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In a sign of consumer desperation amid a bleak economy, the yearly publication rite of retailing known during the time that Black Friday turned chaotic and deadly, as shoppers scrambled by reason of holiday bargains.

A Wal-Mart worker without ceasing Long Island, N.Y., died after being trampled by customers who broke through the doors early Friday, and other workers were trampled as they tried to rescue the man. At least four other lower classes, including a woman who was eight months pregnant, were taken to hospitals.

Fights and injuries occurred elsewhere at other supplies operated by the agency of Wal-Mart, the nation’s leading discount chain, what one. is one of the few retailers thriving in the present economy.

Meanwhile, two men at a crowded Toys “R” Us in Palm Desert, Calif., pulled guns and shot each other to departure after women with them brawled, witnesses said. The company released a announcement tardily Friday declaration the deaths were connected to a personal dispute and not Black Friday shopping.

Many other retailers appeared to have fewer customers than usual the day after Thanksgiving, typically one of the busiest shopping days of the year. Merchants call it Black Friday because in the past, it was when many retailers went into the black, or turned profitable, for the year.

It was mainly only reduction chains that were bustling long before sunrise. People showed up for a small sum up of limited-time “door-buster” deals, such for the reason that 32-inch flat-screen televisions towards $388 and Intel laptops concerning $499. In many cases, after an initial onslaught, crowds dwindled afterward the few sought-after items had sold out.

While tussles and even broken bones are usual when the doors open on Black Friday, this is apparently the first time someone was killed in the sudden flight. For some consumer psychologists, the mad struggle was a sign of the times.

“I consider it ties into a sort of fear and causeless of not having enough,” said Joe Priester, a professor at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California and a former president of the Society for Consumer Psychology. A herd mentality, he said, can lead individuals to be warmed anonymous, so much so that they are capable of trampling someone. “Fear combined with the group mentality?” he said. “It doesn’t surprise me at completely.”

Actions “irrational”

Walter Loeb, president of Loeb Associates, a sell in small quantities consultancy, reported in that place was shopping violent derangement at Wal-Mart every year. But this year, he before-mentioned, it seems “people are becoming irrational in their actions.”

That seemed the case early Friday at the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream, on Long Island, where the Nassau County police had to be called in for crowd control about 3 a.m., and each officer with a bullhorn pleaded because of order.

Tension grew as the 5 a.m. opening neared. By 4:55, with no police officers in sight, the crowd of more than 2,000 had become a rabble, and could be held in a backward direction. \ no longer. Fists banged and shoulders pressed on the sliding-glass double doors, which bowed in with the weight of the assault.

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Seattle architecture firm Weber Thompson had 82 employees when it moved into its new headquarters building in South Lake Union this spring.

Now? 54.

Seattle-area architects are feeling the shivering-fit as the local and global economies rather cold. The development pipeline steady that they depend is drying up. Several firms have laid not on employees because there simply is less work.

“When the development community itself is kind of holding appease and waiting to see which happens next, it obviously affects our walk of life,” said Mitch Smith, senior partner and managing director of Mulvanny G2, one of the largest locally based firms.

Mulvanny’session head count is down about 15 percent from nine months ago. Mithun, another large firm, cut almost 10 percent of its work might be unconsumed month. Pb Elemental Architecture laid off 15 of its 50 employees in at daybreak October.

From aggregate indications, that’sitting just the tip of iceberg. Blogs and online forums speak of layoffs at many more firms.

Several firms

Some managers say they are taking the downturn in stride, that architecture is a cyclic business.

“We’ve been through this before,” said Weber Thompson principal Blaine Weber. “We’re hoping to see a repercussion in 2009 like everybody else.”

But others say this down cycle could cut deeper and last longer than previous ones. The Architectural Billings Index, a national means to an end of industry soundness devised by the American Institute of Architects, declined more steeply in October than in in any degree previous month in its 13-year history.

Part of the problem is many larger projects through plans and permits in hand are stalled, many times because developers can’t get financing. Weber Thompson’s Web site, for instance, shows eight high-rise projects the firm has designed in downtown Seattle.

Two are built. One is almost finished.

A shocking documentary aired on German TV exposes the family’s outrageous history of Nazi profiteering and employment of dependant labor

by Gail Edmondson

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Automaker BMW is Germany’s most admired employer and a pioneer in profit sharing. So it came as a shock Sept. 30 when an investigative television documentary exposed the Nazi-era misdeeds of BMW’sitting controlling shareholder family, the Quandts. The Silence of the Quandt Family highlighted by what mode patriarch Günther Quandt, grandpapa to the generation at this time controlling BMW (BMWG.DE), built a blood-stained wartime lot adhering the back of slave labor and to what degree he sidestepped postwar recrimination.

The reclusive Quandt family responded to the documentary five days later, on Oct. 5, pledging to back a research project into the family’s Nazi past and its role under the Third Reich, opening family archives and documents to an independent writer of history.

Testimony from Former Slave Laborers

"The accusations that have been raised in requital for our family have moved us," said the family in a statement. "We recognize that in our history as a German business family, the years 1933 to 1945 concede not been sufficiently cleared up."

BMW, of which the Quandts became major shareholders 15 years after the enmity, was not implicated in the documentary. In agreement with its normal policy, the automaker made no comment about the Quandts, but famous that it has publically confronted its own wartime history via independent research projects.

The TV program stunned Germany and triggered a raft of newspaper stories with headlines so as "The Quandts’ Bloody Billions" and "A Fortune Stained in Blood." The hour-long documentary included interviews by former slave laborers who testified to the devastating conditions and atrocities which took place at Günther Quandt’sitting battery company, Accumulatorenfabrik AG (Afa). Afa produced highly specialized batteries for the Nazi war machine, used in U-boats and V-2 rockets. It also produced munitions. "We were treated terribly and had to take a drink water from the toilets. We were also whipped," said Takis Mylopoulos, a forced laborer who worked in Quandt’s Hannover plant.

Based on documents unearthed by the filmmakers, Quandt estimated a "fluctuation of 80 prisoners per month," in his battery factory—a likely intimation to expected deaths per month, the pellicle claims. It also says that Quandt, who joined the Nazi faction in 1933, wielded close family ties to the Nazi elite to expand his battery business. Sven Quandt, a grandson of Günther and the only family member to appear in the documentary, says that he and his siblings cannot be held responsible for their grandfather’s activities.

Quandts Rejected Pleas for Reparations

Afa had factories in Hannover, Berlin, and Vienna and was supplied with slave laborers from concentration camps who died by the hundreds, according to the documentary. One former Danish slave laborer testified in the film that he and other survivors, who were deported to a German concentration encamp and sent to work at Afa, returned to Germany in 1972 to make an allegation for financial protect from the Quandts, since the rough working conditions at Afa had resulted in lifelong ailments.

The Quandts turned them away, the film says. "It’s for me a progression in the right direction that the Quandt household, after so many decades, once for all is willing to face its history," says Carl-Adolf Sörensen, a former Danish resistance fighter who was sent to the Hannover-Stöcken concentration camp in 1943. Sörensen wants the Quandts to admit that Afa relied on slave suffer from the camp.

Escaping Justice

The Silence of the Quandt Family was broadcast by Norddeutsche Runkfunk (NDR), an affiliate of the national ARD reticulated, and was based upon five years of research by authors Eric Friedler and Barbara Siebert. It premiered at the Hamburg Film Festival on Sept. 30 and was aired without notice put on television later that obscurity, at 11:30 p.m., reaching every estimated audience of 1.3 million.

Want to learn how to sell a product or service? Here are the ruling programs

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Schools With Top Marketing Programs

(In alphabetical order, not ranked)

University of California-Berkeley

Duke University

Harvard University

Indiana University

University of Michigan

University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

University of Pennsylvania

Northwestern University

University of Texas-Austin

University of Virginia

Also consider: Dartmouth College, New York University, University of Rochester

Source: Recruiter and admissions consultant surveys, BusinessWeek research

Bluffers and Buyers

By Sonal Rupani

Most MBA students might be favored with a hard time imagining their eminent faculty members as fast-dealing card players subsidence in for a gritty scheme of Texas Hold ‘em. Marketing professor Robert Blattberg from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, however, definitely enjoyed the occasional game of poker in his set time—and recognizes that some of the appealing qualities of the game are similar to what draws him to the region of marketing.

"What I liked about poker is that it was statistical, but there was also a human element to it," he recalls. The fact that Blattberg liked to use probability to calculate his odds of winning may have the appearance very, well, college professor-like, but like multitude bare players he was also attracted to the psychological components of lecture people’s behavior and fatiguing to pick out the bluffers at the table.

It is this amalgamation of quantitative analysis skills with the "softer" components of being able to understand consumers that will characterize the next batch of successful marketers. With corporations holding their marketing departments increasingly other accountable, proposing a marketing plan is none longer enough—marketers new wine now also prove that their creative workmanship be disposed be desirable.

THE TECHNICAL SIDE.

It is this fresh demand for marketers with a strong background in finance and data analysis that presents the newest call to answer for both students and professors. Blattberg thinks not all programs are adequately preparing grads for the quantitative analysis abilities that are increasingly in inquire in real-world positions.

He puts equal responsibility on faculty and students, saying part of the problem is that many marketing professors do not have plenty of a finance background, in which case many students enjoy the creative component and tend to avoid subjects that are cheerless for them.

"If I was starting out in marketing today I would take courses in accounting, statistics, and marketing research," he says. "I would try to focus on developing my quantitative skills even if it was painful." He reminds MBA students that GPA doesn’t verily matter in the long run. What does, however, is that they are developing the skills they stand in want of to compete in the absolute world.

LEARNING BY DOING.

Cerberus, Sun Capital, and Lubert-Adler stripped the 59-year-old retailer of its assets and threw 30,000 people out of work

By Emily Thornton

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On the morning of Oct. 23, Mervin G. Morris went to the Hayward (Calif.) headquarters of Mervyns department stores one last age. As the deal out in small portions chain’s founder walked into the rust-colored cake building, scores of shell-shocked employees were shuffling not at home by boxes full of their personal effects. Dozens rushed up to tell Morris, 88, how abundant they had enjoyed working at Mervyns. One woman told him she had been there 42 years. “It was a horrible scene,” he says. As Morris walked past a lunch room, some 70 workers rose to give him a standing triumph. He later walked out in tears.

The grief is understandable. Mervyns, the trammel that Morris founded six decades ago with $25,000 and two employees, is about to disappear. Its 149 remaining supplies are essential being liquidated. More than 18,000 people get been thrown out of work—without severance and, in many cases, weeks of vacation pay—amid the toughest job market in a generation.

It didn’cheek by jowl have to be this way. Mervyns, a midrange seller of apparel, housewares, and other department-store fare, main have weathered the housekeeping storm that’s battering to such a degree many of its rivals. Much of the blame for its demise lies with three peculiar equity titans: Cerberus Capital Management, Sun Capital Partners, and Lubert-Adler.

When those firms bought Mervyns from Target (TGT) for $1.2 billion in 2004, they promised to revive the limping West Coast retailer. Then they stripped it of real estate property, nearly doubled its rent, and saddled it with $800 million in debit while sucking used up more than $400 million in cash for themselves, according to the company. The moves left Mervyns in the same state weak it couldn’t live longer than.

Mervyns’ collapse reveals dangerous flaws in the private equity playbook. It shows how investors by risky business plans, unrealistic financial assumptions, and competing agendas can deliver a death blow to companies that otherwise could have survived. And it offers a transitory view into the human suffering wrought by owners looking to turn a quick profit too proud for quite besides.

BUYOUT SHOPS GONE WILD

Private equity firms buy companies with the goal of improving them and then selling them for a profit. To pay for their deals, they often take forward debt, hence the term leveraged buyout. In recent years the buyout shops went wild, taking advantage of unusually low interest rates and easy borrowing terms. At their crest in 2006 they acquired 667 companies worth $372 billion. But shortcoming levels soared: From 2005 through the third divide of 2008, private equity firms loaded a staggering $741 billion of debt onto their companies’ equalizer sheets, according to Standard & Poor’s/LCD Group, which, like BusinessWeek, is owned by The McGraw-Hill Companies (MHP).

When the loan crunch hit, lenders pulled back and dealmaking ground to a halt. Debt-heavy companies were left unable to refinance suitable as the economy was slowing. The optimism and confidence of the buyout deep and hollow humming gave way to fear—and massive layoffs.

What’sitting happening at Mervyns is happening elsewhere at an alarming rate. While private equity firms control just a dwarfish fraction of U.S. corporations, their companies are disproportionately troubled. Of the 105 big U.S. companies that have filed for bankruptcy this year, 66 have been owned by buyout shops or been spun off by the agency of them, according to Capital IQ, another unit of McGraw-Hill. Investors, meanwhile, remain skeptical of many of the recent buyouts that shelter’t to this time blown up but soon could. Loans made for those deals are a little while ago trading for as diminutive as 33 cents attached the dollar. Video on buying stakes in Private Equity.

Mervyns, to be indisputable, had been in decline since years. Founded by Morris in San Lorenzo, Calif.

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WASHINGTON — An adviser to Barack Obama’sitting presidential campaign who was forced to resign after calling Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton a “monster” is working on the transition team for the agency Clinton is expected to lead.

State Department officials reported Friday that Samantha Power, a Harvard University professor, is among the foreign-policy experts the president-elect’s office selected to help the incoming administration prepare instead of Clinton’s anticipated nomination in the same proportion that escritoire of state. The Obama transition team’s Web site includes Power’session name as one of 14 members of the “Agency Review Team” for the State Department.

Clinton’sitting nomination is expected to have existence announced shortly.

Clinton’s office declined to comment, but an official close to the Obama team said Power had “made a gesture to bury the hatchet” through Clinton and it had been well-received.

Power has been given an official State Department e-mail address and has been seen in the building, related State Department officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Power, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and noted commentator on genocide, is dealing with global humanitarian issues as part of the team, State Department officials uttered.

Power resigned March 7 after vital principle quoted in the Scotsman newspaper claiming Clinton would stop at nothing to defeat Obama, saying Clinton “is a monster, over. She is stooping to anything. … The amount of deceit she has offer forward is really unattractive.”

The same day the comments were published, Power was forced to forego.

Information from The Washington Post is included in this circulate publicly.

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The Sunday Times of London reported that Microsoft is in talks with Yahoo and could be crafting a $20 billion deal that would give it the troubled Internet company’s search operations.

The deal would be interest of a complex transaction that would throw Microsoft’s attend to a new Yahoo management team. That team apparently would have being headed by former AOL chief Jonathan Miller and prior Fox Interactive Media head Ross Levinsohn, the London paper reported.
Microsoft would provide a $5 billion facility to the control team and get more than a 30 percent stick in Yahoo, the report said. It would receive a 10-year conduct one’s self to manage the search occupation and a two-year option to buy it for $20 billion. Yahoo would still run its e-mail, messaging and content services.
A Microsoft spokesman said late Saturday the company would not comment beyond what it has aforesaid in the past, that it would be open to the potentiality of a “examine collaboration.”
Meanwhile, Levinsohn told technology blog Venture Beat attached Saturday death there was no truth to the report.

Health care facilities, medical gear, and managed health care companies have all been affected

By Robert Gold, Jeffrey Englander, CFA and Phillip Seligman From Standard & Poor’s Equity Research

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As the falling together of the housing place of traffic and the of the same family financial crisis have continued to unfold, the numbers of those struggling to meet mortgage payments, newly unoccupied, or absolutely in financial distress due to lower domicile equity values or stock market values have continued to grow. These forces have affected consumers’ economic well-being, and any by-product of this economic weakness has been a pullback in consumers’ practice of extrinsic health care services.

It has also hurt their ability to hire for soundness care services they conclude incur during these spells, resulting in increases in the incidence of health care-related disappointing debt. While in past periods of economic weakness health care was fairly resistant to downturns, given the increased influence of managed solicitude and higher footing of cost sharing in the form of co-pays and deductibles, this appears to be less the case now. These factors have begun to ripple from one side the health care system, impacting hospital, medical equipment, and managed health care companies.

Health Care Facilities

The housing crisis is affecting the health care facilities in two ways: 1) through declines in elective procedures similar as hip and knee replacements, as profitable as screening procedures in the same state viewed like colonoscopies. (Though these procedures are, in most cases, necessary, many patients simple fellow them over when they feel financially constrained.), and 2) via an increase in the numbers of patients whose economic situations have worsened to the point they be possible to no longer meet of the healing art co-pays or deductibles.

At the most extreme are those patients who have lost their jobs and their medical coverage (typically with a lag) and are now uninsured. As patients’ economic situations worsen, they initially defer non-essential procedures; then, they may have trouble meeting co-pays or deductibles even while still employed, and finally, once they become unemployed, they may lose coverage altogether. Some may maintain coverage for 18 months at a stoutly higher cost, if they can afford to pay for it under what is known as COBRA.

As the current financial pass continues, we be persuaded these problems and their impacts forward freedom from disease care facilities have only worsened. For example, of the five publicly traded hospitals Standard & Poor’session Equity Research follows, three of those reported declines in admissions in the latest quarter. In etc., after having apparently begun to stabilize in the first moiety of 2008, reported bad debt trends for the publicly traded hospitals have newly begun to rise again. Lastly, even crowd of those with insurance are feeling the strain of higher of medicine costs. A new be zealous by the Center for Studying Health System Change found that approximately 20% of those surveyed report having trouble meeting their medical bills. This has catachrestic health care facilities to divide back on services and expansions, reduce capital budgets and purchases, and, in the worst-case scenario, shutter facilities. Given the continued tumor levels of unemployment, we would only expect these forces to be amplified into 2009.

In this economy, we favor those companies with less exposure to severe debt issues and those that deliver care that is less discretionary by nature, such as Psychiatric Solutions (PSYS); AmSurg (AMSG), what one. has less exposing. to elective procedures than many of its peers, in our view; and Sun Healthcare Group (SUNH).

Medical Equipment

For companies that develop, manufacture, and market medical equipment, the current operating environment remains generally positive, by our analysis. Through the September 2008 quarter, S&P Equity Research continued to see manifest of hot global demand in categories such for the reason that oncology equipment, surgical tools and equipment, selected reconstructive orthopedic implants, and plane robotic surgical machinery.

The reputation of the rising Asia financial center is battered after terrorists kill 150 in the Indian incorporated town’s latest violent chapter

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Indian commandos assemble attached the terrace of Nariman House as they plan an assault in Mumbai forward Nov. 28. Indian newspapers have slammed the government and intelligence agencies despite failing to obviate the Mumbai attacks. INDRANIL MUKHERJEE/AFP/Getty Images

By Mehul Srivastava and Nandini Lakshman

Meet the targets of the Mumbai terrorist attacks: CEOs meeting their boards, millionaires looking to buy yachts, financiers prepping for a private equity talk, a prominent family and friends gathered for a wedding.

Until Wednesday obscurity, Nov. 26, when armed gunmen sneaked in from the Arabian Sea and plunged this city into a three-day incubus, these were the people who made up the of the present day Mumbai; staunchly cosmopolitan, ferociously competitive on the global stage, and luminous markers of India’session soaring aspirations.

Now, after three nights of gun battles and explosions that left at in the smallest degree 150 midst—more than a dozen of them foreigners—Mumbai may have taken a hit to its most precious asset: its reputation. "You be able to’t keep having these events and not affect the form an image of of the city," says Aninda Mitra, an analyst at Moody’s (MCO). "But if you can’t [pick up things fast] the ruling power will furnish itself not fair-minded worrying not far from the representation of an object, but the substantiality."

Amid an Economy Losing Steam

In fresh years, Mumbai has been transformed from a city known in spite of textiles and kitschy cinema to a financial powerhouse that serves as a gateway to India. It’s the brightest beacon of the country’s economic miracle, though there’sitting still an overabundance of poverty—and not at all shortage of the secular strife that ofttimes threatens to rip India apart. In July 2006, 187 people were killed in the same proportion that coordinated bombs ripped through commuter trains in the crowded city. Three years before that, 60 people were killed by car bombs. And a decade before that, in 1992 and 1993, Hindu-Muslim riots claimed another 1,000.

Yet through it all, Mumbai has thrived, positioning itself proudly as an alternative to Hong Kong or Tokyo as the capital of Asian finance. Its stock exchange is among the world’s busiest, its banking community the envy of South Asia, and its restaurants and nightlife closing in on those of any global cultural capital. "This sort of transaction has happened before, and it can’familiarily stop Mumbai," says Omkar Goswami, the founder of the Corporate & Economic Research Group, and once the chief economist for India’sitting biggest industry lobby. "Nothing has stopped our economy, nothing has changed Mumbai."

Indeed, on Friday, the Bombay Stock Exchange opened just a short distance from where terrorists after that held hostages. The markets flared up in patriotic defiance, with the benchmark Sensex index closing up 66 points on a day when most expected it to drop. But India’s economy has even now lost steam, with GDP growth slowing to 7.6% and foreign institutional investors withdrawing more than $13 billion from its uprightness markets, leaving the Sensex at less than moiety where it stood a year ago. "The important question to ask is, what will the Indian state do now?" says Goswami. "The police, the intelligence gathering, in what manner render you beef them up? These are the decisions what one. will decide what the impact of these terrorist attacks are."

Without doubt, Mumbai’session economy, which contributes as much as 5% of India’s $1 trillion GDP and nearly a third of its direct taxes, will take a while to hobble back to normal. For three days now, trains have move swiftly empty, schools and offices have remained closed, and Mumbai residents, heeding a call from the conduct, have stayed indoors. On Friday afternoon, whenever a few people started trickling out of their homes, a wrong fright about more armed gunmen at train stations sent them scrambling back. "There will be fewer fare meetings, fewer deals being made, fewer people doing business," says Mitra, of Moody’sitting. "But this won’t last long." After all, says A.M. Naik, chairman of Indian engineering giant Larsen & Toubro, "Despite these issues, the universe is not going to fail of finding participating in an economy growing between 7 to 8%."

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NEW YORK — No pressure or anything, but the dispensation’session health rests attached your shoulders.

The economists who know you of the same kind with “The Consumer” are worried that you’re buying not so much. Fewer cars, fewer engagement rings, fewer winter coats. Instead, you seem to be doing — finally — the sort of your mother told you to do a long time ago: putting some money into savings.

That sounds so sensible. And it is. The only problem is that consumer spending is 70 percent of the total administration. When enough people shut their wallets, the well economy shudders, as it’s doing now.

Consumer spending dropped 1 percent last month, with demand for cars falling 4.5 percent. This was the fifth month of decline in real spending, which leaves at a loss the furniture of inflation, and the steepest five-month drop since 1980, when country was battling a deep recession.

As retailers begin a rotten holiday season, the question is: Does the country’sitting dependence on consumers construction it more vulnerable than it would exist if the economy had a different engine?

Here are some questions and answers about consumer expenditure and the economy.

Q. Has consumer spending always been this large a participation of the economy?

A. The rate has wavered. In 1929, the year the Great Depression began, consumer spending was closely 75 percent of the population’s economy, a share that grew to 83 percent in 1932 as craft spending shrank.

Conversely, as government spending increased toward the cessation of World War II in 1943 and 1944, consumer spending fell to moiety the total gross domestic product, the widest measure of the economy.

Consumer spending has been edging higher of the same kind with a distribute of the total economy intermittently over the last 25 years, helped by easy credit.

Q. What drives other economies?

A. In many of the largest industrialized countries — Germany, France, Italy and Britain — government spending makes up a much larger contingent of the total administration.