Research

Recently a senior executive at a large financial services firm struggled to answer whether the client's interests come first, reported Dean Robert Mittelstaedt of the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University in his remarks at the convocation on May 13, 2010.

How confident are you that you understand background facts on economic issues? For the fourth year running, members of the Economic Club of Phoenix were quizzed on their grasp of economic fundamentals at their final luncheon of the season, on May 18.

Arizona employment bottomed out at the end of 2009, after a loss of nearly 300,000 jobs from the peak during 2007. But have we seen the end of the recession? Maybe not, if we are going to evaluate this current cycle in a longer term context, based on annual data.

Economic indicators have been improving, albeit slowly, since the summer of 2009, confirming that the economy is on the mend. However, most observers likely would agree that full recovery — a return to pre-recession activity levels — won't happen anytime soon.

Jim Owens, chairman and chief executive officer of Caterpillar Inc., is "concerned that the U.S.

The median price for resale homes in the Phoenix area has been edging up for several months. Does this signal that the market is approaching normalcy?

There's little margin for error when you're in the business of selling electrons. After all, if an electron traveled around the world instead of bouncing around the nucleus of an atom, it would circle the earth some 8.3 times in one second.

"There is no arrival at customer service excellence," said Terry Cain, vice president of operational excellence at Avnet, Inc.

Those who were not expecting consumers to play much of a role in the recovery have been pleasantly surprised by recent bullish reports from the stores and malls.

We've heard since the middle of last year that the recession is over. Why, then, do people still seem so pessimistic? Why are consumers still so restrained? Why is the housing market still weak?