This is the VOA Special English Economics ReportLast week, the United States Congress approved a major housing bill. President George Bush signed it into law on Wednesday.The plan could help an estimated four hundred thousand homeowners late in their payments and in danger of losing their homes.The ...
This is the VOA Special English Economics Report. The Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States recently moved to protect nineteen major financial stocks. The agency gave an emergency order to restrict what is known as "naked" short selling of those stocks. This is a form of stock trad...
This is the VOA Special English Economics Report.Junior Achievement is an international movement to educate young people about business and economics. The purpose is to help them prepare to succeed in a world economy. The organization is the largest of its kind. JA Worldwide says it reaches over eig...
This is the VOA Special English Economics Report. The Internet is sometimes described as a cloud -- a big, borderless area of computing power. But this power has to come from somewhere.An employee checks a server at the 1&1 Internet company in Karlsruhe, GermanyData centers are buildings full of...
This is the VOA Special English Economics Report.Last week, Bill Gates retired from full-time work at the world's biggest computer software company, Microsoft. He will remain chairman of the company he established with Paul Allen in nineteen seventy-five. Bill GatesMister Gates leaves Microsoft at a...
This is the VOA Special English Economics Report.This week, the crisis in credit markets claimed Bear Stearns. The eighty-five year old investment bank in New York agreed on Sunday to sell itself to J.P. Morgan Chase. The price: just two dollars a share, as part of a rescue plan organized by the gov...
This is the VOA Special English Economics Report.Must a country buy from its own defense suppliers? This is one of the questions in Washington in a dispute over a deal worth at least thirty-five billion dollars. The contract will supply the Air Force with one hundred seventy-nine tankers.Boeing unio...
This is the VOA Special English Economics Report.More bad news for the American housing market:The Mortgage Bankers Association says housing repossessions are at their highest rates ever, led by California and Florida. And loan payments at least thirty days late are at their highest since nineteen e...
This is the VOA Special English Economics Report.This year, something happened at the Academy Awards that had not happened since nineteen sixty-four. All the winners for best acting were from outside the United States.From left, Daniel Day-Lewis, Tilda Swinton, Marion Cotillard and Javier BardemDani...
This is the VOA Special English Economics Report.Usually we think about material qualities when we think about the pleasure we will get from a product. When something costs a lot, we might think about all the fine work that went into it. But can price alone influence the pleasure we experience?How m...
This is the VOA Special English Economics Report.The competition between Microsoft and Google took a new turn on February first. Microsoft made a public offer to buy the Internet company Yahoo. Microsoft says the combined companies would be in a better position to compete against Google in the onlin...
This is the VOA Special English Economics Report.President Bush holds a laptop computer showing the electronic version of his 2009 budgetThis week, President Bush sent Congress the final budget of his presidency. The spending plan for two thousand nine would give the federal government its first bud...
This is the VOA Special English Economics Report.Last Friday, President Bush called for an economic growth package -- a plan to give a quick shot of energy to the slowing American economy. Now, the administration has an agreement with Democratic and Republican leaders in the House of Representatives...
This is the VOA Special English Economics Report.Last week, France's second largest bank, Societe Generale, announced that a single, middle-level trader had caused the bank to lose over seven billion dollars. It was the largest trading loss by an individual in banking history.Bank headquarters outsi...
Warner Brothers, Hollywood's top seller of DVDs, decides against a competing video technology.This is the VOA Special English Economics Report.Competition often means waiting for people to make a choice.That was the case with VCRs, video cassette recorders. During the nineteen eighties, people had t...
The fast-food company expects to add $1 billion in sales by offering specialty coffee drinks in all its U.S. restaurants.This is the VOA Special English Economics Report.McDonald's, the fast-food company, is heating up competition with the Starbucks Coffee Company. McDonald's plans to put coffee bar...
Problems in the U.S. housing market and rising energy prices bring concerns.This is the VOA Special English Economics Report.World economic growth remained strong in two thousand seven. The International Monetary Fund estimated growth at five and two-tenths percent.But predictions for two thousand e...
How a trip to Ghana added up for an accountant sent by the International Executive Service Corps.This is the VOA Special English Economics Report.Abe Mirza is an American, fifty-nine years old and retired. He was trained as an accountant. In fact, he has three degrees in financial record keeping. An...
How a private alliance brought together by the Bush administration plans to try to keep some people from losing their homes.This is the VOA Special English Economics Report.Imagine that you want to buy a house but are not sure you could meet the monthlypayments. Your credit history is considered sub...
Government-owned investment funds are estimated to control over $2 trillion in assets. Most funds are tied to oil money.This is the VOA Special English Economics Report.Last month, America's biggest bank, Citigroup, agreed to sell five percent of its shares to the government of Abu Dhabi. The deal, ...
