A Harvard Business Review study suggests women are getting more top jobs.  Attributes at the top also reflect some broader trends within the Fortune 100 over the past three decades, such as a decrease in heavy industry and energy companies, which have fewer women at all levels of management, and a proliferation of health care and retail companies, which have more women. The study’s most striking findings have emerged in four areas: career trajectory, education, diversity, and hierarchy within the senior ranks.  Top Jobs in Business

Reich reminds us that we have forgotten three important economic lessons we learned during the 30 years following World War II:

1.  Real job creators are consumers, whose rising wages generate jobs and  growth.

2.  The rich do better with a smaller share of a rapidly growing economy than with a large share of an economy that is hardly growing at all.

3.  Taxes to finance public investments –roads, bridges, public transportation and education benefit us all.

Reich always is imminently reasonable.  Why is he so hard to hear?   Robert Reich’s Economics 101

Madame Lagarde has always quickly grasped competing interests of the relevant stakeholders and is able to provide constructive responses. While it might have been tempting to condemn multinationals for engaging in sophisticated ‘tax optimisation’ schemes, for example, it is more constructive to identify the factors which facilitate that and evaluate the options for removing them. In every case Lagarde chose the latter.  She seemed genuinely committed to the constructive route which is a welcome priority for any leader.  Christine Lagarde’s Leadership Legacy

Most of us agree that a society which has a dramatic fault line between the rich and the poor is not a good one.  How can we attack the problem with useful policies?  Stop discussing the middle class.  In simplest terms, the issues impacting the growing chasm are 1) Disproportionately high income in the top one percent and 2) Failure to prepare the poor for jobs in the new information economy.

Beating up on either the rich or the poor is not productive.  Ask why the rich are so rich today?  And why are the poor so poor?  Then address those issues. Take the dialogue out of a left-right debate.  Try instead to solve a problem. Below are proposals worth considering.

Our correspondent Lloyd McAulay a New York political activist and attorney, suggests the following:  Use taxes, not by hiking them on the rich, but by eliminating some favorable treatment.  Rethink luxury taxes.  Limit salaries in publicly -traded companies.  Limit power of the highly-skilled unions and government employees.

Train and educate people for jobs in the information economy.  Training must not be a cover for doing nothing.  Tie rewards from the system to work.  (Earned income credits).    Further ideas.   New Policies for the Income Divide

The Federal Reserve published a final rule requiring higher capital levels from non-US banks like Deutsche Bank, Barclays and Credit Suisse.  European banks have responded by booking more busines outside the US and converting intercompany loans.

The banks lobbied hard for an extension to new Fed Rules and got it.  The Fed is reported to be scrutinizing the methods used to boost US capital levels.

Banking is surely international but the terms in which banks enter foreign markets will change.  Big US banks fear that if the US is too tough on foreign competitors, they will retaliate in their home countries.  No one has yet raised the issue about the purpose of banks and whether or not they are fulfilling their important social functions.