The U.S. economy churned out more jobs than expected last month, and the unemployment rate ticked lower, although Wall Street continued to whipsaw a day after its worst showing in nearly three years. (NPR)
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As the foreclosure crisis continues to wreak havoc on the housing market, a source of national pride has taken a sour turn. Home ownership is on the decline and, according to a recent Morgan Stanley report, the United States is fast becoming a nation of renters. (CNN/Money)
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In a last-minute attempt to stop the U.S. from defaulting for the first time ever on its loan obligations, Congress voted this week to increase the country's debt ceiling by at least $2.1 trillion. The deal includes $917 billion in spending cuts over the next 10 years, and the establishment of a congressional committee to reduce the deficit further by $1.5 trillion. Questions remain, however. (Knowledge@Wharton)
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It looks as if confidence has finally returned to the MBA jobs market, according to the latest survey of employment trends for professionals and managers around the world. (Forbes)
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Life is full of twists and turns and it is sometimes easy to get sick of the many gyrations that are needed to make a business thrive, a project launch, or even to get internal signoff in some bureaucratic version of the Hokey Pokey. It would be so easy to quit. But a part of you knows that many a failure turns into the big success story. (Harvard Business Review)
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Lured by surging growth in frontier economies, Africa's best and brightest are leaving the West and returning home, where business is booming. (Time)
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The latest bailout by the European Central Bank backfired in a big way. Investors are trying to position themselves as far away from the contagion as possible, opting to liquidate equities, bonds and commodities into plain old cash. (Fortune)
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The world's financial markets closed for business nursing losses of more than $2.5 tn (£1.53tn) after a week of turbulent selling not seen since the dark days of late 2008, when the big beasts of banking were forced to beg for government help and the global economy was gripped by its worst recession since the 1930s. (The Guardian)
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Amid a hiring slowdown and bleak prospects for any turnaround, corporate recruiters have scaled back their visits to the nation's college campuses. While other employment tools, like online forums and listings, are taking up part of the slack, the decline in on-campus recruiting efforts has cast a pall over many colleges. (The Wall Street Journal)
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Even though the email popped into her inbox at work more than six years ago, Ankur Kumar remembers the exact date she got the message with the heading: "Your Status Has Been Updated." (Poets and Quants)
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Don't miss the year's must-attend career, education and networking event. Learn how to Power-Up Your Profit-ability by registering to join us in Atlanta.
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Should you have to use your real name online? It's an issue that's long simmered among social media critics and supporters alike. On one end of the spectrum, there's 4chan, where everything is anonymous. On the other, there are Facebook and Google Plus. Both have drawn fire from for categorically preventing people from using pseudonyms. (The Atlantic)
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Do "likes" and retweets add up to sales? Who knows? And who really cares? We're in the "I Love Lucy" era of social-media marketing, a golden age of unaccountability. (Fast Company)
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Success Deficiency Disorder (SDD) hits sales people, sales leaders, and business owners alike. Typically this occurs as a direct result of a prolonged exposure to the following: 1) Lower than average new sales lead volume; 2) Sequential 2nd place or worse finishes in big deal; 3) Loss of one or more key accounts. (bNet)
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Keeping track of your personal finances and launching a business is doubly challenging. Here are a few mistakes young business owners make with their money. (Entrepreneur)
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American employment put in a respectable performance in July. Non-farm payrolls rose 117,000, or 0.1%, and the unemployment rate edged lower to 9.1% from 9.2%, both better, but not dramatically so, than Wall Street had expected. Any other time this would have been cause for mild satisfaction. In these grim times, it constitutes a massive relief bordering on joy. (The Economist)
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When he was Fed chairman and had access to the best economic data and minds on the globe, Alan Greenspan famously liked to forecast the direction of the economy by studying sales of men's underwear. Even during the best of times, underwear purchases remain pretty flat, he noted. (Slate)
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In market moments like these, it’s always tempting do something really big and bold with our investments. Here’s a bad idea that’s likely to occur to the fight-or-flight animal within all of us: Scale way back on stocks in parts of the developed world with economic woes and put the proceeds someplace far, far away, in emerging markets stocks or gold or foreign currencies. (The New York Times)
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Uh-oh. Did you keep your receipt? This week's unnerving market moves haven't just shaken everyday investors and portfolio hawks. They also have the potential to unsettle another important group: American consumers.
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Fractional ownership of private jets and use of jet cards is on the rise as commercial travel frustrates fliers, despite the high cost, according to interviews with executives at the three largest North American private aviation companies – NetJets Inc., Flight Options LLC and Flexjet. Shared jets were originally used by smaller and mid-sized corporations, and have expanded to individual travelers as well. (Bloomberg)
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Not content with simply not hiring anyone, large corporations are now in a race toward Headcount Zero – whichever company figures out how to run without a single human employee first, wins. (Forbes)
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How Nixon stopped backing the dollar with gold and changed global finance, a 40-year-old decision that still echoes in Greece, Ireland, and the U.S. (Bloomberg/Businessweek)
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The co-chair of Obama’s federal debt commission says the job of Congress’s debt-cutting "super committee" will be seriously painful. (Bloomberg/Businessweek)
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Or are truly creative people born with something special? Clayton Christensen discusses his latest book, The Innovator's DNA, which analyzes the traits of CEOs who have disrupted their industries. (Inc.)
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