2008 Overview
While dismal holiday shopping numbers, growing unemployment and bank profit warnings are taking all the wind out of the highly touted New Year rally, most of the US economy is left to look only to the “Obama Bounce” for their next bit of hope. But somewhere between the fuel spike in the middle of 2008 and the financial paralysis that began later in the year, the U.S. airline industry, seemingly as a whole, made the right moves.
It is my first day back at work. This is always a good time to look back and to look forward. Around this time last month I gave my friends a copy of my top choice as business book of the year, Snowball, the authorized biography of Warren Buffet. It is a cracking read but a bit of a tome. I suspect many of my friends drank the bottle of port that accompanied my gift and are now using Snowball as a door stop. This would be a shame. Although Buffet would claim he is not in the advisory business, there are few others who have been so mostly right over so many years.
