Miscellaneous 'Shoe

-- "Young Workers: U ND 2 Improve Ur Writing Skills" at the New York Times. "Nearly half the executives said that entry-level workers lacked writing skills, and 27 percent said that they were deficient in critical thinking. It seems that some young employees are now guilty of the technological equivalent of wearing flip-flops: they are writing company e-mail as if they were texting cellphone messages with their thumbs."

-- "The Agonies of Agflation" at The Economist. "Food prices around the world are rising so quickly that a new term has been coined to describe the ballooning price of breakfast staples and dinner-time favourites: agflation. ... Demand for grain is accelerating not to feed humans or livestock but to fill petrol tanks. Compared with 2000, three-times more corn is used to make ethanol in America; distilleries that produce biofuels hoover up a fifth of the country’s corn supplies. Demand for cleaner energy in turn keeps demand for corn growing. Farmers are having trouble keeping pace with the burgeoning biofuel industry. And to produce more corn farmers are switching production from wheat and soya, pushing up the prices of those crops too. On top of these pressures, rising prosperity in poorer countries, particularly India and China, is also lifting prices. ... As central banks try to control demand they tend not to react to price fluctuations caused by see-sawing supply. But in consumer-price indices, at least in some countries, food has a greater impact. In America food carries just 14% of the weight of the consumer-price index, but in China it accounts for 33% and in India 46%."

-- "Can Private Equity Get Out Of Buyouts?" at DealBook. "Private equity firms are being pushed to rethink deals by the banks that had committed to loan the money and are now expected to rack up billions in losses by selling the debt at a fraction of what they had planned. In Home Depot’s case, the banks that agreed to lend money to the private equity firms are pressing for better terms. At the same time, the consortium -- which includes Bain Capital, the Carlyle Group, and Clayton Dubilier & Rice -- has become nervous about falling sales at Home Depot’s wholesale unit. The combination of factors led the firms to seek a better deal, threatening to walk away otherwise."

-- "BP Says It Won't Increase Pollution" at the Chicago Tribune. "Responding to a month of unrelenting criticism from politicians and the public, BP pledged it will not invoke provisions of a new permit that allows the largest oil refinery in the Midwest to release significantly more ammonia and suspended solids into the lake. BP, which promotes itself as environmentally friendly, said it would abide by more stringent limits in its previous permit as the company moves forward with a $3.8 billion expansion of its Whiting, Ind., refinery, the nation's fourth largest."