A consumer-finance agency is a good thing, but it would do well to teach consumers a simple lesson: if you don't understand the deal you're making, don't make it.

What the investment community does like is short-term measures designed to boost share prices.

Movies' mistrust of capitalism is almost as old as the medium itself.

The history of the Internet is, in part, a series of opportunities missed: the major record labels let Apple take over the digital-music business; Blockbuster refused to buy Netflix for a mere fifty million dollars; Excite turned down the chance to acquire Google for less than a million dollars.

Publishers, naturally, loathe used books and have developed strategies to depress the secondhand market. They bring out new, even more expensive editions of popular textbooks every three to four years, in a classic cycle of planned obsolescence.

In the business world, bad news is usually good news - for somebody else.

One key to successful group decisions is getting people to pay much less attention to what everyone else is saying.