Marketplace - American Public Media

The Daytona 500 is this Sunday, but fewer and fewer of us are taking the time to sit through NASCAR races. NASCAR wants to change that with a new ad campaign it’s unveiling this weekend.

The average NASCAR fan is 47-years-old. NASCAR’s new ad campaign is meant to appeal to a younger audience. It features close-ups of drivers looking tough.

In one spot, a series of drivers say, “In order to finish first, somebody’s got to finish second. I hate second.”

There are flashes of racecars. A couple of drivers shoving each other. Kim Brink, NASCAR’s vice president for marketing, says the idea is to highlight the suspense and drama of racing.

“You never know when someone’s going to crash," she explains.  "You never know when someone’s going to pass another guy. You never know when a driver’s going to get in a fight.”

Brink says NASCAR is aiming its ads at Hispanics -- some ads are in Spanish -- and millennials.  She says they’re also targeting 8- to 12-year-olds. Will it work? Brand strategist Adam Hanft doesn't think so.

“NASCAR is doing all the right things," he says, "but they may be doing it for the wrong sport.”

Hanft says even a polished ad campaign won’t change the fact that car racing is time consuming. 

“It’s a huge time suck," he says,  "you’re kind of in for the day."

Perhaps, not the best sport for time-starved, multi-tasking millennials. 

Apple is reporting some of its company computers were hacked on Tuesday and is laying the blame with an Internet plug-in called Java. U.S. Homeland Security officials warned earlier this year that Java software could be vulnerable to attacks.

"We are very familiar with business computers being breached, but those are all Windows machines," says Jim Finkle, who covers cybersecurity for Reuters. "This is the most significant breach of Macintosh computers at a corporation."

Apple says there is no evidence any data was taken during the attack, which is believed to have been carried out by the same group that recently breached Facebook’s computers.

This final note on the way out. A pause to observe a 5-0 vote in the Federal Communications Commission today. A rare moment of unanimity in Washington that could bring good things to a wireless Internet connection near you.

The FCC voted to set aside more of the wireless spectrum for Wi-Fi. It's not a done deal yet. Public comments and a final vote await. And yeah, there are other people using that same chunk of frequencies.

But at least maybe there's hope that someday your 11-year-old streaming videos won't jam up your home network. Not that I know anything about that.

Campbell Soup controls about 50 percent of the soup market -- much less than it used to. So the 144-year-old company introduced a new line of soups marketed specifically to millennials. And so far, it has not gone over well with some of the target demographic.

They're called "Campbell's Go Soups". They come in a microwaveable pouch -- each one with a different black and white photo of a young person making a quirky face. The Moroccan Chicken, for example, has a woman in thick rimmed glasses with a cartoon voice bubble that says, "check it out."

Campbell came up with the idea by sending some of its employees to cities like London, New York and Portland to follow hipster millennials around and see what they ate.

When it comes to the flavors of the soups, Evan Hamilton thinks Campbell did a great job of figuring out what he and his fellow millennials like.

"Quinoa chicken makes sense for millennials. We like to be healthy. We like quinoa, perfect," says Hamilton.

Hamilton is 28 and works at UserVoice -- a company that helps businesses get feedback from their customers. Even though he liked some of the Go Soup flavors, he was kind of insulted by the marketing campaign.

"It sounds like the marketing copy that would be written by aliens if they landed here 2,000 years from now and looked through the wreckage of our civilization and found a Simpsons episode from 1999. It doesn't sound how actual millennials talk," says Hamilton.

Robert Zeithammer knows how millennials talk. He's surrounded by them every day. Zeithammer teaches marketing at UCLA. He recently had his students write about the Go Soup marketing campaign and nearly all of them thought it was ridiculous.

Zeithammer says the recession has caused a profound shift in our understanding of millennials and Campbell hasn't adjusted to the new reality.

"Before the recession, when we thought about millennials, we always talked about them as rich suburban kids who have everything in the world. They are the richest generation and they just have it made."

According to new economic research, millennials who graduated from college during the recession and missed out on entry level corporate jobs may never catch up.

"So we should feel profoundly sorry for them, we should not be trying to sell them soup that costs almost double of all the other offerings of Campbell," says Zeithammer.

The Go campaign has been the butt of jokes by bloggers and The Colbert Report but Zeithammer says, even this is good publicity because it gets millennials thinking about soup. And just hearing the word Campbell's can influence people to buy some -- even if it's the old-fashioned kind in a can.

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Campbell Soup controls about 50 percent of the soup market -- much less than it used to. So the 144-year-old company introduced a new line of soups marketed specifically to millennials. And so far, it has not gone over well with some of the target demographic.

They're called "Campbell's Go Soups". They come in a microwaveable pouch -- each one with a different black and white photo of a young person making a quirky face. The Moroccan Chicken, for example, has a woman in thick rimmed glasses with a cartoon voice bubble that says, "check it out."

Campbell came up with the idea by sending some of its employees to cities like London, New York and Portland to follow hipster millennials around and see what they ate.

When it comes to the flavors of the soups, Evan Hamilton thinks Campbell did a great job of figuring out what he and his fellow millennials like.

"Quinoa chicken makes sense for millennials. We like to be healthy. We like quinoa, perfect," says Hamilton.

Hamilton is 28 and works at UserVoice -- a company that helps businesses get feedback from their customers. Even though he liked some of the Go Soup flavors, he was kind of insulted by the marketing campaign.

"It sounds like the marketing copy that would be written by aliens if they landed here 2,000 years from now and looked through the wreckage of our civilization and found a Simpsons episode from 1999. It doesn't sound how actual millennials talk," says Hamilton.

Robert Zeithammer knows how millennials talk. He's surrounded by them every day. Zeithammer teaches marketing at UCLA. He recently had his students write about the Go Soup marketing campaign and nearly all of them thought it was ridiculous.

Zeithammer says the recession has caused a profound shift in our understanding of millennials and Campbell hasn't adjusted to the new reality.

"Before the recession, when we thought about millennials, we always talked about them as rich suburban kids who have everything in the world. They are the richest generation and they just have it made."

According to new economic research, millennials who graduated from college during the recession and missed out on entry level corporate jobs may never catch up.

"So we should feel profoundly sorry for them, we should not be trying to sell them soup that costs almost double of all the other offerings of Campbell," says Zeithammer.

The Go campaign has been the butt of jokes by bloggers and The Colbert Report but Zeithammer says, even this is good publicity because it gets millennials thinking about soup. And just hearing the word Campbell's can influence people to buy some -- even if it's the old-fashioned kind in a can.

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Despite the uncertain economy, donations are pouring in to colleges and universities. A new report from the Council for Aid to Education says college fundraisers brought in $31 billion last year -- up slightly from the year before.

Topping the list is Stanford University, which became the first to raise more than $1 billion in a single year. Stanford outraised Harvard and Yale -- and everybody else -- for the eighth year in a row, according to the council’s annual fundraising survey.

Geography helps. Silicon Valley is packed with rich people. Stanford has helped make a lot of them rich, says Bruce Flessner, a fundraising consultant with Bentz Whaley Flessner.

“Stanford’s created a lot of the wealth, and a lot of the wealth has benefited Stanford,” he says.

Venture capitalist and Stanford business school grad Robert King, for instance, gave $150 million for a new institute to promote entrepreneurship in developing countries.

Stanford is also just really good at raising money, says John Cash with consulting firm Marts & Lundy.

“They have big ideas, and very wealthy people give big gifts to support big ideas,” he says.

But Stanford is not immune to dips in the economy. During the financial crisis it had to cut about 20 percent of its fundraising staff. The budget uncertainty in Washington, D.C., could affect giving this year, says Martin Shell, Stanford's vice president for development.

“I do think donors are like markets,” Shell says. “Uncertainty is something that they abhor.”

The 10 universities that raised the most in 2012:

1. Stanford University (Stanford, CA) $1,034,848,797
2. Harvard University (Cambridge, MA) $650,243,000
3. Yale University (New Haven, CT) $543,905,260
4. University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA) $491,853,719
5. Columbia University (New York, NY) $490,311,087
6. Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD) $479,654,409
7. University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA) $440,602,631
8. University of California-Berkeley (Berkeley, CA) $405,434,869
9. New York University (New York, NY) $395,509,740
10. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA) $379,058,315

Institutions that raised the most per student (and amount raised per student) in 2012:

1. University of Texas M.D. Cancer Center ($590,719)
2. University of Texas Health Center at Tyler ($163,225)
3. University of California, San Francisco ($69,864)
4. Deep Springs College ($67,334)
5. Stanford University ($55,745)
6. University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas ($48,669)
7. Yale University ($45,803)
8. California Institute of Technology ($44,576)
9. Hillsdale College ($41,506)
10. Amherst College ($36,399)
11. Massachusetts Institute of Technology ($34,795)
12. Phillips Theological Seminary ($34,611)
13. Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology ($34,512)
14. Baylor College of Medicine ($33,528)
15. Union Theological Seminary & Presbyterian School of Christian Education ($32,877)
16. Oregon Health & Science University ($32,677)
17. Princeton University ($31,306)
18. Harvard University ($30,892)
19. Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary ($30,800)
20. Bethany Theological Seminary ($27,907)

Despite the uncertain economy, donations are pouring in to colleges and universities. A new report from the Council for Aid to Education says college fundraisers brought in $31 billion last year -- up slightly from the year before.

Topping the list is Stanford University, which became the first to raise more than $1 billion in a single year. Stanford outraised Harvard and Yale -- and everybody else -- for the eighth year in a row, according to the council’s annual fundraising survey.

Geography helps. Silicon Valley is packed with rich people. Stanford has helped make a lot of them rich, says Bruce Flessner, a fundraising consultant with Bentz Whaley Flessner.

“Stanford’s created a lot of the wealth, and a lot of the wealth has benefited Stanford,” he says.

Venture capitalist and Stanford business school grad Robert King, for instance, gave $150 million for a new institute to promote entrepreneurship in developing countries.

Stanford is also just really good at raising money, says John Cash with consulting firm Marts & Lundy.

“They have big ideas, and very wealthy people give big gifts to support big ideas,” he says.

But Stanford is not immune to dips in the economy. During the financial crisis it had to cut about 20 percent of its fundraising staff. The budget uncertainty in Washington, D.C., could affect giving this year, says Martin Shell, Stanford's vice president for development.

“I do think donors are like markets,” Shell says. “Uncertainty is something that they abhor.”

The 10 universities that raised the most in 2012:

1. Stanford University (Stanford, CA) $1,034,848,797
2. Harvard University (Cambridge, MA) $650,243,000
3. Yale University (New Haven, CT) $543,905,260
4. University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA) $491,853,719
5. Columbia University (New York, NY) $490,311,087
6. Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD) $479,654,409
7. University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA) $440,602,631
8. University of California-Berkeley (Berkeley, CA) $405,434,869
9. New York University (New York, NY) $395,509,740
10. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA) $379,058,315

Institutions that raised the most per student (and amount raised per student) in 2012:

1. University of Texas M.D. Cancer Center ($590,719)
2. University of Texas Health Center at Tyler ($163,225)
3. University of California, San Francisco ($69,864)
4. Deep Springs College ($67,334)
5. Stanford University ($55,745)
6. University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas ($48,669)
7. Yale University ($45,803)
8. California Institute of Technology ($44,576)
9. Hillsdale College ($41,506)
10. Amherst College ($36,399)
11. Massachusetts Institute of Technology ($34,795)
12. Phillips Theological Seminary ($34,611)
13. Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology ($34,512)
14. Baylor College of Medicine ($33,528)
15. Union Theological Seminary & Presbyterian School of Christian Education ($32,877)
16. Oregon Health & Science University ($32,677)
17. Princeton University ($31,306)
18. Harvard University ($30,892)
19. Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary ($30,800)
20. Bethany Theological Seminary ($27,907)

Armed robbers have pulled off one of the world’s biggest diamond heists in a lightning raid at Brussels Airport. Disguised as police, the thieves cut a hole in the airport perimeter fence and broke into a plane that was about to take off. They stole an estimated $50 million worth of gems that were being shipped from nearby Antwerp -- the hub of the global diamond trade.

The chances are, these stones will never be recovered.

“The possibility that they will be sold by the burglars is a very big possibility," says Caroline de Wolf of the Antwerp World Diamond Centre. “And it’s also a product that is quite easy to transport. So we’re afraid that we won’t see them again.”

The stones were uncut and should carry a certificate under the Kimberley Process, a system designed to eliminate so-called blood diamonds that finance armed conflicts. But Annie Dunneback of the human rights group Global Witness says the process is not totally effective.

“Places like Dubai in the United Arab Emirates tend to have weaker controls and less government oversight. So that might be an easier place to dispose of these diamonds,” she says.

Even so, it could be very time-consuming. Fred Cuellar is author of “How to Buy a Diamond” and knows a thing or two about  brushes with law. Almost 15 years ago, he racked up what he calls an unjust felony conviction over diamond dealing. He says the thieves will need to trickle the diamonds into the market.

“They would take one or two stones and mix them in together with stuff that was not stolen and then slowly disperse them that particular way,” he says.

There are other possibilities. The stolen diamonds could become a kind of criminal currency -- used to finance the trade in illegal drugs and weapons. But however they’re disposed of, Cuellar says, the robbers should not expect to get more than 3 or 4 percent of the face value of the gems. Divide that between the eight people who staged the raid and the haul begins to look rather more modest.

“They’d be lucky to get a few hundred thousand,” claims Cuellar.

Meanwhile -- as police investigate the possibility that this was an inside job -- Antwerp is counting the cost to its reputation as a safe, secure and discreet diamond center.

A recent piece in the New York Times said that the Chinese army is constantly hacking American computers. The article is based on a study by cybersecurity firm Mandiant. The study shows Chinese intrusions into corporate networks in the U.S. trace back to an Army unit in Shanghai.

Scary stuff, right? Kim Zetter of Wired says “scary” may be the wrong word to use.

“I don’t like to use that word. This is espionage, and a lot of it is economic espionage; in the past, it’s happened in a lot of other ways. Computers just make it a lot easier and a lot more stealth,” said Zetter.

But how do these guys even go about hacking into corporate systems? Zetter says the main avenue for hackers is through email.

“It’s very easy to get into email. You have a lot of protections on a network, but you can’t block email from getting in,” said Zetter.

Zetter said hackers use “spearfishing” attacks: Malware emails that are crafted in a way that entice users to click. These emails usually come from a person that the user knows or is about a topic that the employee is interested in. When the email is open, it allows malware into the system, and hackers use that to dig deeper into a system.

Although it may seem like common sense to stray away from clicking something suspicious, Zetter says you can take all the measures you want to get employees not to do something, but they will still do it.

What would it look like for the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in this country to come out of the shadows and join the legal workforce? We’ve gotten a sneak peek through a federal program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which went into effect last year. It allows some immigrants brought to this country as children to temporarily postpone deportation and work here legally. So far, more than 150,000 young people have been approved. To see how Deferred Action is working, we looked at its impact on two recipients living in Los Angeles.

Miguel Carvente instructs kids in English and Spanish at a dual-language kindergarten near downtown. In some ways, he’s also teaching by example. Carvente came to this country from Mexico when he was 5. He didn’t even think about his legal status until he got older. “It sort of hit me when I realized that a lot of things were being closed to me because I lacked certain documentation,” says Carvente.

After high school, he worked a variety of menial jobs -- sewing clothes in a garment factory, stocking shelves in a liquor store -- all paid under the table. “They paid way below minimum wage. And so, that was sort of something you aspired to, to earn minimum wage,” says Carvente.

He put himself through UCLA and got a teaching credential, but then his career hit a roadblock. “The majority of my peers were applying for jobs and visiting schools," says Carvente. "It’s sort of disheartening to know that they’re getting a job somewhere. I knew that I was just as qualified as they were.” 

Last fall, he got a break when the government granted him Deferred Action. So, for the next two years, he won’t face deportation and can work here legally. Now, Carvente gets paid around $150 to teach for four hours. “When I first got my paycheck from the first few days here, I was very surprised at how much I received. And how much a difference just having that work-permit made in terms of your earning power,” he says. 

Across town, 20-year-old Arian Nava was equally thrilled to get her first paycheck of $307. “It was great," says Nava. "It was just such a sense of relief that I no longer had to, to do it under the table. That it was no longer illegal for me to work,” she says.

Nava is a student at Los Angeles Trade Technical College. For the last three months, she’s worked as a receptionist at the college, helping people who want to transfer to a four-year university. Before she got this job, she struggled to pay the tuition of $460 a semester. Then, she was legally barred from working. “Before, it was just really, really difficult to even study for a test and know that I might not even get the actual grade because I didn’t have the money to pay for that class,” says Nava.

If Nava had been documented when she graduated from high school, she might be in a different profession. “Actually, when I graduated from high school, I was certified to go directly into nursing, because I got that background being in a health academy," Nava says. "And I couldn’t go into any hospitals because they require documentation.”

Nava is grateful for the chance to join the ranks of the documented workforce. But she still worries about her parents, who live under constant threat of deportation and because her reprieve is temporary. “It is only for two years. That’s the scary part,” says Nava.

Back in his kindergarten class, 28-year-old Miguel Carvente also wonders how long his good luck will last. The Deferred Action program only covers people under the age of 31. The current rules allow people like Carvente, who have already qualified, to apply for an extension. But nothing is guaranteed. “So that’s my biggest worry. That I’ll be 31, and I’ll suddenly be out of the program and sort of be stuck back where I started a few years ago,” says Carvente.

Until then, he’s in legal limbo. Along with more than 150,000 other young immigrants who’ve been granted Deferred Action, Carvente is unsure if his economic future will be bright, or a return to the shadows.

For the first time in 16 years, viewers will be treated to a Grey Poupon commercial during the Academy Awards this weekend. The new $1.7 million spot starts where the classic commercial ends -- with one aristocrat passing a jar of Dijon to another.

But in the updated version, one of the men takes off a chase ensues and things start to explode. Michael Mann would be proud.

Kraft is dusting off its famous campaign as the company’s share of the mustard market has stagnated in recent years. Matthew Hudak, a food analyst with market research firm Euromonitor says it’s not just Grey Poupon that’s struggling. He says the yellow stuff has a marketing problem.

“It’s just one simple flavor. Current taste, especially for younger consumers is something more interesting, something more bold. And I mean bold and interesting don’t always go hand-in-hand with mustard,” he says.

Over the past five years, the analyst says mustard consumption is down by about 2.5 percent. Part of the problem people has been the war on carbohydrates, people are eating fewer sandwiches. At the same time, hot sauce is on the rise.

I took a quick trip to a grocery store in north Philly saw how mustard is trying to keep up with its condiment cousin. You’ve got all these exotic flavors -- at least by the standards of mustard: Roasted habenero, horseradish, wasabi, Texas chili, mango, smoky chipotle.

Hudak says the one thing Gray Poupon has going for it, is the past. “Playing on nostalgia, playing on what you remember when you were younger has been working well for a lot of other companies,” he says.

The challenge for Grey Poupon is making two elitists driving around in Rolls Royces as interesting as sriracha or Louisiana Hot Sauce that’s just a shelf away.

Competition isn't a bad word. That is true in the office -- as well as on the race track. At least it's true for Po Bronson, the co-author of a new book on the topic called "Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing." The important step, Bronson said, is to embrace competition.

"You can learn to actually enjoy the stress and intensity of competition and actually miss it when it's not happening in your life," Bronson said. "And you can actually get competitive advantages by enjoying the stress rather than being freaked out by it."

And one interesting fact, related to Bronson's time as a bond salesman on Wall Street: "All the financial projections made from 1983 through recently -- over three million financial projections, over 20,000 stocks, almost 20,000 analysts -- and female financial analysts are 7.3 percent more accurate than men, on the whole," Bronson said. "And there's a similar science that looks at when women are CFOs, when women are on the audit committee, when women are on boards -- that they keep some of the corporate risk from being taken. And men tend to drive companies to take risks. It could be argued that we need a lot more women on Wall Street to try to help prevent some of these wild swings that we're getting into."

Bronson began working on the book after recovering from surgery. "I was kind of losing my edge, and reading all this research and being soaked up in the minutiae of competing," he said, "gave me the zeal again to tackle big challenges."

He warned, though, that there are points when mastering competition can become dangerous. "Being great at something can sort of backfire because you're overconfident," he said. "Being slightly underconfident wires up the mind to have this sort of critical thinking -- you're looking ahead for strategic things that you can do."

We’re a strange breed here in Washington, a city of geeks. We follow the lurchings of Congress like normal people follow their favorite baseball team. We kind of have to. Government is the biggest game in town. But now it’s getting ridiculous.

We're less than two weeks away from the latest fiscal crisis du jour -- the so-called "sequester." It's a package of billions in automatic, across-the-board spending cuts that were supposed to be so harsh Congress would never let them happen.

Sequester stress is seeping into every corner of my life. My day usually begins with a caffeine fix in the kitchen down the hall from the Marketplace bureau. There’s a cluster of offices around the kitchen. I’ve got a number of kitchen buddies. One of them is Jennifer Lachman. We grab some coffee, then head into her office. Jennifer is executive director of the U.S. branch of a nonprofit called MAG, which stands for Mines Advisory Group. They remove mines and surplus weapons from war-torn countries. Jennifer’s office gets 95 percent of its funding from the State Department. If the sequester hits, the State Department’s budget would be cut by around 5 percent. Jennifer Lachman knows that could filter down to her. 

“It is one of the most stress inducing situations that I’ve ever faced at work," she tells me.

Jennifer says her staff is banding together to fight the stress, going out to more happy hours and maybe throwing an extra cocktail into the mix. Other sequester sufferers have different ways to cope. At lunchtime, I head out to some downtown food trucks. I meet Dionna Collins. She works at a law firm. It depends on government contracts, which could be cut by the sequester, causing a wave of layoffs.

Collins is very worried. She’s smoking more. I ask how much more.

“Before everything started to fall apart, about a pack a week," she says. "I’m maybe now to a pack every three days.”

Other people I talked to are trying to tune out the sequester buzz. Shelli Goldzband works for a medical research firm. Some of that research is government-funded. She feels powerless to stop the sequester.

She says, “So, I’ve just sort of given up and sort of just am sitting on the sidelines with a bowl of popcorn, watching everything go down in a flaming ball of death.”

OK then, maybe it’s time to move on. Maybe things will be different once I leave work for the day. My neighbors are having a potluck. Hopefully they’re not on a sequester death watch?

No such luck. There’s the usual talk of real estate, but with a sequester tinge. My neighbor Sterling Mehring is a realtor. He says the Washington market has been red hot lately. He even made a few sales over the holidays. But now, he’s worried about a sequester slump.

“I just know how fragile the market is," he says. "It can -- it can stop on a dime.”

At that point, my husband and I head home with our twin toddlers, who are just about the only people in my world not talking about the sequester. And that’s only because they can’t say the word. Unfortunately, they do eventually master it. Then they want to know more. As in any toddler interrogation, one word is repeated over and over: "Why?"

Which, actually, is a very good question.

Simpson and Bowles. We’ve seen this movie before. Two unelected men with a plan -- to cut the budget deficit. Today, they called for another $2.4 trillion in austerity.

Many see it as an effort to get the two sides to the table and strike a bargain before that automatic spending cuts -- yes the dreaded sequester -- kicks in March 1. But who are they? And why does official Washington listen to them?

The dynamic budget duo is Democrat Erskine Bowles and Republican Alan Simpson. They ran a budget commission three years ago, spit out a report, which went on a shelf -- yet they’re still in the middle of our deficit conversation.

Why? Clint Stretch, senior tax policy council at Tax Analysts, says they insert themselves in it, regularly. And, their plan is in the political middle; Goldilocks in a city of very hard beds and very soft ones.

“Simpson Bowles comes down on the side of saying government ought to be bigger than Republicans would have it be, and probably smaller than Democrats would have it be,” Stretch says.

In the campaign, both Gov. Romney and President Obama cited Simpson-Bowles, favorably. And many economists dig it, says one famous one. Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoff says Simpson-Bowles kills the right tax breaks, and doesn’t raise taxes so much it stalls growth.

“I think still the original proposal they put out there is still the lightpost by which policymakers will try to guide themselves over the long-term,” Rogoff says. “At least we hope so.”

It’s not the North Star to everyone. Simpson and Bowles are urgent about deficit cutting.

Henry Aaron at the Brookings Institution says maybe not right now. The bigger problem, he says, is millions unemployed.

“That’s the primary waste we have today,” Aaron says. “Ending that waste should be job one. Job two is dealing with our longer term budget challenge.”

This view tolerates more government borrowing and spending. But the gospel of Simpson and Bowles is to push deficits just one way: down.

The stocks of both Office Depot and OfficeMax were up following reports the two companies are in advanced talks to merge. While many market analysts have been touting the recent spate of mergers and acquisitions as a sign of business confidence, Juli Niemann, analyst with Smith Moore & Company, thinks the trend is more out of necessity.

Since the banking crisis hit hard in 2008, Georgia has seen more than 80 banks go under. That’s more than any other state. Most have been small, community banks whose assets were tied to the housing market. But did those banks have to fail? A new report from the University of West Georgia says in many cases, the answer is no. The reason so many did, the report finds, is because of an accounting rule called “mark-to-market,” which regulators put in place after the collapse of Enron.

Barnes & Noble had been expected to announce its financial results today, but it pushed the date back to February 28. Analysts predict the bookseller will report a profit for last quarter, but the outlook is doesn't look so good -- not even for its Nook e-reader. Barnes & Noble says this year its Nook will lose more than the $260 million it originally predicted.

And finally, to London where some people are selling an antique mirror that "very possibly haunted." The sellers say since putting up the mirror, they've woken up screaming in pain and items have been disappearing from their apartment. Paintings fell from the wall and things were inexplicably strewn across the floor. Speaking of inexplicably, the mirror just sold for a $155.

Microsoft is launching a $30 million ad campaign today to promote Outlook.com -- a new product meant to compete with Internet-based email systems like Google Inc.’s Gmail. 

That’s going to be some stiff competition. Gmail is currently the big dog in Iinternet-based email. It has 306 million worldwide users, not including those who visit only on mobile devices, according the latest data from research firm comScore. 

“A lot of people are directing their office email to Gmail,” says  Raj Venkatesan, a marketing professor at University of Virginia. He says Gmail has benefitted from the fact that people want to merge their work and personal lives into their email habits. Now, Microsoft is trying to tap into that trend too, and take advantage of how popular Outlook already is in the workplace. 

“You can build on the loyalty in the customer relationship,” Venkatasen says.  “Now Outlook can have one product that the customer can use when they're at work and when they're at home.”

Outlook.com has been in test mode since last summer, and Microsoft claims it has already been adopted by over 60 million people. 

The stocks of both Office Depot and OfficeMax were up following reports the two companies are in advanced talks to merge.

While many market analysts have been touting the recent spate of mergers and acquisitions as a sign of business confidence, Juli Niemann, analyst with Smith Moore & Company, thinks the trend is more out of necessity.

"We're going to be seeing a lot of shotgun marriages right now, simply because they must survive. You've got weak profit margins, huge competition out in the industry, and way too many retailers out there," says Niemann.

Direct industry alternatives such as Staples, online retailers like Amazon, and discount stores Costco and Walmart all count as competition, according to Niemann.

"It's hard to be a specialty retailer and a huge big-box when all the competition is coming out of the woodwork," says Niemann, who also adds that roadside strip-malls which depend upon big-box chains may also soon feel the squeeze on profits.

Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles -- the bipartisan pair that brought us a multi-trillion-dollar deficit reduction plan that was never enacted -- are out today with a new plan.

It targets Medicare and Medicaid for cuts, and curbs a number of tax breaks. It would reduce the deficit by about $2.4 trillion -- about halfway between what Democrats and Republicans want.

This proposal is their fourth effort in three years to drum up support for a deal to shrink America's debt. So, is there any reason the dynamic deficit reduction duo's plans could get traction now? 

Economist Gary Shilling says the political gridlock of today may actually make the new Bowles-Simpson plan more alluring.  With “neither side willing to budge” in the Whitehouse or Capitol Hill, Shilling says Bowles and Simpson may be able to play something of the knight-in-shining-armor role, “stepping in and offering a compromise that both sides will look at seriously.” 

Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Analytics, doubts that Simpson and Bowles will have any impact on the immediate issues we're facing, such as the looming across-the-board budget cuts known as the sequester, set to hit in March.

“I think that's a train that's already left the station,” Zandi says of the sequester. But Zandi does think the new Simpson-Bowles plan could have an impact on future deficit negotiations.

“There's a lot more work to be done, and they could have a big role to play.”

Since the banking crisis hit hard in 2008, Georgia has seen more than 80 banks go under. That’s more than any other state. Most have been small, community banks whose assets were tied to the housing market. But did those banks have to fail?

A new report from the University of West Georgia says in many cases, the answer is no. The reason so many did, the report finds, is because of an accounting rule called “mark-to-market,” which regulators put in place after the collapse of Enron.

Here’s how it works. Say you buy a house for $100,000. The economy tanks, and the value falls to $50,000. You keep paying on the hundred grand, but the bank must report on its books $50,000 -- the diminished fair market value of the asset.

“As the bottom fell out of the real estate market, with that rule in place, that has destroyed in an artificial way a lot of capital in banks,” says Danny Jett of the Georgia think tank Main Street Solutions.

The non-profit funded the University of West Georgia study looking at the effect of the mark-to-market rule on small banks.

“Context matters,” says Dr. Joey Smith of the University of West Georgia’s Richards College of Business. He found the mark-to-market rule doesn’t always paint an accurate picture of a bank’s solvency.

“You have to take into consideration what’s happening around the bank, and other banks, because it’s one big relationship,” he says.

The study’s findings show that in the recent crisis, banks had to unload loans that were bad on paper, although they may have been paid as agreed upon. And that created a snowball effect.

The rule was revised in 2009, but Smith says if mark-to-market isn’t revisited, we’re likely to see more community banks collapse in a future crisis.

Was it suicide or was it murder? And is a major Chinese company trying to use restricted U.S. technology for a military purpose?

In a case with possible national security implications for the U.S., an American electronics engineer was found hanged in Singapore last year. Local police suggested Shane Todd's death was suicide. He was troubled and was just leaving his job, but the family isn't buying it.

A story in the Financial Times is raising troubling questions about the circumstances of the death and work Todd was doing for IME, a Singapore government research institute. The work reportedly involved gallium nitride, a semiconductor that can withstand high levels of heat and power with both civilian and military applications. There are also possible connections to Huawei, the big Chinese phone company that American lawmakers worry could be involved in espionage.

"What we know from a file on Mr. Todd's computer was that he has a project labeled 'Huawei' and there was a project plan where IME and Huawei would be working on a project from 2012 to the end of 2014," explains Christine Spolar, investigations editor for the Financial Times, who says that Todd's family suspects foul play related to this work.

According to the family, Todd told them he feared he was working on a project that was hurting U.S. national security.

In response to the FT's piece, Singapore authorities say they are still investigating Shane Todd's death, with a coroner's inquest set next month.