This American Life tackles the sub-prime housing market. I’ve read economists writing about this crisis… and it’s rather difficult to understand. I mean, all this talk of AAA overrated paper, etc. — I got a vague idea of the topic, but I wanted something more. Soo, I read a glowing recommendation of This American Life’s coverage of the topic. A quick summary:
The British company “albam” doesn’t use Chinese manufacturers to make its high quality clothing:
We are an independent company so we can listen to you. We develop and produce our clothes in the UK because we think the extra cost is worth the great quality. If we don’t make a line in the UK it is because we haven’t found a quality high enough to hang our hat on.
…
As someone told us “it doesn’t have to be radically different, just a lot better”, well we are sticking by this.
Four years ago, Fast Company wrote about Wal-Mart — and the article is still pretty interesting:
Wal-Mart is not just the world’s largest retailer. It’s the world’s largest company—bigger than ExxonMobil, General Motors, and General Electric. The scale can be hard to absorb. Wal-Mart sold $244.5 billion worth of goods last year. It sells in three months what number-two retailer Home Depot sells in a year. And in its own category of general merchandise and groceries, Wal-Mart no longer has any real rivals. It does more business than Target, Sears, Kmart, J.C. Penney, Safeway, and Kroger combined.
Leave it to your mildly deluded host to write a post about a topic on which he has almost no specific information. Nevertheless, if I can’t brainstorm at tumbledry, where can I brainstorm? (“In your own head, you’re saying” I know, but that’s not the point we’re debating.) The topic today: business. My qualifications: slim. Forecast: stormy, with a chance of incorrect conclusions.
If you are in the Twin Cities area November 6, and whether you are ostensibly a ‘liberal’ or not, you should see Paul Krugman speak. John Gruber calls him “the world’s best political commentator” and even wrote “I didn’t mind paying the $50 a year for TimesSelect — I’d pay that just to read Paul Krugman and Frank Rich.” Krugman’s most recent book is called The Conscience of a Liberal. Here is a quick summary from Andrew Leonard’s recent review of the book in Salon magazine:
A recent article by Marc Hedlund (who writes the Wheaties for Your Wallet blog) covers a paper entitled Consumer Myopia and Information Suppression in Crowded Markets. If you scanned too quickly over that title, think about it once more: it means that when consumers don’t take the time to analyze the full extent of their purchases/services in a given market, then they will get overcharged by companies taking advantage of mis/dis/missing-information.
Price control in the dairy industry - It isn’t hard to imagine that the dairy industry is price controlled — so few industries remain so effectively localized in the US.
Via kottke.