Word: profitable
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...currency swoon makes imports, from food to commodities, more expensive. Jocelyn Tran, whose Ho Chi Minh City company contracts with local factories to supply apparel to U.S. stores, says the price of Chinese-made yarn has jumped 15% this year. "Our factories are absorbing it by cutting out the profit margin," says Tran. Even though some factories have raised wages, she complains that workers are still going on strike...
...endorsement of Obama eight more times, using his full name in each instance to underline the formality of her support. Each time Obama's name was mentioned, there was a mixed response. "Emotions are running high right now," said Ellen Malcolm, head of Emily's List, a non-profit group that works to elect Democratic women candidates and one of Clinton's strongest backers. "I don't think anyone's going to vote for John McCain in the fall. Given some time to grieve, they'll see the importance of electing a Democrat, Barack Obama, in November...
...alarm bells are going off too. The emergence of players who are out purely for profit has raised the possibility that, far from nurturing the poor, microfinance schemes could end up milking them, especially in countries where lenders don't have to clearly disclose interest rates. When the Mexican microfinancier Banco Compartamos went public last year, revealing its loans carried rates of about 86% annually, the development consortium Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) and others scorned it for having put shareholders ahead of clients. Says Elizabeth Littlefield, CEO of CGAP: "There is some risk that the mainstreaming...
...pressure to turn a profit often forces microfinanciers to change their business models in ways that depart from the industry's original purposes. As Al Amana, Morocco's largest outfit, has shifted from grants to commercial funding, its average loan size has roughly tripled; smaller loans to the most desperate borrowers are costlier to service. One consequence of commercialization is that a lower percentage of loans go to women because they tend to take out smaller sums, according to a recent study by Women's World Banking...
...cost you. Go to a website like GetAFreelancer.com and you'll see dozens of ads placed by spammers and other bad actors, who hire whole teams of people to read and type out CAPTCHAS, all day, by hand, by the thousands. ("How the hell can they still maintain a profit margin?" Von Ahn wonders. "This is amazing...