"Corruption is rampant at high levels, and at low levels," said an FBI agent, before adding: "and all levels in between".
Foreign remittances continue to grow. In all, 250m migrant workers will send home $500 billion this year – up from $410 billion in 2012. At their destination savings often end up under the mattress – rather than channelled into microfinance schemes, for instance, as many development experts have long hoped. The marriage between remittances and microfinance has not happened yet.
"Republican gluttons of privilege" who had "stuck a pitchfork in the farmer's back".
He spent his entire career within the DeBeers stable.
It takes pride in sticking to its companies through thick and thin.
The distinction between being a successful tycoon and being an enemy of the people has been blurred.
Marriott likes to buy to the sound of cannons and sell to the sound of violins.
40 % of Missourians would oppose a new tax even if it was being used "to construct the landing pad for the second coming of Christ".
Once upon a time the overstressed executive bellowing orders into a telephone, cancelling meetings, staying late at the office and dying of a heart attack was a stereotype of modernity. Cardiac arrest – and, indeed, early death from any cause – is the prerogative of underlings. The best medicine, then, is promotion. Prosper, and live long.
Narcissism index indicators of CEO: prominence of the boss's photo in the annual report, company press releases. Length of his Who is Who entry, frequency of his use of the first singular interviews, ratios of cash compensation to second-highest paid exec.
Of course, successfully picking the leader of a big public company has always been tricky, because the job requires at least two quite different skills. Like the fox, a chief executive must know lots of little things, must manage successfully the key day-to-day aspects of the business. But like the hedgehog, he must also know one big thing: every three or four years, he will have to take a substantial strategic decision, which may mortally wound the business, if he gets it wrong. Plenty of giants, such as Cable & Wireless and AT&T, have had leaders who passed the fox test but failed the hedgehog one.
The Chinese dragon's coils encircling the world are getting tighter by the day.
In business, as in photography, it pays to stay focused.
The number of people in the United States living in poverty increased last year to 39.8 million – the highest percentage of the population in 11 years, the Census Bureau said Thursday. The number equals 13.2 percent of the country's population and is 2.5 million more than were living in poverty in 2007, which is defined by the agency as a person making less than $10,991 or a family of four making less than $22,025.
This new elite is not just a breed apart. It lives apart, in bubbles such as Manhattan south of 96th Street (where the proportion of adults with college degrees rose from 16 % in 1960 to 60 % in 2000) and a small number of "SuperZips", neighbourhoods where wealth and educational attainment are highly concentrated. These neighbourhoods are whiter and more Asian than the rest of America. They have less crime and more stable families. They are not, pace Mr Gingrich, necessarily "liberal": plenty of SuperZips voted Republican in 2004. But they are indeed out of touch.
The have-a-nice-day stuff of Walmart in Germany went down like a lead Zeppelin with employees and shoppers alike.
Hopkins was the most flamboyant advertising genius of the early 20th century – the man who convinced millions of women to buy Palmolive soap on the basis that Cleopatra had washed with it, and got the world talking about puffed wheat with the claim that it was "shot from guns" until the grains puffed to eight times their normal size.
Every company starts out as a shell. Just £ 349 ($560) buys you a company in the Seychelles, with no local taxation, no public disclosure of directors or shareholders and no requirement to file accounts. Prices rise to £ 5,000 for more sophisticated corporate structures in places like Switzerland and Luxembourg. Two firms handle two-thirds of all Delaware companies: CT Corporation (part of Wolters Kluwer of the Netherlands) and CSC.
There is no limit to human ingenuity in finding new ways to go bust.
Before the crisis many central bankers believed that all they needed was a "hammer" (interest rates) to strike a "monetary nail" (consumer-price inflation). But not every problem is a nail. Policymakers also need a full set of "macroprudential" tools, from wrenches to duct tape E.
Mr Murray starts by lamenting the isolation of a new upper class, which he defines as the most successful 5 % of adults (plus their spouses) working in managerial positions, the professions or the senior media. These people are not only rich but also exceptionally clever, because America has become expert at sending its brightest to the same elite universities, where they intermarry and confer on their offspring not just wealth but also a cognitive advantage that gives this class terrific staying power.
The best time to invest is when there is blood in the streets.
In the 19th century Alexis de Tocqueville marvelled that in America the opulent did not stand aloof from the people. A great cultural gap separates the elite from other Americans. They seldom watch "Oprah" or "Judge Judy" all the way through. In fact they do not watch much television at all. They eat in restaurants, but not often at Applebee's, Denny's or Waffle House, chains that cater to the common taste. They may take The Economist, with the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and perhaps the New Yorker or Rolling Stone. They drink wine and boutique beers (and can discuss them expertly) but only in moderation, and they hardly ever smoke cigarettes.
Mr Icahn had expounded his theory of the moronisation of American management. The typical chief executive, he said, to chuckles, is "the guy you knew in college, the fraternity president – not too bright, back-slapping, but a survivor, politically astute, a nice guy". To be a chief executive, you need to know how not to tread on anyone's toes on the way up. You eventually become the number two, who "has got to be a little worse than the number one to survive". When the number two becomes chief executive, he promotes someone a little worse than him as his second-in-command. "It is the survival of the unfittest," concluded Mr Icahn. "Eventually we are all going to be run by morons."
Most students of taxation know the advice that Jean-Baptiste Colbert, treasurer to Louis XIV, offered the beleaguered taxman: pluck the goose so as to get the most feathers with the least hissing. But suppose the goose is housed on one farm, eats the birdseed scattered in a second, and lays its eggs in a third. Which farmer gets the plumage?
History offers perhaps only one true example of a reserve-currency shift, from the British pound to the dollar. The pound was king during the era of the gold standard. But in the years after 1914, Britain switched from net creditor to net debtor, and by the 1920s the dollar was the only currency convertible to gold (although the pound returned to gold in 1925). Two costly wars and two episodes of currency devaluation in Britain later, the dollar was unchallenged as the world's chief reserve currency.
Americans used to believe that their constitution protected private property. The Fifth Amendment allows the state to seize it only for "public use", and so long as "just compensation" is paid. "Public use" has traditionally been taken to mean something like a public highway. Roads would obviously be much harder to build if a single homeowner could hold out forever or for excessive compensation. The government's powers of "eminent domain" have also been used to clean up "blighted" slums. "Urban renewal", he noted, has sometimes been nicknamed "negro removal".
The "triangular trade" as it was known, whereby slave-ships left European ports for west Africa with rum, guns, textiles and other goods to exchange for slaves, and then transported them across the Atlantic to sell to plantation-owners, and then returned with sugar and coffee, also fuelled the first great wave of economic globalisation. Slavers in France would send their shirts to be washed in the streams of the Caribbean isle of St Domingue, now Haiti; the water there was said to whiten the linen better than any European stream.
The price of used furniture is nothing but a viewpoint, and if you wouldn't understand the viewpoint is impossible to understand the price. With used furniture you can't be emotional 49.
There is almost no house property in London that is not overburdened with a number of middlemen.
Although Britons are cross about high pay, few seek capitalism's overthrow: they dislike corporate fat cats for being fat, not for being cats.
Some firms are employing a "China + 1" strategy, opening just one factory in another country to test the waters and provide a back-up. if China's currency and shipping costs were to rise by 5 % annually and wages were to go up by 30 % a year, by 2015 it would be just as cheap to make things in North America as to make them in China and ship them there.
Mr Rao offered two deals on loose coffee beans: 33 % extra free or 33 % off the price. The discount is by far the better proposition, but the supposedly clever students viewed them as equivalent. Even well-educated shoppers are easily foxed.
If not in coin you must pay in humiliation of spirit for every benefit received at the hands of philanthropy.
When Deng Xiaoping, China's paramount leader, died in 1997 his only post was chairman of the China Bridge Association.
Shopping with coupons and jars of loose change. Watering down milk to make it go further. Using washing up liquid instead of shampoo. Inventing excuses for skipping lunch. Having to walk everywhere. Sharing beds and baths. Mending clothes that are themselves second-hand. Reviving old newspapers as makeshift lampshades. Always being tired – poverty in austerity.
The first is that entrepreneurs routinely see opportunities where everyone else sees problems. A surprising number of great companies were born out of fury and frustration.
When Wal-Mart tried to impose alien rules on its German staff – such as compulsory smiling and a ban on affairs with co-workers – it touched off a guerilla war that ended only when the supermarket chain announced it was pulling out of Germany in 2006.
When things went wrong for Middle Eastern tribes a couple of millennia ago, the accepted remedy was to send a sacrificial goat out into the wilderness to placate the gods. The practice continues today, but the voters have replaced the gods, and highly paid businesspeople the goats.
Why do Americans spend such huge amounts of time, money, water, fertiliser and fuel on growing a useless smooth expanse of grass? Much better to cultivate something useful, like tomatoes.
Walmart did not become a $200 billion company without running down a few pedestrians.
Water flows towards money.
The recovery has resembled third-world traffic, where juggernauts and rickshaws, cars and cycles ply the same lanes at different speeds, often getting in each other's way.
Shoppers have been able to buy from out-of-state merchants since Sears issued its first mail-order catalogues in the 19th century.
Warren Buffett: "It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who's been swimming naked."
The new strategy looks more promising, but as always success will depend on implementation.
Consider an imaginary Englishman's day. He wakes in his cottage near Dover, ready to commute to London. Chomping a bowl of Weetabix, a British breakfast cereal resembling (tasty) cardboard, he makes a cup of tea. His privatised water comes from Veolia and his electricity from EDF (both French firms). Thumps at the gate tell him another arm of Veolia is emptying his bins. He takes the new high-speed train to London: it is part-owned by the French firm Keolis, while the tracks belong to Canadian pension funds. At St Pancras station, a choice of double-decker buses awaits. In the last couple of years, one of the big London bus companies was bought by Netherlands Railways. A second went to Deutsche Bahn, the German railway company. In March, a third was taken over by RATP, the Paris public-transport authority (its previous owners were also French). The Dutch railways logo is emblazoned on buses across London. Thanks to RATP's logo, a stylised image of the River Seine now adorns hundreds more: most Londoners neither know nor care. As for Weetabix, a French billionaire is interested in buying the firm, according to press reports. Yet Britain still feels British.
Polaroid, whose once-iconic instant-photo firm, has only one significant asset now – its name.
In a diatribe against the Rothschilds, Heinrich Heine, a German poet, fumed that money "is more fluid than water and less steady than air".
New boss didn't magic away the problems.
Most state-owned companies are prone to over-staffing, underinvestment, political interference and corruption.
Putting business at the heart of the health-care system is not a must but a bug.
The word "company" is derived from the Latin words "cum" and "pane" meaning "breaking bread together".
The sheer size of the Al Saud clan has also helped cement the nation. There have been eight generations of Saudi rulers, dating back to 18th-century sheikhs who held sway in a few oasis towns near present-day Riyadh. Many have been prolific. King Abdul Aziz himself sired some 36 sons and even more daughters. The first son to succeed him, King Saud, fathered 107 children. King Abdullah is believed to have 20 daughters and 14 sons. The extended Al Saud family is now thought to number some 30,000, though only 7,000 or so are princes. Of these, only around 500 are in government, and only perhaps 60 carry real weight in decision-making.
There's no exaggerating China's hunger for commodities. The country accounts for about a fifth of the world's population, yet it gobbles up more than half of the world's pork, half of its cement, a third of its steel and over a quarter of its aluminium. It is spending 35 times as much on imports of soya beans and crude oil as it did in 1999, and 23 times as much importing copper – indeed, China has swallowed over four-fifths of the increase in the world's copper supply since 2000.
The world knows what it wants, but cannot agree on how to get what it wants.
The financial results of Chinese companies that global investors wish to buy into can be as unintelligible as the dialect spoken in the company town. It is said (with apparent sincerity) that some Chinese firms keep several sets of books – one for the government, one for company records, one for foreigners and one to report what is actually going on.