ABCDE Business sunday, october 24, 2010 CARPAGES
Climbing new heights Tailor-made for the alpha male, the new Ford F-350 Super Duty XLT offers several practical options to make hauling heavy loads easier. l Plus thousands of car ads.
SLATE
In trading, the inside edge Study quantifes how corporate insiders profit. G2 KIPLINGER’SPERSONALFINANCE
A boost for career makeovers Training programs can ease workers’ transition. G3
Cost-of-Living Land
Youths get valuable lesson at interactive museum for financial literacy
BY YLAN Q.MUI Lake Braddock Secondary
School student Zenat Raza has a problem that an eighth-grader wouldn’t expect to encounter for a while: how to budget the $81,085 salary of a 35-year-old singlemomwith two kids. Taxes eat up $676 a month.
Social Security andMedicare pay- ments take away $338 more. Then there’s the house payment, car note, insurance premiums, cellphone bills and even college to think about. Zenat scans her budget worksheet and realizes the harsh truth. “Going into a big world seems
really challenging,” the 14-year- old said. There are “a lot of diffi- culties—a lot of, like, math.” The exercise is at the heart of a
program developed by nonprofit Junior Achievement and the Fair- fax County school system that teaches eighth-graders the basics of personal finance, from the dif- ference between debit and credit cards to calculating compound interest. The curriculum culmi- nates in a visit to a 20,000- square-foot interactive museum called Finance Park that opened this month, where students such as Zenat put their skills to the test. “Youarenolonger eighth-grad-
ers here today at Finance Park,” building manager Rachel Wun- der told about 100 students on a recent morning. Instead, they transform into
adults, with all the financial obli- gations thereof. Each student re- ceives a life situation that spans the economic spectrum.Somebe- comemarried couples earning six figures; others are single parents making ends meet. There are students who are single with plenty of disposable income, and those who only thought they had money to spare until they began tackling their budgets. During their day at the park,
students visit about a dozen faux stores to buy a dizzying array of life’s necessities, from clothing to college education. They track the rise and fall of their stock portfo- lios through a prominently dis- played scrolling ticker. A few for- tunate students get “lucky chanc-
park continued onG5 FOR THE WASHINGTON POST OSCAR LLORENS MARKETS
Strong earnings giveWall Street a lift Major companies reported profits and issued forecasts that topped analysts’ projections. G6
YTD: Dow +6.8%
NASDAQ +9.3%
S&P 500 +6.1%
J G EZ
MICHELLESINGLETARY The Color of Money
A new hiring hurdle: your credit history
ob applicants painstakingly pore over their resumes and cover letters because studies show that hiring managers
have little tolerance for any mistakes. And now, there’s something else for applicants to worry about: their credit profiles. At the same time the lagging
economy is adversely affecting people’s personal finances—and thus their credit histories— employers are scrutinizing the way people pay their bills as part of their screening process. TheU.S. Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission is so concerned about this trend that it held a hearing recently to examine the potential impact on workers. The Fair Credit Reporting Act
Here’s the underlying question that so far has no definitive answer: Doworkers with money troubles have a propensity to steal from their employers?
allows employers to pull credit reports on employees and job applicants as long as certain disclosures are made. An employer has to get written authorization from the individual to viewa report and then must give the worker or applicant a copy along with a written description of the person’s rights before taking any adverse action based on what is in the document. The Society forHuman ResourceManagement says job applicants shouldn’t worry too much about credit checks. Although about 60 percent of organizations use credit checks when selecting employees for some jobs, only 13 percent conduct credit checks on all job candidates. “Credit check results are one
important component of the hiring decision but are not typically the overriding factor in the consideration of a job candidate,” ChristineWalters, a
color continued onG4 What Bernanke needs to say EZRAKLEIN Economic &Domestic Policy T
he worst word in Washington is “message.” Whenever anything goes
wrong, politicians begin blaming their messaging operations, as if a better-chosen sound bite by a more-silver-tongued aide would have spared them the consequences of their actions. It’s almost never true. Almost. But for Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, the economy—not to mention the Fed’s credibility—might be riding on whether he’s willing and able to talk to Congress. In a recent speechat the
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Bernankemade perfectly clear that the central bank is tired of watching the economy stagnate. “With an actual unemployment rate of nearly 10 percent,” he said, “unemployment is clearly too high”—and, yes, the italics are in his prepared text. So the Federal Reserve is likely to begin purchasing Treasury bonds— “quantitative easing,” it’s called —in an effort to lower interest rates and spur the economy. They did this in 2009, and to great effect. But the Federal Reserve can’t
go it alone.No one gets a job when the central bank buys a bond. It’s only when the Fed’s decision to buy a bond persuades some other economic actor to spend money that hiring ticks up. And thus far, that’s not been happening. Banks and
klein continued onG2 YAREK WASZUL FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
A Harbinger of wireless risks to come
Hedge fund founder making his biggest gamble ever
BY ANTHONY EFFINGER
AND KATHERINE BURTON Philip Falcone left his home-
town of Chisholm in northern Minnesota’s rusting Iron Range in 1980 in the passenger seat of a 12-year-old Mercury Cougar that cost $150. Neil Sheehy, from nearby In-
ternational Falls, had offered Fal- cone a ride toHarvardUniversity, which had recruited both of them to play hockey for the Crimson. The car stalled in front of Fal- cone’s house, and Sheehy had to restart it on a hill while Falcone’s mother and one of his sisters
sobbed their goodbyes. “It’ll be all right,Mrs. Falcone;
it’ll be all right,” Sheehy recalls telling CarolineFalcone as the car chugged to life and headed east. Phil was the youngest of nine children and had grown up poor. His mother worked in a shirt factory,andhis fathernevermade more than $14,000 a year as a superintendent at a local utility. Falcone rode to Cambridge,
Mass., with his feet on the dash- board because Sheehy had packed a skate-sharpening ma- chine on the floor of the front seat.Halfway there, the roof liner came loose and showered the youngmenwith fiberglass insula- tion that stuck to them as they sweated in the late summer heat. Now, when he goes home to
Minnesota, Falcone can fly in his own jet. He and his wife, Lisa
harbinger continued onG4
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