“[R]umors inside the industry suggest that Iran is being forced to charter 20 huge oil tankers to hold 40 million barrels of its crude; apparently, Iran has run out of space to store all the oil it has pumped but not yet sold.”
Daily Archives: August 30, 2006
Dependency Ratios
This relation between the number of people who aren’t of working age and the number of people who are is captured in the dependency ratio. In Ireland during the sixties, when contraception was illegal, there were ten people who were too old or too young to work for every fourteen people in a position to earn a paycheck. That meant that the country was spending a large percentage of its resources on caring for the young and the old. Last year, Ireland’s dependency ratio hit an all-time low: for every ten dependents, it had twenty-two people of working age. That change coincides precisely with the country’s extraordinary economic surge.
Kraft Foods (Oscar Meyer Parent) Spinoff?
Today’s meeting of Altria’s board may bring Kraft — which sells food carrying the Maxwell House, Nabisco and Oscar Mayer labels, among others — one step closer to its goal.
With the last major legal challenge over marketing practices by the tobacco industry having cleared two weeks ago, Altria’s 11-member board is likely to discuss the timing of a much-anticipated and imminent corporate overhaul. But Altria’s board is not expected to announce a Kraft spinoff after the meeting.
Wall Street analysts who follow Altria say they expect the company, which has been planning an overhaul since 2004, to take its time in making a final decision on the timing of what would be one of the largest tax-free corporate spinoffs.