By SIMON CONSTABLE
Listen here.
1915 French Artillery tractor See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Thursday, January 16, 2025
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Tuesday, January 14, 2025
Briefings Magazine: Suddenly, Global Defense Spending Booms
By SIMON CONSTABLE
It was 1962, and tensions were rising as the Soviet Union began a buildup of nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles south of the United States. Worries of a nuclear Armageddon were palpable. Fortunately, the crisis was averted—and so was the military buildup. Over the next six decades, in a remarkable string of declines, global defense spending (including military equipment, war matériel, personnel, and weaponry) would fall from 6.3 percent of global GDP in 1962 to a low of 2.1 percent in 2018, helped in part by the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But that was then. In a turnabout whose magnitude may surprise you, global defense spending rose a whopping 6.8 percent in 2023 from the previous year to a staggering $2.4 trillion, the largest annual increase since 2009. Read more here.
Thursday, January 9, 2025
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Korn Ferry: A Slump in Britain’s Hiring
By SIMON CONSTABLE
Two years ago, British companies couldn’t find enough people to work for them. It was the Great Resignation of 2022, and salaries soared.
But things have changed dramatically since then. New job vacancies in the UK have dropped by a staggering 23% through the end of November versus the same time last year, according to data from job-posting website Indeed. Britain is also far behind other rich countries such as Germany, Ireland, the US, and Canada, in which job openings dropped between 5% and 15% over the same period. Read more here.
Sunday, January 5, 2025
WSJ: FINANCIAL FLASHBACK -- 25 YEARS AGO: The AOL-Time Warner Merger
By Simon Constable
In January 2000, Steve Case, CEO of internet provider AOL, agreed to merge with media conglomerate Time Warner for a record-breaking $156 billion offer for a public company.
At the time, The Wall Street Journal noted that the 15-year-old AOL wasn’t old enough to purchase beer.
On the other hand, Time was founded in 1923 and survived the Great Depression with many well-loved brands. “[AOL] has essentially swallowed an ancien regime media conglomerate that took most of a century to construct,” wrote The Wall Street Journal.
“This was supposed to be the proving ground of Old Economy meets New Economy,” says Pete Earle, a senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. AOL needed content, Time Warner had lots of it, and there would be synergies. “It seemed like a match made beyond heaven,” says Earle.
But that dream died fast.
A big part of the issue was the culture clash. “You have Time Warner, a conservative long-lived company added to AOL, an aggressive tech firm,” Earle says. “It hindered effective collaboration.”
In retrospect, the deal’s announcement in January 2000 marked the peak of the dot-com bubble.
Read more here.
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