Free Republic

He sleeps under a bridge, washes in a public bathroom and was panhandling for booze money 11 months ago, but now Larry Moore is the best-dressed shoeshine man in the city. When he gets up from his cardboard mattress, he puts on a coat and tie. It's a reminder of how he has turned things around. In fact, until last week it looked like Moore was going to have saved enough money to rent a room and get off the street for the first time in six years. But then, in a breathtakingly clueless move, an official for the Department...

Tibco Software chief executive Vivek Ranadive said the worst of the tech recession is behind us as he addressed the TieCon conference — an annual event in Silicon Valley heavily attended by the South Asian, venture capital and entrepreneur communities. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Tibco, a company with market value of $1.1 billion, makes software that gives real-time insight into the operations of a company and thus it has insight into the enterprise market, which has been pummeled by the recession during the last couple of quarters. Echoing other optimists such as Intel CEO Paul Otellini and Cisco CEO John Chambers,...

I haven't spent this much time thinking about economics since college, when it was my second major. I have dedicated the last 15 years primarily to my first major, computer science, and my first love, entrepreneurship. But that has changed in the last six months, although my primary concern still remains entrepreneurship. I was invited by Tim Kane and Bob Litan of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the world's largest foundation dedicated exclusively to the cause of promoting and fostering entrepreneurship, to a small conference of economics bloggers held in Kansas City recently. About 30 of us spent a stimulating...

The passage of the $787 billion stimulus bill has so far failed to stimulate anything but greater market pessimism. This suggests to us that the strategy behind the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act is wrong -- and worse, that the weapons it is using to fight the recession are obsolete.

Amid the financial crisis, some 40,000 of New York's 185,700 Wall Street jobs could be lost. The bailout is not exactly offering a great deal of confidence to the financial markets. We are all losing a lot of money. Fear runs through the system like a chilling shiver in the middle of the night. But is there a silver lining in this nightmare? I have long been troubled by the fact that Wall Street recruits some of the most highly educated talent in America into jobs that do not involve "building" or "leading." Rather, these professionals spend their lives "trading"--buying...

30 years ago, huge corporations dominated the business world...the seismic shifts that turned America into a nation of entrepreneurs. entrepreneurship has become a popular aspiration. A September 2005 Baylor University study reports that since 1980, more than 5 million jobs have disappeared from Fortune 500 companies, while 34 million new jobs were created at small businesses. Also, the number of small businesses increased from 14.7 million in 1977 to nearly 32 million last year, according to IRS tax returns. Today, one in 12 adults is actively involved in starting a business, and more than 60 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds...

The entire world seems to be heading toward points of inflection. The developing world is embarking on the digital age. The developed world is entering the Internet era. And the United States, once again at the vanguard, is on the verge of becoming the world's first Entrepreneurial Nation.

Ashley Qualls doesn't sound like a typical high school student. Maybe that's because the 17-year-old is the CEO of a million-dollar business. Ashley is the head of whateverlife.com, a website she started when she was just 14 — with eight dollars borrowed from her mother. Now, just three years later, the website grosses more than $1 million a year, providing Ashley and her working class family a sense of security they had never really known. It all started with capitalism 101, the law of supply and demand. Ashley became interested in graphic design just as the online social networking craze...

Being broke need not mean social death in Sweden - as long as you are well-educated. But for Americans and Russians having a good all-round education is no substitute for having cash, according to a new survey on status symbols in the three countries. The international survey by analysts United Minds asked 1,000 people in each country what values confer status. 'Bling' items such as expensive jewellery and designer clothes come well down the list for Swedes, while featuring more highly for Americans and, particularly, Russians. "Sweden is the only country where you can be penniless but well-read and still...

It has long been known that dyslexics are drawn to running their own businesses, where they can get around their weaknesses in reading and writing and play on their strengths. But a new study of entrepreneurs in the United States suggests that dyslexia is much more common among small-business owners than even the experts had thought. The report, compiled by Julie Logan, a professor of entrepreneurship at the Cass Business School in London, found that more than a third of the entrepreneurs she had surveyed — 35 percent — identified themselves as dyslexic. The study also concluded that dyslexics were...

New Swedish companies are bursting with ideas in IT and biotech. It's time for international investors to sit up and take notice, says leading entrepreneur Johan Staël von Holstein.

America is the greatest entrepreneurial nation in the world. But there are really two kinds of entrepreneurs here -- product entrepreneurs and financial entrepreneurs -- and only one of them truly builds the economy. Product entrepreneurs find new ways of satisfying customers. Financial entrepreneurs find new ways of ... well, making money off money. Problem is, financial entrepreneurship is becoming more and more dominant in the economy. Thirty years ago, finance was the handmaiden of American industry. Now industry is run by finance. For every budding Steve Jobs or Bill Gates there are now thousands of aspiring private equity or...

FEW people in Africa would get to see Al Gore and his troupe of rock-star ecologists strutting their stuff last weekend - because most have neither television nor electricity. That's just as well, because they would be aghast at LiveEarth's bizarre message. In Africa, we have much more serious things to worry about than climate change. Indeed, if they achieve their objective, the concerts will have done harm to the people of Africa. Britain's former Secretary of State for the Environment, David Miliband, recently said that the rest of the world cannot aspire to the UK's standard of living because:...

If the United States is exceptional because of our entrepreneurial culture, then our natural allies may not be in Continental Europe, in spite of its democratic governments and high levels of economic development. Instead, we may have more in common with other nations of the Anglosphere, as well as such entrepreneurial outposts as India, Israel, and Singapore. "The movement that built the first national democracy was not triggered by an uprising of the masses; nor was it led by intellectual theorists. It was led by entrepreneurial men of means...In fact, starting a business develops precisely the traits that make...

ATLANTA When Rajat Gupta could not find a decent job in India after earning a degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi in 1971, he did what many of his compatriots did. He moved to the United States. ...(SNIP)... "There is a huge demand for Indian executives," said Rana Talwar, the former chief executive of Standard Chartered. ...(SNIP)... Part of what makes Indian graduates desirable is their willingness to move for a job, said Ajay Banga, chief executive of Citigroup's $18.3 billion Global Consumer Group International in New York. "My boss said 'Ajay, you've got...

A CHINESE entrepreneur who once tried to sell land on the moon is hoping to cash in on China's obsession with the World Cup by offering fans bags of stadium air. Li Jie, who describes himself as chief executive of the Lunar Embassy to China, is selling his "World Cup air" for 50 yuan ($8.60) a bag. "The air was packed at the World Cup venues while the workers were cutting the grass before matches," Mr Li told the Beijing Daily Messenger. "You can still smell the grass." Mr Li suggested soccer enthusiasts unable to make the trip to Germany...

"You can never be optimistic about anything in our country because it will likely end up badly," is the sentiment of the old-timers in Russia. Youngsters who do NOT remember the Soviet times do not share this sentiment-- nor do they have the aversion to capitalism that their parents and grandparents no doubt have. Young girls wear spike-heeled boots and tread carefully to keep the mud off. They also manage bank branches that specialize in giving small loans to entrepreneurs. Start-ups were few and far between just a few years ago-- bank portfolios have tripled and clients doubled in some...

President General Pervez Musharraf said on Saturday that high growth and friendly policies had made Pakistan an ideal destination for world entrepreneurs. He said that the country’s economic reality was far better than “distorted perceptions”. In a keynote address to OPEN Silicon Valley’s annual business moot in California through videoconference, Musharraf said the country was shaping up through the construction of Gwadar Port. He said that a network of infrastructure was in place to serve as trade and energy corridor for the landlocked Central Asia, South Asia, the Gulf region and China. “Pakistan today is in an altogether different league...

Bangalore's flourishing outsourcing companies, including Infosys Technologies and Wipro, have attracted worldwide attention with their global clients and tens of thousands of workers. Less known are the many technology start-ups, like Read-Ink, that have taken root here in recent years. The new firms are drawn by the region's big pool of engineering graduates, many of whom have expertise in esoteric new technologies. That advantage, coupled with labor costs much lower than those of Silicon Valley, is starting to turn Bangalore, long a center for lower-end outsourcing services, into a center of higher-end innovation. Some of these firms are self-financed, others...