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Economics pretends to be a science. Its practitioners fill blackboards with equations and clog computers with data. But it is really a faith, or more accurately a set of overlapping and squabbling faiths, each with its own doctrines.
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Mr. Snowden did not start out as a spy, and calling him one bends the term past recognition. Spies don't give their secrets to journalists for free.
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For investors who do want to speculate in high-yield bonds, one alternative may be a junk bond mutual fund, which can offer investors the relative safety of diversification.
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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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Shareholder meetings are not usually the occasion for utter candor - or for that matter, arch sarcasm - by chief executives.
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Information technology departments must spend enormous amounts of time and money worrying about integrating big computer systems with billions of pieces of customer data.
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Big swings in the wholesale price of electricity are not unusual in the summer, when high demand taxes generators' ability to supply power.
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Most unfortunately, Enron's plunge into bankruptcy court also cost many of its rank-and-file employees their savings.
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In the short run, using militias might be the quickest and easiest way to improve order on Iraq's streets and uproot the terrorists and guerrillas who routinely attack American troops and civilian targets.
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Of all the big Internet companies, Yahoo is the most highly valued on a price-earnings and price-sales basis.
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As a reporter, I embedded for modest stints with American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. When I'm asked about those experiences, I always say - and mean - that we civilians don't deserve the soldiers we have.
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Don't expect Barton Biggs to be offering his market insights on 'Bloomberg News' anytime soon. His plumber, maybe.
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As they grow, companies saturate their markets, become more complex and difficult to manage, and face larger and more entrenched competitors.
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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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In general, investors prefer companies to reward executives for producing recurring income, not one-time gains.
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Trailer home borrowers, mostly near the bottom of the economic ladder, often default on their loans.
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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.
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Accounting rules give financial institutions flexibility about when they choose to recognize venture capital profits.
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If only the human body could handle trauma as well as biotechnology stocks do.
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The lower spreads mean lower costs for investors, because Nasdaq investors generally do not trade directly with one another. Instead, they usually buy and sell from market-makers, brokerage firms that flip shares between buyers and sellers and keep the spread for themselves.
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As the Nasdaq soared in 1999 and early 2000, demand for many offerings far exceeded the supply of shares available at the initial offering price.
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Fannie Mae has never publicly disclosed how much money it could lose if interest rates rose 1.5 percentage points in a very short period of time.
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For chat-room tyros who expect to make their first million day-trading by age 27, paging through the Sunday newspaper with a pair of scissors just to save a couple of cents on Cheetos seems so, well, old economy.
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Traditionally, companies have made major announcements before or after the close of trading so that all interested investors and analysts are apprised of the news before trading resumes in their stocks.