| Mike Pierce named VP at Allen Agency
CAMDEN (March 17): The Allen Agency, the Camden-based, employee-owned insurance and financial services company, is pleased to announce the appointment of J. Michael Pierce as a vice president of the company. The Allen Agency stockholders made the decision at their annual meeting in December.
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Stanford Business School Research Examines Linkage Between Return ...
STANFORD, Calif., March 16 (AScribe Newswire) -- For years, return on investment (ROI) and related financial accounting ratios have been widely used as key measures of business profitability. But what three accounting professors from the Stanford Graduate School of Business recently discovered was that, despite its widespread acceptance, the economic meaning of the ROI metric has only been vaguely understood. The idea for their study arose through a casual conversation between faculty colleagues Stefan Reichelstein and Mark Soliman. Reichelstein, the William R. Timken Professor of Business who specializes in managerial accounting, asked Soliman, a financial accountant and an assistant professor, a question that targeted the intersection of their two disciplines: to what extent do traditional financial accounting ratios - return on investment, return on equity (ROE), and return on assets (ROA) - reflect real economic profitability as described by the internal rate of return of a firm's investment projects.
WorldCommodity Funds, Inc. Launches No-Load Mutual Fund
ATLANTA, April 10, 2007 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- WorldCommodity Funds, Inc. announces the launch of its first mutual fund, the open-end, no-load, WorldCommodity Fund(tm). WorldCommodity Fund reported a total return of 10.90% for the three month period ending March 30, 2007; and 14.33% since inception on October 27, 2006. The fund's first quarter performance of 10.90% ranks among the top 15 open-end mutual funds available to U.S. investors among the 8,800 funds tracked by Morningstar.com and the third-best performing of the 40 open-end funds in Morningstar's Specialty-Natural Resources category. .
Charles Schwab Announces Addition Of 2050 Target-Date Fund for ...
SAN FRANCISCO, -- Charles Schwab has added a 2050 fund to its suite of target-date retirement funds. The Schwab Managed Retirement Trust Funds(TM) are collective trust funds designed specifically for retirement plan participants and managed by The Charles Schwab Trust Company (CSTC). The funds are tied to target retirement dates 2010, 2020, 2030, 2040, and now, 2050. A sixth fund, the Schwab Managed Retirement Trust Fund - Income, is designed to provide income during retirement. "Target-date retirement funds fulfill a key role in helping individuals get to and through a comfortable retirement because they are easy to use, diversified and provide ready-made asset allocation," said Jim McCool, executive vice president of Schwab Corporate & Retirement Services. "More than 60 percent of our retirement plan clients offer target-date funds to their employees, and that number continues to grow.
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Fiscal Policy: Private equity is an invaluable tool for rejuvenating underperforming companies and generating new jobs. So why does the Senate Finance Committee's top Republican want to more than double the tax on it? With the Sarbanes-Oxley regulatory regime making life miserable for many public companies, a number of troubled firms have innovatively turned to private equity to better their fortunes or even save themselves. Investors and buyout experts use the conversion to private ownership to improve a firm's cash flow. By pooling their money and borrowing other money (but nowhere near the proportion of debt seen in the leveraged buyouts of the 1980s), they improve a company's operations in ways now impossible for public firms. The sums involved can be huge, but the long-term rewards are big in profits and job growth.
Weak Institutions At The Root Of Political Crisis
"The problem, even 15 years after the demise of the Soviet Union, is to bring the leading politicians into a situation where they obey the rules of the game, which they obviously don't do," Rahr says. "And second, the problem is the mentality of the elites and the broader population, which also favor leaders and not law." Personality And Politics Following the 2004 Orange Revolution, Ukraine tried to move away from the powerful executives that have been prevalent in the former Soviet Union and build a true parliamentary system. The presidency's powers were trimmed and parliament's were strengthened. At the time, many observers hailed the changes as the revolution's most important legacy. But Yushchenko's decision to dissolve parliament represents the end of this experiment.
Doubts on stents help pump up heart surgery
"The rules of the game changed dramatically a few years ago," said Dr. Richard Shemin, the newly installed chief of cardiothoracic surgery at UCLA Medical Center, pointing out that cardiologists have been performing more heart procedures, and surgeons fewer. "Things may be changing again."
On the advice of her doctor, Gail Miller, a 60-year-old art instructor in Sacramento who had been diagnosed with advanced heart disease, chose to have bypass surgery two days after Christmas last year.
"At first, I was terrified, and my family was even more scared," said Miller, who was close to full recuperation. "But after I read about all the issues with stents lately, I am kind of happy I got a bypass."
Stents, which come in varying sizes and designs, are inserted by a cardiologist — heart specialists who diagnose and treat conditions such as congenital defects and coronary artery disease but don't perform surgery.
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