Business News Gets Personal

Gone are the days when Business and Financial news existed primarily to inform investors in near real-time how much money they’ve won or lost on their investments.  Recently, business and financial news stories have crossed over to the mainstream and are making headlines in a big and bad way.

When I was in the US a few weeks ago, the evening news was dominated by lines of desperate people camped out in front of IndyMac in California to withdraw their money from the failed bank. Those images belong to another era, circa. 1929.

Last week in a suburb south of Boston, 53 year old Carlene Balderrama committed suicide just an hour and a half before her house was scheduled to be foreclosed and sold in auction.  Her suicide note instructed her husband and son to use the life insurance money to pay for the house. Continue reading »

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Make Your Own Moment!

Just a few days ago, Barack Obama made history in Berlin.  The images of Obama delivering his speech at the Victory Column and the crowd of 200,000 will not soon fade away, by design of course.

The entire overseas trip bore a close resemblance to a state visit.  In Berlin, Obama followed in the footsteps of previous American Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Regan, as nearly as he was allowed to anyway.  Many compared the event to a rock concert.  Some critics commented that the speech was too vague, but they missed the point entirely.  He nailed it with both audiences, in Europe and the US.  In Berlin, he addressed the audience as Europeans, expanding his reach beyond Germans, and gave them what they came for, an opportunity to see the man they crave as the next American President and to hear his eloquent and inspiring speech in person.    While the International Herald Tribune estimates that 4-6 million Americans live abroad, it is unlikely that all 200,000 living in Germany were in attendance to greet Obama. Continue reading »

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Top 10 reasons I didn’t blog on vacation

I’m back to work after a few weeks off, but was that really a vacation?  Every summer we visit family and friends in St. Louis, but does it really count as a vacation?  We always feel like we need a vacation to relax afterwards, unfortunately our Visa and Gap card statements are compelling reminders not to book another trip. Continue reading »

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