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View MoreChristopher Altman saw it in the same way that most small business owners do: in the quiet of an inbox that used to fill up on its own, rather than all at once. His Oakland tree-trimming crew scheduled three weeks off for years without his involvement. Then, the reservations simply…
The atmosphere changed somewhere between a half-empty diesel station outside Hamburg and the screens of a London trading floor. Like these things often do, it happened quietly. In January, Brent crude was trading at about sixty dollars. It was close to 120 by the second week of March. Ten weeks.…
There is a rusted metal cap bolted into a concrete floor somewhere in the northern Russian Kola Peninsula, close to the Norwegian border, surrounded by Arctic forest and the kind of silence found only at the edge of the inhabited world. It’s not big. There is nothing dramatic about it.…
When oil futures cross a round number on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange floor with the speed at which they crossed $100 in early March, there is a certain atmosphere that is unique to the financial industry. Because traders are too seasoned for that, it isn’t quite a celebration. It resembles…
If you spend an afternoon at a diner in a mid-sized Midwestern city, where the lunch special is still written on a chalkboard and the coffee comes in a thick ceramic mug, you will learn something from the conversations at nearby tables that no survey can fully capture. People experience…