“Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Gustave Flaubert
So you start the day full of enthusiasm. You’re excited about a new piece of creative work and itching to put your ideas into action. Firing up your computer, the familiar stream of e-mails pours into your inbox, burying the ones you didn’t get round to replying to yesterday. Scanning through the list, your heart sinks – two of them look as though they require urgent action. You hit ‘reply’ and start typing a response to one of them. 20 minutes later you ‘come round’ and realise you’ve got sucked into the e-mail zone and have been sidetracked by interesting links sent by friends, as well as writing replies about issues that aren’t a priority for you. You minimize the email window and get back to your project.
After 15 minutes you’re really enjoying yourself, getting into your creative flow – when the phone rings. Somebody wants something from you. Something to do with a meeting last week. You rummage through the papers on your desk, searching for your notes. You can’t find them. Suddenly your heart leaps as you lift up a folder and find an important letter you’d forgotten about – it needed an urgent response, several days ago. ‘Hang on, I’ll get back to you’ you tell the person on the phone, ‘I’ll ring you back when I’ve found it’. You put the phone down and pick up the letter – this needs sorting immediately, but you remember why you put it off – it involves several phone calls and hunting through your files for documents you’re not sure you even kept.
The united stated economic crisis affecting the education sector.
Harvard University’s endowment decreased 22 percent, or $8 billion, in the first four months of fiscal 2009, putting the fund on course to have its worst performance in at least four decades.
The decline came in the four months through October, according to a letter dated yesterday by President Drew Faust and Executive Vice President Edward Forst. The endowment, the biggest U.S. education fund, had totaled $36.9 billion on June 30 after gaining 8.6 percent in fiscal 2008. The worst annual return that Harvard, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has recorded in at least 40 years was a loss of 12.2 percent in 1974.
The 22 percent decline, excluding adjustments for real estate and private equity, outperformed the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index of stocks, which fell 24 percent during the same period with dividends included. Faust said the school is making budget plans based on a possible 30 percent investment loss for the year ending June 30. Valuations for the fund’s real estate and private equity holdings have yet to be updated.
“The severe turmoil in the world’s financial markets has affected all major asset classes in which the endowment is invested,” Faust and Forst wrote in the letter. The university also plans to issue “a substantial amount” of taxable fixed- rate debt to help support research and financial aid “as we work to absorb the impact of anticipated losses in revenue,” according to the letter.
Colleges and universities across the U.S. are struggling. The University of Virginia at Charlottesville’s endowment declined about 20 percent, to $4.2 billion, in the four months through October.
News about U.S “deep” recession. The Unites States economy activity is getting worse since Mid-October until now. I post some useful news here, this post come from bloomberg.com.
(Bloomberg – 3 dec) — The U.S. economy weakened across all regions since the middle of October as it became tougher to get loans and demand for credit shrank, the Federal Reserve said in its regional economic survey.
Retail sales, tourism spending and manufacturing declined in most places, housing markets were “weak” and commercial real estate “weakened broadly,” the Fed said today in its Beige Book release, published two weeks before officials meet in Washington to set interest rates.
The report underscores the picture of a downfall that spurred Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley analysts to forecast a contraction in the economy this quarter of about 5 percent. Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and his colleagues may cut interest rates further and consider adopting less conventional policies when they meet Dec. 15-16.
“We are looking at an economy that is not only in a recession, but a recession that is deepening rapidly,” former Fed Governor Lyle Gramley, now senior economic adviser at Stanford Group Co., said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “It certainly is a gloomy report, but not I guess worse than what you would expect given the data coming in.”
This news come from guardian.co.uk, you may read the original post here.
NEW YORK, Dec 3 (Reuters) – U.S. private employers cut 250,000 jobs in November, an unexpectedly large number and the biggest in seven years, while the service sector, which powers most of the economy, posted its worst slump on record.
Wednesday’s reports were the latest signs that the slide in the U.S. job market is nowhere near bottom and suggested Friday’s government payrolls report could exceed current expectations for 320,000 job losses in November.
The Institute for Supply Management said its index of non-manufacturing businesses dropped to the lowest in the survey’s 11-year history, while a record low in its employment gauge raised worries about the payrolls report.
“This is consistent with payrolls falling by about 500,000; let’s hope it is very wrong,” said Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, New York.
ADP Employer Services, a major payroll servicer for the private sector, said private companies cut jobs for a fourth straight month in November.
The Federal Reserve reported economic activity had weakened across the United States since early October, while price pressures eased with declines in retail and energy prices.
“Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Gustave Flaubert
