- Industry: Economy; Printing & publishing
- Number of terms: 15233
- Number of blossaries: 1
- Company Profile:
An agreement among two or more firms in the same industry to co-operate in fixing prices and/or carving up the market and restricting the amount of output they produce. It is particularly common when there is an oligopoly. The aim of such collusion is to increase profit by reducing competition. Identifying and breaking up cartels is an important part of the competition policy overseen by antitrust watchdogs in most countries, although proving the existence of a cartel is rarely easy, as firms are usually not so careless as to put agreements to collude on paper. The desire to form cartels is strong. As Adam Smith put it, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or in some contrivance to raise prices. ”
Industry:Economy
The composition of a company’s mixture of debt and equity financing. A firm’s debt-equity ratio is often referred to as its gearing. Taking on more debt is known as gearing up, or increasing lever age. In the 1960s, Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller (1923–2000) published a series of articles arguing that it did not matter whether a company financed its activities by issuing debt, or equity, or a mixture of the two. (For this they were awarded the Nobel Prize for economics. ) But, they said, this rule does not apply if one source of financing is treated more favorably by the taxman than another. In the United States, debt has long had tax advantages over equity, so their theory implies that American firms should finance themselves with debt. Companies also finance themselves by using the profit they retain after paying dividends.
Industry:Economy
A production process that involves comparatively large amounts of capital; the opposite of labor intensive.
Industry:Economy
When capital flows rapidly out of a country, usually because something happens which causes investors suddenly to lose confidence in its economy. (Strictly speaking, the problem is not so much the money leaving, but rather that investors in general suddenly lower their valuation of all the assets of the country. ) This is particularly worrying when the flight capital belongs to the country’s own citizens. This is often associated with a sharp fall in the exchange rate of the abandoned country’s currency.
Industry:Economy
The ratio of a bank’s capital to its total assets, required by regulators to be above a minimum (“adequate”) level so that there is little risk of the bank going bust. How high this minimum level is may vary according to how risky a bank’s activities are.
Industry:Economy
A market in which supply seems plentiful and prices seem low; the opposite of a seller's market.
Industry:Economy
The long-run pattern of economic growth and recession. According to the Center for International Business Cycle Research at Columbia University, between 1854 and 1945 the average expansion lasted 29 months and the average contraction 21 months. Since the Second World War, however, expansions have lasted almost twice as long, an average of 50 months, and contractions have shortened to an average of only 11 months. Over the years, economists have produced numerous theories of why economic activity fluctuates so much, none of them particularly convincing. A Kitchin cycle supposedly lasted 39 months and was due to fluctuations in companies' inventories. The Juglar cycle would last 8—9 years as a result of changes in investment in plant and machinery. Then there was the 20-year Kuznets cycle, allegedly driven by house-building, and, perhaps the best-known theory of them all, the 50-year kondratieff wave. Hayek tangled with Keynes over what caused the business cycle, and won the Nobel Prize for economics for his theory that variations in an economy's output depended on the sort of capital it had. Taking a quite different tack, in the late 1960s Arthur Okun, an economic adviser to presidents Kennedy and Johnson, proclaimed that the business cycle was "obsolete". A year later, the American economy was in recession. Again, in the late 1990s, some economists claimed that technological innovation and globalization meant that the business cycle was a thing of the past. Alas, they were soon proved wrong.
Industry:Economy
An investor who expects the price of a particular security to rise; the opposite of a bear.
Industry:Economy
Eating people is wrong. Eating your own business may not be. Firms used to be reluctant to launch new products and services that competed with what they were already doing, as the new thing would eat into (cannibalize) their existing business. In today's innovative, technology-intensive economy, however, a willingness to cannibalize is more often seen as a good thing. This is because innovation often takes the form of what economists call creative destruction (see Schumpeter), in which a superior new product destroys the market for existing products. In this environment, the best course of action for successful firms that want to avoid losing their market to a rival with an innovation may be to carry out the creative destruction themselves.
Industry:Economy
The stalking-horse for international capitalism. A focus for all the worries about environmental damage, human-rights abuses and sweated labor that opponents of globalization like to put on their placards. A symbol of America's corporate power, since most of the world's best-known brands, from Coca Cola to Nike, are American. That is the case against. Many economists regard brands as a good thing, however. A brand provides a guarantee of reliability and quality. Consumer trust is the basis of all brand values. So companies that own the brands have an immense incentive to work to retain that trust. Brands have value only where consumers have choice. The arrival of foreign brands, and the emergence of domestic brands, in former communist and other poorer countries points to an increase in competition from which consumers gain. Because a strong brand often requires expensive advertising and good marketing, it can raise both price and barriers to entry. But not to insuperable levels: brands fade as tastes change; if quality is not maintained, neither is the brand.
Industry:Economy
