Portal:Business

Finn Michael Westby Caspersen, Sr. (October 27, 1941 – September 7, 2009) was an American financier and philanthropist. A graduate of Brown University and Harvard Law School, he followed his father, Olaus Caspersen, a Norwegian immigrant to the United States, as chairman and chief executive of Beneficial Corporation, one of the largest consumer finance companies in the United States. After an $8.6 billion acquisition of Beneficial by Household International in 1998, Caspersen ran Knickerbocker Management, a private financial firm overseeing the assets of trusts and foundations.

Reykjavík

The economy of Iceland is small and subject to high volatility. In 2011, gross domestic product was US$12 billion, but by 2018 it had increased to a nominal GDP of US$27 billion. With a population of 387,000, this is $55,000 per capita, based on purchasing power parity (PPP) estimates. The 2008–2011 Icelandic financial crisis produced a decline in GDP and employment that has since been reversed entirely by a recovery aided by a tourism boom starting in 2010. Tourism accounted for more than 10% of Iceland's GDP in 2017. After a period of robust growth, Iceland's economy is slowing down according to an economic outlook for the years 2018–2020 published by Arion Research in April 2018.

Iceland has a mixed economy with high levels of free trade and government intervention. However, government consumption is less than other Nordic countries. Hydro-power is the primary source of home and industrial electrical supply in Iceland. (Full article...)

"Men who promoted these large corporations were in many cases financiers or merchants, who previously had dealt almost exclusively with money and goods. They had bought in the cheapest markets and sold at the best price they could get. Their natural tendency, therefore, was to apply to the purchase of labor the same rules which they had applied to the purchase of materials, namely, to buy it as cheaply as possible. The great difficulty which stood in the way of accomplishing this result was that there was no exact means of measuring the labor received, and the best that could be done was to buy a man's time, on the theory that time consumed was a measure of labor performed. While this is in a measure correct if the workman feels that he is being equitably rewarded for the work done, it may be far from correct when he does not have this feeling. When he realizes, as is often the case, that the employer, taking advantage of his necessity, gives him the smallest hourly rate he can be hired for, he naturally does only just enough work to hold his job.

Moreover, there has seldom been any attempt to keep a record of the work any man did in order that a more equitable compensation might be accorded him; and, whether he did much or little, he was accorded the hourly rate of wages common to his class. The railroad companies, perhaps more than any other organizations, have offended in this manner, and the rates of wages, which they were willing to pay for different classes of workmen were not only fixed by employers, but maintained with all their power. A mechanic, therefore, had but little chance of getting a higher compensation than his class rate, no matter how industrious or conscientious he might be.

The introduction of piece work, by which the workman was paid for the work he did, instead of the time he worked, promised better results; but, as piece prices were commonly set on a basis of what had been done by a man dissatisfied with his daily wage, it soon became clear that the men could do much more work than had been done, and earned correspondingly higher wages, with the result that the employer reduced the price per piece. This "cutting" of piece prices was common practice whenever the workman earned much more than his class rate; and the capable workman, recognizing the impossibility of increasing his compensation through more, or better work, soon ceased to make any effort in that direction, and devoted his spare time to the organization of a union with the object of advancing the class rate."

—Henry Gantt, Industrial Leadership, 1916

• ... that railroad transportation executive William Phillips Hall was known as the "business millionaire evangelist"?
• ... that Peachtree Arcade, a shopping arcade in the U.S. state of Georgia, was conceived after a local businessman visited the Cleveland Arcade?
• ... that Garretson, South Dakota, was named after businessman Arthur Samuel Garretson?
• ... that new employees of a business headquartered in the Editors Building chose their office decorations from a 7,000-piece collection of historic memorabilia of Washington, D.C.?
• ... that Earle M. Chiles, a businessman and philanthropist from Portland, Oregon, was also a senator of the board of Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany?
• ... that Selling Mother's Milk is a book which discusses the 18th-century practice of some parents in France giving their children to wet nurses for a year or more?

June 11:

• 1894 - Kiichiro Toyoda, a Japanese businessman, founder of Toyota, was born on this day.

• ...that in the United States of America the largest reserve requirement for commercial banks is 10% of liabilities?

• ...that the United States Federal Reserve System uses six monetary aggregates as components of the money supply?

• ...that an open market operation is an activity by a central bank to buy or sell government bonds on the open market?

• ...that, although nominal USA national debt has been steadily increasing since 1940, Debt-to-GDP ratio was actually higher during WWII than it is now?

• ... that the United States debt ceiling has been steadily raised since 1981?

• ... the Federal Reserve owns the largest share of the USA national debt?

• ...the term petrodollars was coined by Ibrahim Oweiss to describe dollars that did not circulate inside the United States, and therefore were not part of the normal money supply, and instead were received by petroleum exporting countries (OPEC) in exchange for oil?

Wikinews Economy and business portal

• July 21: Technological University Dublin senior lecturer Dr Lorcan Sirr speaks to Wikinews on housing market in Ireland
• July 15: California governor signs new state budget, eligible Californians to get stimulus payments
• July 4: 130 OECD countries agree to back global corporate tax rate
• June 30: 'Each makes the other more difficult to recover from': University of Sussex professor L. Alan Winters speaks to Wikinews on trade, COVID-19, Brexit
• June 16: Wikinews interviews Victor Kline, leader of newly registered The New Liberals party in Australia
• April 23: Irish Finance Minister Donohoe criticises OECD's global minimum corporate tax rate
• April 17: People protest in Berlin against German Court overturning five-year rent cap
• March 5: Chancellor Rishi Sunak announces UK budget 2021
• February 10: Disney to shut down Blue Sky Studios, animation studio behind 'Ice Age'
• January 24: World Trade Organization declares US tariff hike illegal, rules in South Korea's favour