In August 2025, Social Security turned 90. There were pontifications by politicians of all stripes about how important it is for hardworking Americans. President Trump pledged to “protect and preserve Social Security”, and that it “stands stronger and more resilient…
My wife, Nancy, and I were in Wales, UK in November 2025. We shopped in a Zara, an international chain. For expediency they have both US and UK prices on all the items. For the jeans above, the UK price…
Education and research have been drivers of the Philadelphia economy and other economies around the country for years. This type of business has been mostly recession proof, with funding by the government. Lots of times when there’s unemployment, people choose…
I have been a fan of international relations since college. In college, I joined AIESEC, an international business student association. The premise of AIESEC was that if we could get local businesses to take an intern from a foreign country…
When I was in banking graduate school, the capstone class was the opportunity to run a bank, or at least a computer simulation of a bank. The American Bankers Association School of Banking at that time was mail studies, with…
To people in a lot of areas, the cost of climate change is what it may cost them to deal with repairs and improvements due to weather events. That’s a big deal, but there’s a lot more. University of Pennsylvania…
I wrote a blog post about Bob Casey’s campaign trying to paint businesses as greedy. The premise is that companies’ increasing prices for products more than inflation and/or cutting product size is greedy and causing high prices for consumers. Kamal…
These days artificial intelligence (AI) is all over the business news. A June 2024 New York times article talks about how robots can bring automated precision to drug development. A July 2024 article described the red-hot AI market helping landlords…
In February, Nancy and I had a couple of extra hours and decided to check out the American Dream Mall in East Rutherford, New Jersey. One can see it from the Turnpike near the Meadowlands Stadium. Mills Corporation started planning…
Since writing the "Greedflation" article, I read Fareed Zakaria’s book, “Age of Revolutions”. The book is about political, industrial, and scientific revolutions. The French revolution was a failure (afterwards people were not better off) because entrepreneurship and making a profit…
