Word: benchmarking
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...particularly discomfiting thought right now, when the word bubble is being bandied about to describe emerging markets. Stock markets from Mumbai to Shanghai have been hitting record highs with giddy regularity recently, in spite of dangers such as the murky outlook for the U.S. economy. The CSI 300, a benchmark index for China stocks, has nearly quadrupled in the past year, while India's Sensex index is up 35% since January. Even Nigeria's stock market, a relative newcomer to the radar screen of global investors, has jumped almost 60% in 2007. (The value of stocks listed in Nigeria...
...test’s limitations, but also encourage the development of more reliable and more equitable methods of evaluation. In the current admissions system, however, standardized tests will continue to serve a useful role for many colleges. Scores, although limited in their predictive power, still provide a nationally standardized benchmark against which admissions officers may quickly garner a rough idea of an applicant’s comparative academic ability. As long as admissions committees are aware of the test’s limitations and interpret scores with the applicant’s socioeconomic background in mind, considering test scores...
TIME: Is it key to leverage that expertise? Pollitt: We would argue very strongly, yes. There is a basic benchmark: the money that you put into these projects should do more than it would do if you simply handed it over to a charity. That means running projects that have some relationship to your business, or to business in general. So health-care companies doing health-care projects seems very sensible...
...value of their virginity are rife in Indonesian films, because those are the images that draw the kids to the theaters. In most cases, films are made for less than $500,000, and producers need to sell at least 300,000 tickets to break even. Few reach that benchmark without a heavy dose of teen romance, superstition or horror, and even then most Indonesian films aren't shown for more than a week on a particular screen. "The only films that do well now are ones kids see over and over," adds producer Wijaya. That's a formula Hollywood knows...
After the stock-market crash of 2001 and 2002, the Fed worried that inflation was so low it might turn into deflation. So it cut short-term rates even further, reducing them to 1% in 2003, while the yield on the 10-year Treasury bond--a key benchmark of long-term rates--dropped as low as 3.13%. The result: a real estate boom, as ultra-low mortgage rates made houses affordable at ever higher prices. Cash from refinancings and home-equity loans also kept consumer spending strong. By mid-2004, confident that deflation was out of the picture...