Category Archives: William Busch

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Friday Rant: The Present Value Cost of Risk Demands Far More Attention at the Executive Level

William Busch - December 7, 2012 3:12 PM | Categories: William Busch

Back in the early 80′s when I was at Wharton Grad and also a full time print shop manager, paper warehouse manager and buyer of copiers and peripherals, desktop computers with DOS operating systems were just beginning to replace card punching machines at Penn. It was a hands on era when professors of Computer Science still supervised campus wide hard wired networks to mainframes and the academic discipline of risk management resided in the Insurance Department populated by a hand full of professors near retirement. Much has changed since then, but not nearly enough. A recent article on the Harvard [...]

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Friday Rant: Federal & State Funding for Rehabbing Vacation Homes Post Sandy — Let's Get Real

William Busch - November 30, 2012 2:11 PM | Categories: William Busch

From early childhood, I’ve luxuriated in spending summers at a seaside family vacation home in Southern New Jersey built by my great-grandfather in the 1940′s. And for the past 70 years, my extended family has counted their blessings when after every storm, “The House” has been relatively unscathed — that is, until Hurricane Sandy. We have always known that “a big one” would hit some day and now one has. My sister and I are currently matriarch and patriarch of this grand family legacy and our seaside vacation community has changed dramatically over the years from a sparsely built fishing [...]

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Friday Rant: The Fiscal Cliff, U.S. Tax Code & Class Warfare

William Busch - November 16, 2012 2:11 PM | Categories: William Busch

Indeed, spend matters immensely and must be cut to reduce the U.S. deficit. But as uncertainty grows around exactly how the U.S. executive branch and legislature will soften the scheduled fall off the fiscal cliff at year’s end, a few statistics to enable some out-of-the-box thinking warrant attention. It takes the CCH Standard Tax Reporter, “the most comprehensive and current federal income tax law authority in the industry,” 73,608 pages to fully document the U.S. tax code — the Internal Revenue Code (IRC), enacted by Congress in Title 26 of the United States Code (26 U.S.C.) — as it stands [...]

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Friday Rant: Where's The Gasoline Post Sandy?

William Busch - November 2, 2012 2:11 PM | Categories: William Busch

Answers to this critical supply chain debacle question are all over the map in today’s press from claims that refineries pre-emptively shut down as Sandy advanced, to mention of damage at refineries preventing them from coming back on line. But the real answer appears to be lack of electricity to pump refined fuel from stocked storage tanks and POS retail service stations. CNBC reports “The problem is not gasoline supplies, but the ability to distribute it, especially from the critical terminal area around Linden, N.J., which lost power and was hit by storm surge. An estimated 75 percent or more [...]

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Friday Rant: When 2% of the Flying Public Diminish Value for All &c

William Busch - October 19, 2012 2:10 PM | Categories: William Busch

I was on two fully booked domestic flights this week. Not unusual as Fall biz travel is in full bloom. But something new stood out in the pre-flight SOP: a “please do not remove items from the overhead compartments that do not belong to you” admonishment. Wow — the narcissists among us have found new ways to pierce the thin veil of civilization. That flyers continue to push the envelope with oversized carry-ons is disruptive enough — now we have a contingent of self important, self obsessed fellow passengers who attempt to have someone’s else bag checked on-board rather than [...]

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Friday Rant: Can CEO Compensation Be Accurately Benchmarked – And Who Wants the Job Anyway?

William Busch - October 12, 2012 1:10 PM | Categories: William Busch

CEO compensation is not an incidental line item contributor on most corporate proxy statements when it comes to declaring the cost of executive compensation. And while most boards of directors have a fairly intuitive sense of what they need to hire and pay to retain executive talent among their COOs, CMOs, CFOs, CPOs etc., sufficient CEO compensation can be far more elusive and difficult to justify to shareholders. The managerial skills required of CEOs clearly demand a very high level of competency in finance, marketing and operations but in reality, their primary organizational acumen must lie with their ability to [...]

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Friday Rant: Investing in the Best & Brightest to Nurture Corporate Loyalty — Back to the Future

William Busch - September 7, 2012 1:09 PM | Categories: William Busch

Ask any professional business person over 50 what’s changed most in their work arena over the past 20 years and you’re very likely to hear a bluesy tale about how no one stays in one place for long and that corporate and employee loyalty have become oxymoronic. I’m in the age group to which I refer and believe that these supposed lost values have impacted corporations to a far greater degree than the careers of those they’ve failed to retain. Sure, there was a time when the majority of the business work force spent their entire lives with one, or [...]

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The Lost Holiday

William Busch - September 3, 2012 5:09 AM | Categories: William Busch

The U.S. national holiday of Labor Day is celebrated today for about the 119th time — but who’s counting? If we look at Labor Day anthropomorphically, it has a number of unenviable problems. As the bookend that brackets the un-official end of summer, Labor Day has a crummy job and few friends. Its distant relative, Memorial Day, has it made by contrast as the gateway to Summer vacations while carrying the solemn duty of honoring the nation’s fallen protectors of freedom. Surely everyone loves a holiday if for no other reason than it usually means a day off from work. [...]

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Friday Rant: Nurturing Academic and Life Success With Games, Not Just Dollars

William Busch - August 31, 2012 12:08 PM | Categories: William Busch

As the un-official end of summer approaches and another academic year ramps up, it’s quite possible that all of us who wish to give the young people in our lives the very best leg up on future academic and career success should re-examine our tendency to invest in canned solitary developmental exercises like early reading and virtual or physical rote exercises like flash cards and language tapes. A recent New York Times Magazine article claims that “…playing certain kinds of childhood games may be the best way to increase a child’s ability to do well in school. Variations on Freeze [...]

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Friday Rant: U.S. Medical Care Rationing & Personal Cost – A Tale From The Trenches

William Busch - August 24, 2012 1:08 PM | Categories: William Busch

My wife and I have good employer-provided and sub-vented medical insurance coverage that will protect us from financial collapse should either or both of us ever need treatment for a catastrophic illness. It also comes with a high annual personal deductable, an essential component to affording coverage that also makes it possible for employers to offer and provide the benefit. We’re fortunate to be in extremely good health as we enter our sixth decade on Planet Earth. We’re also interesting subjects in that we’ve contributed at least $600,000 in medical insurance premiums over the past 40 years, take no routine [...]

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Friday Rant: One More Time – Periodic Economic Statistics Have Dismal Predictive Validity

William Busch - July 27, 2012 1:07 PM | Categories: William Busch

Our revered and precious freedoms of speech and press — in fact all of our sovereignties — carry with them tremendous individual responsibility to question, validate and determine the relevance and accuracy of the informational deluge they enable. The challenge, of course, is how to fulfill this responsibility amidst continuously expanding communication and information technology. Ironically, and fortunately, those very same technologies make it easier than ever to separate the wheat from the chaff, but we must be willing put forth the effort to do so. This past week’s release of quarterly economic statistics presents a prime opportunity to remind [...]

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Friday Rant: The Blaring Hidden Cost of Clubbing

William Busch - July 20, 2012 2:07 PM | Categories: William Busch

The vast majority of people who read Spend Matters are also likely to be very hard workers. And while working hard doesn’t demand that we play hard when we have precious down time, kicking back by going out with friends to venues that have live music, DJ entertainment or simply mind numbing, bone throbbing dance music can provide sorely needed therapeutic escape from the daily rigors of the work week. We also know that such venues can be rather costly. But I’m not referring to cover, ticket or exorbitant fees for drinks. I know that what I’m about to discuss [...]

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Friday Rant: When Arbitrage Is Usury

William Busch - July 13, 2012 1:07 PM | Categories: William Busch

There’s something so innately satisfying in buying low and selling high that it was only my adversity to financial risk that stopped me from becoming a stockbroker decades ago. Now, one of my many satisfying hobbies involves buying and selling vintage electronics, musical instruments and Persian rugs — strange mix, I know — on Craig’s List, eBay and at garage and estate sales. I love that they are all among the purest markets in contemporary times. Conversely, why would anyone pay a 3x mark-up and higher for an item that can be bought for 1x a block or so away? [...]

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Friday Rant: Genetically Enhanced Appearances — Why Most Tomatoes Are Mostly Tasteless

William Busch - June 29, 2012 1:06 PM | Categories: William Busch

Clichés, while largely true, fail to penetrate our consciousness. Take for example “You can’t judge a book by its cover” and “First impressions may not be as they appear”. We know these are valid platitudes but in our quest for exquisite fruit, these expressions are now more spot on than ever when it comes to finding the perfect tomato. I have long been skeptical when I hear friends and consumers get on a soap box to decry that genetically engineered foods, fruits and vegetables are unhealthy and should be avoided. Unless one grows their own fruits and veggies from heirloom [...]

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Friday Rant: EU Workers Gain Odd New Benefit During Euro Crisis as the AFSCME Looks Like it Behaves

William Busch - June 22, 2012 12:06 PM | Categories: William Busch

It’s hard to argue with the premise that good physical and mental health enables creativity and higher production on the job. But the cost and value of the benefits that promote good health will likely remain contentious for many generations to come on both sides of the pond. In the most startling labor headline of the week , The New York Times reported today that “… Europe’s highest court ruled that workers who happened to get sick on [their paid four to six week guaranteed] vacation were legally entitled to take another vacation.” The Court of Justice ruling which “… [...]

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Friday Rant: Can “The Dream” Sustain Without Investment, Or is it Already Too Late?

William Busch - June 8, 2012 12:06 PM | Categories: Friday Rant, William Busch

The public education crisis in the U.S. is old news and steadily grows worse. In my home town this week, The Philadelphia Board of Education — an oxymoron if there ever was one — announced a new round of spending cuts for a system that long ago ceased to provide organized after school extracurricular essentials like music and sports in a “system” that can barely manage to graduate half of its high school pupils. On a broader national level, the problem is also accelerating. This week’s New York Times reports from “… the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development [...]

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