Alex Berenson Quotes
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Automated call centers are only the most obvious way speech recognition will be used. The software is now becoming sophisticated enough to identify speakers through 'voiceprints,' akin to fingerprints, eventually reducing the need for personal identification numbers.
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Insider trading is hard to prove. To be convicted, a person must have bought or sold a stock based on material information that is both unknown to the general public and likely to have had an important effect on a company's stock price.
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Many newly public companies are able to post a year or two of strong sales growth off a small base, but their growth almost always slows over time, thanks to what investment professionals call 'the law of large numbers.'
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For value investors, General Motors is a tempting target. The company's share of the North American auto market has steadily declined for two decades, and analysts say the company suffers from weak management and unexciting cars.
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Business cycles lengthened greatly during the 20th century, as central banks learned to manage national economies by raising and lowering interest rates.
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In general, great companies prefer to grow 'organically,' as Wall Street likes to say. That is, from the inside out, by finding new markets or by taking market share from their competitors.
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At any moment, one company stands in the spotlight of the middle ring in the stock market's never-ending circus. It may not be the biggest corporation in the world, or the most profitable, but somehow it both mirrors and leads the market's broader action.
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It's no secret that big institutional investors have a lot of advantages on Wall Street. They get the first chance to buy hot initial public offerings. They get to meet in person with companies' managements.
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Because Genentech is a leading developer of cancer therapies, some doctors also fear that the company's pricing plans for Avastin - around $8,800 a month - may encourage other companies to charge more for their own oncology drugs.
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Sergeant Bergdahl may have broken any number of military laws.
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John W. Snow was paid more than $50 million in salary, bonus and stock in his nearly 12 years as chairman of the CSX Corporation, the railroad company. During that period, the company's profits fell, and its stock rose a bit more than half as much as that of the average big company.
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Climate change might be disastrous, but does that mean we want carbon taxes that raise the price of a gallon of heating oil to $10? And how exactly will those taxes affect economic growth?
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Individual income can grow only as fast as productivity rises.
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The Wahhabists are the boogeymen, the guys who will chop the head off any American they catch. And they will destroy Iraq without a second thought if they believe that the instability will benefit them.
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An attack on the scale of Sept. 11 would rock the markets and the economy.
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The thing to do with mutual funds is to buy a couple of decent ones, set up an investment plan and then never, ever think about them again, except maybe once a quarter or so when you take a peek at your statements to make sure that you have not accidentally been buying the Fidelity Peace-in-the-Middle-East fund.
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Companies buy customers when they cannot win new business on their own. They merge when their executives do not have a better idea of what to do.
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One of the Internet's highest-profile companies, Priceline once dreamed of transforming the way consumer goods are bought and sold by offering customers the chance to 'name your own price' for a variety of products, including airline tickets.
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Determining how many asbestos suits have been filed or how much companies have spent to resolve them is difficult. Cases are filed in state and federal courts, and many companies do not disclose their spending on settlements.
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Wal-Mart does not do big mergers, though it will buy much smaller competitors in so-called 'tuck-in acquisitions.'
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A vote of confidence from Cisco Systems can be very important to fledging technology companies, especially if they have initial public offerings on the horizon.
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Publicly traded United States companies report sales and profits to investors every quarter.
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Evidence of defendants' lavish lifestyles is often used to provide a motive for fraud. Jurors sometimes wonder why an executive making tens of millions of dollars would cheat to make even more. Evidence of habitual gluttony helps provide the answer.
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For a developing country, average long-run growth of 5 percent a year per capita is excellent, and 7 percent is stellar.