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I pulled up the column I wrote five years ago this week. It was published five days after 9/11. This is how it began: “When you have a tragedy of such immense proportions as the one visited on America last week, it renders the world of sport to the status of the trivial, the trite, the absolutely, totally inconsequential.” But I also expressed the belief that it would be sport that would aid us in our recovery. “Yet as meaningless…
Alan Goldsticker, president of Ryland Homes of Indiana, said builders have a mound, not a mountain, confronting them. The walls might not be caving in on the Indianapolis housing market, but the current softening in home building is expected to continue for months. That’s the prospectus from Steve Lains, CEO of the Builders Association of Greater Indianapolis. While the outlook is not as bad as it could be, it is worse than most experts expected entering 2006. BAGI predicted then…
I’ve been scanning laptop buyer’s guides lately, and I have to say that many magazine test labs seem utterly out of touch with business users. They extol the big screens, fast multimedia and other capabilities business users just don’t care about. They act as if weight is a big factor for those of us who have to cart our hightech symbiotes around with us, but laptops long ago dropped below that critical barrier. Hewlett-Packard had a little notebook unit in…
Bankers like to see plenty of collateral when they underwrite loans. Insurance agents don’t have many hard assets to show them. Free toasters won’t smooth over this credit dilemma. But the leaders of the Carmel-based Oak Street companies boast they can. And they’re poised to capitalize with a fast-growing specialty lending firm. “The first line of our vision statement says we’ll build a long-term sustainable financial-services firm,” said Oak Street Chairman Steven Alonso. “It’s our strategy to diversify.” Founded in…
It’s 2:30 p.m. on a Tuesday and a steady stream of customers continues to patronize Claus’ German Sausage and Meat Market on East South Street. By March, however, the butcher shop likely will have abandoned its longtime home for a new building on South Shelby Street in Fountain Square. Whether its loyal clientele will follow concerns owner Claus Muth, who purchased the store from relative Gerhard Klemm in 2003 and changed the name from Klemm’s in April. “Since [the new…
Chunsheh Teo is a driven man. The 28-year-old sometimes works long days as an architectural graduate at Ratio Architects Inc. and spends his off time building furniture for the home he and his wife recently purchased in Irvington. On a recent weekend, he built a new fence for the yard. Oh, and he also enters international design competitions in his down time-about seven in the last three years. “It’s just kind of a fun thing to do,” Teo said. At…
Most people who hire Everett Barnard are looking for him to make something new look old. Barnard, as his clients tell others, is a genius at remodeling a modern kitchen or an entire home into a throwback from the Neo-Greco era. But one of his most recent projects involved remodeling a 112-year-old former Methodist church into a new art gallery while restoring and retaining as much of the structure’s late-19th-century look and feel as possible. Barnard doesn’t just make things…
Eli Lilly and Co. has picked an insurer it knows extremely well to cover future problems in the high-stakes world of product liability litigation–itself. The Indianapolis drugmaker opted for self-insurance after struggling to find coverage in what it terms a “very restrictive insurance market.”
The 156-year-old Terre Haute company that quietly churned out nothing but its trademark baking powder for more than a century is now serving notice to General Mills’ Bisquick and other well-known brands that the status quo is dead.
The sun is setting, the pavement damp, and dark clouds dance across the San Juan Mountains as we turn onto U.S. Highway 550 and drive north toward Durango. As if there weren’t enough beauty in this peak-filled paradise, Nature’s earlyevening sideshow features a fully arced double rainbow, quite the welcome sign to a late-summer vacation. I suppose you could write off a double rainbow as a mere meteorological phenomenon. I suppose I could, too. But it’s more fun to wonder…
CHRIS KATTERJOHN Commentary ‘Pop’ group: Cosby, White & Dungy Bill Cosby, Eugene White and Tony Dungy are a pop group of a different kind. They are out and about these days calling on men to be better fathers. Comedian Cosby was in Baltimore late last month urging fathers to help raise their kids. “This is a great evening because we’re calling on men to come claim their children,” Cosby said to the crowd. “And that’s part of being a man….
BEHIND THE NEWS First Internet’s acquisition is no run-of-the-mill bank Bank mergers happen all the time in Indiana, but this one is about as unique as they come. The buyer, Indianapolis-based First Internet Bancorp, was one of the nation’s first Web-only banks when it opened its doors in 1999. Today, it’s among the top five in that field, with assets topping $445 million. The seller is Indianapolis-based Landmark Financial Corp., parent of Landmark Savings Bank. Landmark Financial, with assets of…
If you ever want to satisfy your curiosity about recessions and business cycles, travel over to the Web site of the National Bureau of Economic Research. It has recorded and documented every downturn and uptick in the U.S. economy since 1857. And over that century and a half, the bureau has noticed certain regularities to the boom and bust of the economy around us. In the first stages of recovery from a recession, for example, it is quite common for…
Valerie Hollowell always has known she wanted to work with dolphins. After all, trips to Sea World were highlights of her childhood. But now that she's a senior marine mammal trainer, she knows the seemingly glamorous job she watched from the stands is more than wet suits and whistles.
A comic named Irwin Corey, who calls himself the Professor, once said, “If we don’t change direction soon, we’ll end up where we’re going.” You had better open up your statement and listen to the Professor, because where your stocks are going might not be where you want to end up. If you have a big position in a value stock, or value mutual fund, it’s time to make some changes. It’s time to increase your exposure to good, old…
The Indianapolis Colts are giving sponsors a chance to help design the interior of Lucas Oil Stadium. The newly announced sponsorship packages, which parcel out naming and design rights for 12 parts of the stadium, are expected to generate up to $10 million a year for the franchise.
“You will have 30 minutes.” Most project interviews begin with those five words. Design firms usually get 30 short minutes to persuade prospective clients to hire them for a project. Often, when all is said and done, both the designer and prospective client for the project, however, the guy sold his firm and retired to Florida. The interview certainly can make a difference, as it did in these three cases (although mostly for the wrong reasons). But most marketing experts…
Agrowing demand for new homes with basements featuring wide-open recreational spaces has created niche businesses even beyond home-theater specialists-like Suburban Steel of Indiana. Suburban Steel customizes structural steel for building projects, mostly residential, at its 20,000-square-foot workshop on Indianapolis’ far-southwest side. In a way, it might be considered the metalworking equivalent of a fast-food joint, where customers always “have it their way.” “A builder can call at 1 p.m. and we’ll have it for him the next day,” said Mark…
Mutual funds became truly dominant in the early 1980s when our government strengthened the 401(k) rules. Most 401(k) plans do not allow participants to buy individual stocks, or much of anything besides mutual funds. So these massive institutions are supported by legions of workers mechanically depositing small amounts every month. The gig has gotten even better for the fund providers over the last 25 years because 401(k) participants have developed habits of doing almost nothing with their money after they…
Electric customers would gain new payment options and more access to “green power,” and Indianapolis Power & Light would have more opportunities to profit, under a plan the utility filed Aug. 23 with state regulators.
