The ball traced a thin parabola against a hazy Florida sky before burying itself in the weeds next to the water hazard. Tom wiped the sweat off his brow and was about to go after it when an alligator lurched out of the pond and snapped it up in its jaws, then slid back under…

Toyotas new CEO, Kiichiro Toyoda, recently took his company to task for following Detroit on the dead-end strategy of building large, gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs, a decision that has contributed to plunging sales. Toyota, he said, forgot who its customers were. Before announcing cost cuts, one of the first things Toyoda did was to cut…

When the owner of a local gift andcoffee shop retired, an employee offered to buy her business. But theirinitial contentment with the arrangement soon turned to despair afterthree banks turned down requests for financing. Intodays struggling economy, when lenders have tightened their pursestrings, this scenario is an increasingly common and brutal reality,making it a challenge…

Even when places like Vegas, Phoenix and Miami were tanking, real-estate values in the Pacific Northwest always held up-until now. We haven’t hit bottom, like Sacramento or Detroit, but even our rock-solid ‘hoods, such as Somerset and Queen Anne, have seen a price dip. Condo owners are probably doing slightly better, but they still have…

Lets face it: 2008 was, without a doubt, one of the ugliest years any of us can remember. Probably not since 1929 have so many of the Puget Sound regions most powerful economic titans looked so vulnerable. There was the near-collapse of the worlds financial system due to a whole string of obscure and complex…

Scandal of the year The Washington Mutual Implosion I was just following orders, even if they were mine…. WhileKerry Killinger didnt actually say these words, they pretty muchconvey the gist of what he told a Rotary Club meeting in mid-June, afew months before Washington Mutuals sudden crash and burn. Accordingto reporters with The Seattle Times,…

Although Im too busy to look it up right now, I was recently stunned to learn that sometime, somewhere, a literary figure who is older than my grandparents said something like the rich are different from you and me. This remark got me to wondering what the difference was. It would be easy to come…