Word: buys
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...last December when Satyam announced the $1.6 billion acquisition of two affiliated construction companies, Maytas Infra and Maytas Properties, run by Raju's two sons. Raju claimed the acquisitions were a good diversification strategy, and announced they would go ahead without shareholder approval. Investigators say Raju actually wanted to buy the companies because they held many of the illicitly acquired properties; absorbing them into Satyam could have allowed Raju to cover up his misdeeds indefinitely. But many of Satyam's foreign stakeholders, who owned 47% of the Nasdaq-listed company, grew suspicious and angry over the deal and dumped...
...price wars have gone nuclear. From Target's $3 coffeemakers to Best Buy's half-price washing machines to Staples's $350 laptops, the theme of this holiday shopping season is, without a doubt, "we sell for less." Even Wal-Mart's commitment to "every day" low prices isn't preventing it from going lower. An online skirmish with Amazon.com that started with $9 hardcover books (books normally sold for three times that amount) has dominoed into other categories, driving down prices on everything from mobile phones to Easy-Bake ovens. The deals are everywhere. (See pictures of expensive things...
...realize it's an odd time to lobby for higher prices. We're coming off the worst recession in a quarter century. One in ten Americans is out of work and plenty of people feel like they need low prices to be able to buy anything...
...that leads to my second argument for higher prices: if stuff costs more, we'll buy less of it (that's the demand curve in action). If we are forced to buy fewer things, then perhaps we'll start to break this mentality that the way to happiness is to own more...
...have this cycle we've developed-work intensively, buy more, repeat," says Carolyn Danckaert, New American Dream's director of home and communities programs. "At a certain point, the accumulation of stuff starts to drive your life." As Juliet Schor, an economist at Boston College who helps run the group, points out in her book The Overworked American, when workers became more productive over the second half of the 20th century, we as a society chose to take the benefit as more stuff. We could have also decided to, say, work a little less...