Word: marketing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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PLAY THE STOCK MARKET. By now there is wide agreement that stock and bond markets could in effect pay much of the nearly 30% of pensions that Social Security taxes will eventually no longer cover. But who should invest how much of the system's money? Clinton's proposal to have the government do the investing is a poor second best--and not only because of the danger of political manipulation of business. More fundamentally, individuals ought to have some say in how to invest money that the government taxes away from them. Redirecting some Social Security money into individual...
...this assumes, of course, that financial-market investments will continue to provide an attractive return. That seems reasonable, at least in the long run. Martin Feldstein, president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, calculates that a portfolio 60% of which is invested in stocks and 40% in bonds would grow on average 5.5% a year. That represents the actual average from the end of World War II until today, minus an allowance for administrative costs. By contrast, the special Treasury bonds that, by law, Social Security must now buy with any spare cash it has may yield on average...
Some colleagues have asked me, "Do we really need to do all that?" Maybe not--if the economy and the stock market continue to boom and inflation stays tame for years to come. But we shouldn't take chances. The system needs to be shored up so it can continue to keep the elderly out of poverty, come what may: recession, a stock-market crash, a flare-up of inflation or even all these things together. In the unlikely event that the economy continues to show its remarkable combination of superfast growth, superlow unemployment and superlow inflation for another decade...
Drawing these readers out of the library and into the bookstore is also a goal at Random House. Christine McNamara, director of marketing for the large-print division, observes that "nobody has tried this before. No one has gone after the market this way." Random House plans to charge the same price for a large-type book as for its conventional-type counterpart--and use the same covers to minimize the perception that these books are different. Says McNamara: "They'll look just as sexy and glossy as the regular trade edition--just a little bit fatter...
Publishers acknowledge that most large-type readers are older and have older reading tastes. Westerns, which have almost disappeared from bookstores, are still a thriving genre in large type. "Mass market and pulp westerns were popular in the '30s and '40s," says Thorndike's Olsen, whose publishing house offers hundreds of large-type westerns. The life stories of older celebrities are also naturals for this market. This fall Random House plans to publish large-type editions of John Glenn's memoir and a Rosemary Clooney autobiography. With the market expanding, however, publishers are adding blockbuster bestsellers and newsy titles--even...