Eye on the Bailout is a great resource for keeping up on the bailout. The site, maintained by ProPublica, includes a map, timeline and list of recipients of the cash.  You can see in the image above that even Buffalo has received TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) funds: $600 million given to M&T Bank.

ProPublica also tracks where the economic stimulus funding is going, including all of the “contracts, grants and loans that the government has reported awarding.”  About $112 million is making its way to Erie County so far:

If you want to find everything you can about an industry, IBISWorld is a great place to start. IBISWorld provides hard-to-find industry data like market size, major players in the industry, market share, geographic spread, keys to success, and more.

IBISWorld covers 700 industries. Here’s a list of the most popular industry profiles that were downloaded here at UB last month (hmm… video games, beer, fast food – that sounds about right!):

Here’s a sample market share table from the fast food report:

So, go give IBISWorld a try (it’s much quicker and more reliable than Googling!).

The economic crisis… when will it end? A new index, called the Chirp Index, predicts a turnaround in August, 2009.  This index is especially interesting because of the four economic indicators it uses:

• Bond yield spreads
• Insider buying activity of S&P 500 firms
• Traffic congestion, with increased congestion being a good sign, indicating the transportation of goods, more shopping, more people going to work, etc.
• Count of how many times the word “recession” appears in a handful of major newspapers

There are myriad economic indicators out there and one that makes the rounds this time of year is the Christmas Price Index which “calculates the CPI each year as a fun, lighthearted way to look at the increasing cost of goods and services bought by the “True Love” in the holiday classic the Twelve Days of Christmas.”

Here’s an article I wrote a while back for the university newspaper about some of the useful and not so useful economic indicators that have been created over the years:

Desperate Times, Desperate Economic Measures?

When it comes to economic data, forget about inflation, interest rates, and stock prices… Big Macs, lipstick and Super Bowls are the true measures of economic activity.  Well, probably not, but it’s fun to speculate.  Here are some alternative ways to make sense of the economy.

Currency exchange is not an easily digestible topic, but “burgernomics” may go down easier.  The Big Mac is the same everywhere (two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce…) and yet its price varies wildly from country to country.  As a result, the Big Mac Index provides a surprisingly accurate measure of currency values across countries (www.economist.com/markets/Bigmac/).

To understand the economy, the lipstick theory suggests that increased lipstick sales indicate an economic downturn.  The reasoning goes that women look for cheaper ways to pamper themselves when times are getting tough.  Another theory ties economic outlook to the length of miniskirts – the gist of this one is that as the economy brightens, hemlines heighten (www.jmrlsi.co.jp/english/mij/r_eye/2004/05.html).  Makes you wonder what an equivalent indicator might be for the male of the species… golf balls, goatees, or maybe beer guts (http://digbig.com/4whhp)?

Daniel Gross’ “Moneybox” column in Slate magazine is a great source for fascinating and obscure economic indicators, like the Guns-to-Caviar Index which compares “how much money the world spends on fighter jets (guns) versus how much money the world spends on private business jets (caviar)” (http://digbig.com/4whgw).

Researchers love linking presidential performance to the economy – one study finds a connection between presidential approval ratings and stock markets (stocks go up when ratings go down) and another connects the third year of any presidents’ term to up-ticks in stock markets.  In truth, there’s little evidence these are causal connections as presidents hold little sway on the day-to-day meanderings of markets (http://digbig.com/4whhh).  Indeed, this November’s election, regardless of who wins, will likely have no predictable market impact (search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=10832844&site=bsi-live).

The real power to impact economic change lies with the Federal Reserve.  However, even Alan Greenspan once said that being Fed chairman taught him “to mumble with great incoherence.”  Most experts acknowledge that no one fully understands the economy.  [It's enough to give you a headache... wait, there's an indicator for that: the aspirin count theory (http://www.answers.com/topic/aspirin-count-theory)]

Same goes for stocks – Burton Malkiel wrote in his classic book A Random Walk Down Wall Street (www.worldcat.org/oclc/44957631) that “throwing darts at a newspaper’s financial pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by experts.” Since 1988, The Wall Street Journal has held contests inspired by the book, and guess what?  The darts generally do as well as the experts (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1068).

And the Super Bowl connection?  Well, the Dow, apparently, goes up 80% of the time when the NFC team wins (www.snopes.com/business/bank/superbowl.asp).  Talk about incoherent mumblings… We all know that the only thing the Super Bowl can predict is that if our local team is playing, disappointment will surely pervade Buffalo in the game’s wake.

Are you studying entrepreneurship?  Maybe thinking about starting your own business?  Check out our new collection of Entrepreneurship Resources for theoretical and practical advice on everything from planning to starting to growing a business.

Our most popular entrepreneurship resource is the Business Plans Handbook which provides hundreds of examples of real-world business plans (click on “Business”).

A great way to test your business ideas is to enter one of the entrepreneurship competitions on campus, like the Panasci Technology Entrepreneurship Competition.  You will gain valuable insight on your ideas and maybe even win some start-up cash!

The current crisis we are in has gone by many names: it started out as the “housing” or “mortgage” crisis, then it became the “credit” or “liquidity” crisis, then it expanded to be called the “Wall Street” or “market” crisis, which in turn morphed into the more general “economic” or “financial” crisis, and finally it’s become the “world” or “global” crisis.  In fact, nowadays, you just have to say “crisis” and eveyone knows what you are referring to.

Here are some resources to help keep up with the current crisis:

• Wall Street in Crisis from the Wall Street Journal
• NPR’s coverage of the crisis
• Fallout: America’s Financial Crisis from American Public Media
• Google News coverage
• Global Financial Crisis from the BBC
• Global Financial Crisis from the Financial Times

And as a sign of the times… the iconic sign in Times Square that displays our national debt has run out of room.  The US debt now contains too many numbers to fit on the sign and they had to paint on an extra digit…