entirely of gold. Now they consist mainly of silver with a thin coat of gold. Winners in London are advised not to bite too hard on their medals, as they will have a gold content of only about 1.5 %.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote that: "In every big transaction, there is a magic moment during which a man has surrendered a treasure, and during which the man who is due to receive it has not yet done so. An alert lawyer will make the moment his own, possessing the treasure for a magic microsecond, taking a little of it, passing it on." Like so many novelists, he was talking bosh. No alert lawyer takes only "a little".
When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton, a prolific bank robber (pictured, after he retired), is said to have replied: "Because that's where the money is." Sutton reportedly pinched $2m during a lifetime of crime.
The phenomenon has been described as the Wimbledon effect: Britain provides the beautiful arena where foreign champions come and beat the hell out of British players. The annual Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race is much the same: a slugfest between predominantly non-British mercenaries.
The real money is where the pain is.
The human animal is a beast that must die. If he's got money, he buys and buys and buys everything he can, in the crazy hope one of those thing.
"Corruption is rampant at high levels, and at low levels," said an FBI agent, before adding: "and all levels in between".
Foreign remittances continue to grow. In all, 250m migrant workers will send home $500 billion this year – up from $410 billion in 2012. At their destination savings often end up under the mattress – rather than channelled into microfinance schemes, for instance, as many development experts have long hoped. The marriage between remittances and microfinance has not happened yet.
"Republican gluttons of privilege" who had "stuck a pitchfork in the farmer's back".
He spent his entire career within the DeBeers stable.
It takes pride in sticking to its companies through thick and thin.
The distinction between being a successful tycoon and being an enemy of the people has been blurred.
Marriott likes to buy to the sound of cannons and sell to the sound of violins.
40 % of Missourians would oppose a new tax even if it was being used "to construct the landing pad for the second coming of Christ".
Once upon a time the overstressed executive bellowing orders into a telephone, cancelling meetings, staying late at the office and dying of a heart attack was a stereotype of modernity. Cardiac arrest – and, indeed, early death from any cause – is the prerogative of underlings. The best medicine, then, is promotion. Prosper, and live long.
Narcissism index indicators of CEO: prominence of the boss's photo in the annual report, company press releases. Length of his Who is Who entry, frequency of his use of the first singular interviews, ratios of cash compensation to second-highest paid exec.
Of course, successfully picking the leader of a big public company has always been tricky, because the job requires at least two quite different skills. Like the fox, a chief executive must know lots of little things, must manage successfully the key day-to-day aspects of the business. But like the hedgehog, he must also know one big thing: every three or four years, he will have to take a substantial strategic decision, which may mortally wound the business, if he gets it wrong. Plenty of giants, such as Cable & Wireless and AT&T, have had leaders who passed the fox test but failed the hedgehog one.
The Chinese dragon's coils encircling the world are getting tighter by the day.
In business, as in photography, it pays to stay focused.
The number of people in the United States living in poverty increased last year to 39.8 million – the highest percentage of the population in 11 years, the Census Bureau said Thursday. The number equals 13.2 percent of the country's population and is 2.5 million more than were living in poverty in 2007, which is defined by the agency as a person making less than $10,991 or a family of four making less than $22,025.