NEW YORK | It used to be the world’s largest airline, a ‘dream of stars and stripes,’ the only big carrier that had succeded to avoid bankrupt. Yet now it has gone broke. American Airlines and its parent company AMR on Tuesday filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in New York, in an effort to cut labor costs, airport agreements and airplane leases to bring them in line with the…
Another crystal clear note from Nordkapp analysts in Madrid: “If Germany keeps its ironclad determination of not accept the monetisation of the bad sovereign debt in the hands of the banks, if the holes in the Spanish banks are not monetised, if a haircut is not applied to Greek debt, an exit to the crisis with all its consequences will be delayed. Each day that passes without resolving the crisis…
LONDON | Most company leaders forecast that business structures will inevitably change. A 63 per cent predict a shift to decentralised mechanisms with a far-reaching devolution of business decision-making authority. The majority assume that customers will generate almost as many new ideas for the improvement of business processes as employees. And by 2020, customers will generate the most new product or service ideas. Business leaders are expecting wrenching change to…
LONDON | Just how does innovation relate to the economy, and what does it mean that US and European firms hold all positions at the Top 10 list? The 100 leading innovative firms added more than 400,000 new jobs in 2010 over 2009, three percent more than the prior year and greater than the percentage increase in growth experienced by the S&P 500 for the same period, a comparison of market…
NEW YORK | Can a government compel citizens to purchase basic health insurance? For President Obama, it should, indeed. For all Republican candidates, this would be a clear violation of individual rights. The US Supreme Court agreed on Monday to take up the case of President Barack Obama’s landmark health care reform in March. By June, the nation’s 9 top justices -viewed as one of the most conservative benches in…
By Jacobo de Regoyos, in Brussels | The financial roulette russe has become a variable-geometry argument that serves both to justify an intergovernmental Europe and a federal Europe at the same time. Among the latter, we’d find most of EU officials, especially the president of the European Commission Durao Barroso, who believes that the EU must complete its monetary union with a real economic union. Yet, Barroso opposes the Franco-German…
LONDON | After as many students as police officers on Wednesday ran through the British capital’s central postcodes complaining against tuition fees, we were left wondering that perhaps future and present university pupils aren’t exactly worried about the financial effort necessary to access higher education. The less than 4,000 protesters sought to convince the Liberal-Democrat and Conservative Coalition government led by David Cameron to reverse the trend of increasing costs…