Word: booms
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...Karen Ho got a job on Wall Street. The student of anthropology, who would later go on to get her Ph.D., was fascinated by how even in the midst of an economic boom, corporate downsizings were rampant - and how each time a company announced a major layoff, its stock rallied. What she found from her perch at Bankers Trust - and later in interviews with people at firms such as Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Salomon Brothers, Kidder Peabody and Lazard - was that it wasn't just an ideological commitment to boosting shareholder value that drove decisions...
...Until recently, nests were mainly harvested from caves in the wild, and the trade was dominated by a ruthless and well-connected élite. Now, fueled by insatiable demand from prospering China, a regional boom in farming nests in purpose-built birdhouses - "swiftlet condos," as they're sometimes called - is democratizing the business. "It's recession-proof," enthuses Harry Kok, a retired Malaysian engineer who owns or has shares in five birdhouses and writes a blog on the subject from his Kuala Lumpur home. "The overheads are minimal. You don't have a factory with so many workers. Right...
Thwarted ambition is not the only problem. One of the dirty little secrets of Spain's boom years was the number of people Spanish firms employed on casual contracts. In an effort to make its labor market more flexible, the country has the highest rate of temporary jobs in the European Union: one in three. The great majority of those "trash contracts," as they're called by locals, go to the young, making them the easiest (read: least expensive) workers to fire. None of this is new. Young people have complained of being mileuristas since Europe adopted the common currency...
...While new types of lending programs are slowly expanding credit to SMEs, things could get worse later this year. The overall boom in bank lending has increased the risk of bad loans that could come back to haunt the financial system and delay economic recovery. Some economists now say that policymakers will want to control credit more tightly in the second half of the year. Their challenge will be to ensure that small businesses that have seen little help thus far don't get further squeezed as the credit explosion is reined...
...pictures of China's infrastructure boom...