The Maven: Lowdown on Layoffs

Business Week lets this claim go with a trite crack about fewer pens and sticky pads being dropped off at doctors' offices. But sales -- as anyone like The Business Press Maven who has been in it knows -- is a numbers game. Saying less will be more might sound OK, but as a realistic claim, it is not arable.

A Read on Rates

If an article in this morning's Wall Street Journal stands as an example of the emerging consensus on interest rates and their effect on the market, well, The Business Press Maven approves.

In the past year, the first consensus on interest rates was unadulterated rot. It held that the Fed was about to lower interest rates. The business media were used to rates going ever lower, and they stayed true to the thing they were most used to. The Business Press Maven shouted himself silly about how the media were being almost willfully naïve in misreading Federal Open Market Committee notes.

Then, about the middle of last year came a better reading of the FOMC notes, if no accurate consensus on whether rates were going up or down and what that meant for the market.

Before all patience was leeched from my body, I finally came out and said what the Journal did today: If rates stay right where they are, Dieynu, as the Jewish people say on Passover -- that would be enough. In the past generation plus, we have been on a wild ride in terms of interest rates, but for large swaths of time, rates remained constant. And constant, especially here at the low end, is great news economically.