Let's use 'telework' to grease economy

July 4, 2008

One superhighway is jammed and expensive. The other is open and cheap.

Recent columns

• Fed is bit player in global economy

  July 2, 2008

  The business press paints the Federal Reserve as omnipotent. Maybe once it was. But events are likely to prove it has lost some of its mojo.

• Bartlett's investing choices glitter

  June 27, 2008

  The winner of the Maryland Congressional Delegation Investment-Picking Contest, held annually in this space since 2003, "just got lucky" last year, his spokeswoman suggests.

• Jobs may unravel

  June 25, 2008

  Foreign competition and state regulation haven't completely wiped out Maryland's once-storied needle-trade industry, but the Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation is working on it.

• Monkey business at PJM system

  June 20, 2008

  Two days ago, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan said she had evidence a company called Edison Mission Energy continued a suspicious pattern of wholesale electricity trading long after it claimed to have stopped.

• Ready for rumble at TVI meeting

  June 18, 2008

  TVI Corp.'s directors would have more credibility in arguing for the status quo if the company's shares had traded for more than 50 cents any time recently.

• Hang up on Alltel, Verizon alliance

  June 13, 2008

  It's easy to understand why Alltel Wireless' private equity owners want to flip the company to Verizon Wireless for no profit less than a year after they bought it. Thanks to the credit boom's collapse, they'd have to search long and hard for any other buyer at any price.

• Larsen made progress, but more work remains

  June 11, 2008

  In what proved to be his grand finale as Public Service Commission chairman, Steven B. Larsen filed a 212-page salvo last week petitioning federal regulators to cut wholesale electricity prices in in Maryland and a dozen other states.

• A 'ZZZ+' rating for U.S. economy

  June 6, 2008

  A news story we might read soon:

• Let Md. focus on firms it has now

  June 4, 2008

  It's as plain as the steely resolve in Gov. Martin O'Malley's eyes that something interesting is about to happen to the Department of Business and Economic Development.

• Electric controls nearing a return

  May 28, 2008

  Today's Public Service Commission hearing on electricity-price increases for convenience stores, doctors' offices and other small commercial users might look like an obscure business-to-business squabble, but don't be fooled.

• Collapse unlikely in spook industry

  May 23, 2008

  Last year's embarrassing leak of spy-budget details gave insight into just how lucrative the business of federal contracting has become since the 2001 terrorist attacks and the 2003 start of the Iraq war.

• Energy inquiry has soft landing

  May 21, 2008

  Call me cynical, but it sure seems like Edison Mission Marketing & Trading had something to hide.

• Some deals are better avoided

  May 14, 2008

  Disingenuous and naive. That's the portrayal of Chicago's Bouchard brothers, the proto-Andrew Carnegies who almost bought the Sparrows Point steel mill, in a lawsuit stemming from the deal's collapse.

• Living will can lessen the pain

  May 9, 2008

  Sure, fill out a living will because it might let you and your loved ones avoid heartache and agony at the end of your life. But here's another reason: It'll potentially save your heirs and society tens of thousands of dollars.

• Actions more important than words at Legg

  May 7, 2008

  Legg Mason CEO Mark R. Fetting is "gratified to see some daylight on the horizon." There is "some performance improvement" in Legg's mutual funds, he told analysts on yesterday's conference call. "The fundamentals are encouraging."

• Airline mergers much nonsense

  May 2, 2008

  If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, book dates with a shrink for CEOs Richard Anderson and Doug Steenland.

• Boomers planting a debt bomb

  April 30, 2008

  The biggest U.S. financial crisis isn't the housing crunch. It's the government debt bomb being planted by baby boomers to explode in the faces of their children and grandchildren

• J. Bank plays it close to the vest

  April 25, 2008

  Jos. A. Bank Clothiers stock has fallen by nearly half since last spring. The menswear chain is defending itself against two shareholder lawsuits. Analysts worry it might get squeezed between a falling economy and rising costs. "Short sellers," who will profit if the shares fall further, are betting on it.

• Power: Same old thing best deal

  April 23, 2008

  Jennifer and Rob Brewington of Glenwood switched to an alternative electricity supplier two years ago, saved a few dollars and figured they would renew when the deal expired in June. That was before they checked the details.

• Bet on oil as the newest bubble

  April 18, 2008

  The Fed is printing money to clean up the housing bubble, which was fueled by the money it printed to clean up the Internet bubble. The only question is what kind of bubble the new money will inflate.

• Executive-pay disclosure rules are a failure

  April 16, 2008

  Last year, SEC Chairman Christopher Cox pleaded with corporations to use "plain English" in reporting executive pay and avoid "the legalese and the jargon" that make proxy statements more like insurance policies than helpful guides for shareholders.

• Ferris missed a chance to act

  April 11, 2008

  David A. Dadante was making questionable stock trades almost immediately after Ferris Baker Watts took him on as a client in early 2003.

• Openness needed in electricity market

  April 9, 2008

  When bids from power providers to provide electricity to BGE households flunked a test to ensure fair prices two years ago, Maryland regulators changed the rules and approved high offers anyway, a new report shows.

• Point's future is up to Annapolis

  March 26, 2008

  The global economy has done its part: Russia's OAO Severstal has agreed to buy the Sparrows Point steel mill and invest in badly needed upgrades.

• Primary voters have real choices

  February 8, 2008

  Critics of American politics - generally from the left - often say there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans.

• Soul-searching at Ferris

  September 12, 2007

  So Stifel Financial and a few other companies are interested in buying Ferris Baker Watts. No big news there. Ferris has been getting buyout feelers for years.

• It's still possible to get a deal on BGE power

  June 10, 2007

  Worried about the 50 percent price increase for BGE electricity that took effect June 1? Here's where to buy juice for less - and save maybe $200 a year or more.

• Fixing Md.'s deregulation will be harder than its start

  May 27, 2007

  You thought Steve Larsen could mutter an incantation, lift his eyes to heaven and make BGE's electricity-price increase vanish?

• Being free of Mittal is a good thing for the Point

  February 21, 2007

  Getting sold by Mittal Steel might be the best thing to happen to Sparrows Point in a long, long time.

• Ground rent law violates the principles of due process, fair play

  December 13, 2006

  Because Deloris McNeil missed paying a $96-a-year ground rent bill, she lost the Fayette Street house she had bought for $44,500 and lived in for years. The tiny, delinquent bill morphed into creditor-seizure powers that trumped fair play, common sense and fundamental rights.

• However it's spun, Baltimore is losing a headquarters

  December 20, 2005

  As sales of key corporate citizens to out-of-town landlords go, the merger of Constellation Energy with FPL Group isn't that bad. So why are they trying to spin us like a dynamo in a heat wave?

• U.S. probes grant to city nonprofit

  October 2, 2005

  The U.S. Education Department's inspector general is investigating whether a senior official of the agency improperly helped the National Federation of the Blind win a key federal grant around the time she was discussing taking a job at the Baltimore-based nonprofit.

• Big rise in Md. tax revenue is partly credited to home sales

  July 31, 2005

  WHAT'S BEHIND the surprising spurt in Maryland tax collections and what Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. calculates is a billion-dollar budget surplus?

• Reform goes back to start on nonprofit boondoggle

  July 20, 2005

  FAITHFUL READERS know about a $2 billion federal boondoggle called the Javits-Wagner- O'Day program, which pays peanuts to disabled people working on no-bid government contracts, enriches nonprofit executives and operates with little oversight or control.

• A warning to charitable donors and a case for tougher disclosure laws on nonprofits

  June 19, 2005

  RIIIING. IT'S the National Federation of the Blind of Oregon, calling across that state. They want money "to help the blind of the area," according to a fund-raising script from 2003.

• Nonprofits seem in no big hurry to fix their problems

  March 2, 2005

  The nonprofit-industrial complex knows it has a problem.

• Chimes, other charities are object of badly needed reform

  December 5, 2004

  FEDERAL authorities have launched a tax probe of Baltimore-based Chimes Inc. and have proposed sweeping governance standards, including executive salary limits, for Chimes and other nonprofit groups that get $2 billion annually from taxpayers to employ the disabled.

• The lights start to flash at end of the blackout

  August 20, 2003

  IN ECONOMICS there's a heads for every tails, a pull for every push, and the happy reciprocal of the Blackout of 2003 will be the purchase of billions of dollars' worth of electrical transmission hardware.

• Citigroup gets a black eye in Rusnak caper

  May 28, 2003

  JUST WHEN you thought it was safe to walk down Wall Street again without two Dobermans to repel the white-collar muggers, Allied Irish Banks brings new allegations of misdeeds against Bank of America and Citigroup.

• Bailout pays airlines for years of bad management

  September 30, 2001

  AS HE pursued his doomed merger with United Airlines earlier this year, US Airways chief executive Rakesh Gangwal said "there is no Plan B" if regulators were to block the deal.