Developing countries often have hypertrophied bureaucracies, requiring businesses to deal with enormous amounts of red tape.

Corporations hope that the right concept will turn things around overnight. This is what you might call the crash-diet approach: starve yourself for a few days and you'll be thin for life.

Bubbles and crashes are textbook examples of collective decision making gone wrong. In a bubble, all of the conditions that make groups intelligent - independence, diversity, private judgement-disappear.

Developing countries often have hypertrophied bureaucracies, requiring businesses to deal with enormous amounts of red tape.

I think people don't understand compound interest because typically no one ever explains it to them and the level of financial literacy in the US is very low.

In industries where a lot of competitors are selling the same product - mangoes, gasoline, DVD players - price is the easiest way to distinguish yourself. The hope is that if you cut prices enough you can increase your market share, and even your profits. But this works only if your competitors won't, or can't, follow suit.

On Wall Street, fraudulent schemes tend to thrive during economic booms, and to blow up when times turn tough.