I drive a Ford.. sort of. It's a Volvo XC90... and since Ford owns Volvo these days, I guess it's an American car. It's the third Volvo I've owned in the last 20 years, and I love it. Before you give me grief for driving a large, gas-hogging SUV, let me explain I live in an area that floods during heavy rain, and an SUV's high ground clearance is key to my being able to get home. (And in fact, once before the SUV I almost didn't get home, but that's another story...)
My first car, though, was a Chevy Impala... and I put about a zillion miles on it. The best feature was how solid it seemed. Zipping up the Florida Turnpike at high (and undisclosed) rates of speed was great, because the car felt like it was standing still.
Nightly Business Report and the PBS prime-time program "American Experience" have a terrific working relationship. It was forged several years ago when we produced a series of stories on the Business of Las Vegas to go along with a series AE did called "Las Vegas, An Unconventional History." Its newest project "We Shall Remain" gave us another great opportunity to expand coverage of at topic. "We Shall Remain" is a series of 5 documentaries looking at Native history as a key part of American history. I first saw snippets of the material last spring, at a PBS conference, and was hugely impressed by the scope and power of the project. The prime time stories look back at history, so we decided to look at the present, and future.
With all the brouhaha on Capitol Hill over taxing those big bonuses at AIG, I wondered just what happens to people who took the money, then decided to give it back. After all, they DID get it. Wouldn’t they owe taxes on it in any case, since it was compensation? Okay, so I admit I’m not a tax accountant...
I don’t even do my own taxes (ugh). But I was still curious, so I called in an expert, Kevin McCormally of Kiplinger’s, who is NBR’s tax guru.
While NBR is marking 30 years on the air, I'm about to mark my 15th year with the program. As I look back over that time, it strikes me how much technology has changed over that time... making it easier for us to produce the program, and helping us produce a better program.
15 years ago we used to send an associate producer to the library to do research for stories. Now, all the libraries in the world are on the desktop of everyone in our newsrooms, courtesy of the internet... and information on businesses, governments, and economics is all there for the surfing.
Speaking of computers, 15 years ago, the software we used to get the program on the air was poky and cumbersome. Now, all our bureaus are connected with high-speed lines, making communication easy and instant. I can read show copy from a hotel room in China... and I have.
The crumbling economy has everyone a little crazy these days. Congress and the Administration are working on a formula to cure to what ails the economy.
And while that work continues, Our Washington bureau photographer editor Mike Labella has been wondering about the marketing campaign for the miracle drug we’ll call Fiscalis.
You can watch this clip below (you'll need Flash installed) or on You Tube.
There are many different markers used by investors to gauge volatility and stress in the marketplace... the VIX, the LIBOR rate, the TED spread. In the South Florida newsroom of Nightly Business Report we have another...the Chocolate Chimp Indicator.
This little noted, but often used measure is a key index of stress.. among our employees. That’s the Chocolate Chimp there in the photo.
It’s a ceramic cookie jar that lives in my office and is filled (and re-filled) by me with chocolate. My office door is always open for anyone who feels the need for a little caloric therapy. And I’ve noticed we’ve been plowing through a LOT of calories recently. My usual 2-bag a week shopping item has ballooned into 3 bags a week. And now, we’re chowing through those BIG bags of candy meant for Halloween trick or treaters.
It has been a grueling few months. Banks and brokerages have failed. Home foreclosures have soared. Congress and the Treasury have been mired in the mud over the biggest financial bailout plan in our history. And our problems have spread around the globe, compromising the economies of nations worldwide. Whew!
Our viewers tell us they've been put through the wringer watching all of this unfold... worried about their jobs, their investments, their futures. So... we decided to do something, as the Monty Python guys would say, COMPLETELY different. The clip below is what we came up with...
There used to be an attraction at Disneyworld called Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. It was a terrifying joy ride in which you lurched from disaster to disaster... crashing through walls and a fireplace, careening into trucks, and my personal favorite, a head-on collision with an oncoming train. You were taken on a jarring, manic, havoc-wreaking trip... which wound up in Hell... and eventually spit you back out into the soothing reality of the Magic Kingdom's beautifully manicured grounds. If you were watching business and finance news events over the last 2 weeks, this type of trip will sound eerily familiar.
The last 2 weeks have been a wild ride for everyone who involved in the banking system and the economy... which is just about all of us. If you're saving for retirement, own a mutual fund or individual stocks, have money in the bank (any bank) or money in your wallet, you were swept along on Mr. Paulson's Wild Ride. We have lurched from crisis to crisis... Fannie/Freddie/Merrill/Lehman/WAMU/MoneyMarkets/Morgan/Wachovia... and the list goes on.
It's unusual for Nightly Business Report to be making news, rather than our usual role of reporting and analyzing it. But that's the case today, thanks to Jon Friedman at MarketWatch. His column about our anchor Susie Gharib is generating a lot of buzz on the web. We thought you'd like to read his column yourself.. as well as the comments posted at the end of it.
If you are a faithful viewer of the program (and we hope you are) you've probably noticed Paul's Stocks in the News segment has not had his usual lineup of stock charts in the last few weeks. He mentioned on the air that we're having some computer glitches. But.. the problems have gone on far longer than we anticipated, so it's time for an explanation. I thought this blog would be the best place for everyone to see it.
We use two different services to produce on-air stock charts.. a data provider and a software provider. Several weeks ago, our data provider underwent a HUGE change in how it handle its information, and had to change the ticker symbols for more than 27,000 (yes, that's thousand) stocks and indices. When the new symbols were plugged into the charting software, the two systems refused to work properly together. They're still not working properly together, and so we've been working with both vendors virtually non-stop to get things back to normal.
I drive a Ford.. sort of. It's a Volvo XC90... and since Ford owns Volvo these days, I guess it's an American car. It's the third Volvo I've owned in the last 20 years, and I love it. Before you give me grief for driving a large, gas-hogging SUV, let me explain I live in an area that floods during heavy rain, and an SUV's high ground clearance is key to my being able to get home. (And in fact, once before the SUV I almost didn't get home, but that's another story...)
It’s a ceramic cookie jar that lives in my office and is filled (and re-filled) by me with chocolate. My office door is always open for anyone who feels the need for a little caloric therapy. And I’ve noticed we’ve been plowing through a LOT of calories recently. My usual 2-bag a week shopping item has ballooned into 3 bags a week. And now, we’re chowing through those BIG bags of candy meant for Halloween trick or treaters.
It's unusual for Nightly Business Report to be making news, rather than our usual role of reporting and analyzing it. But that's the case today, thanks to Jon Friedman at MarketWatch. His 
