Wholesale prices barreled ahead while housing and industrial activity faltered — a blend of high-costs and slow growth that ensures the Federal Reserve’s most likely move on interest rates next week will be no move whatsoever.

Chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues have made increasingly clear they’re not inclined to cut interest rates further for fear of aggravating inflation. On the other hand, boosting rates too soon to fend off inflation would hurt an economy already battered by housing, credit and financial woes.

"The Fed is in a box," Ken Mayland, president of ClearView Economics, said after the latest batch of economic barometers were released Tuesday. That’s why many economists are predicting the Fed will hold rates steady at 2 percent, a four-year low, at the June 24-25 session.

• Read the original story here
• If the above link is broken, view our cached copy instead.

Crude oil is trading at $135 a barrel. Global food prices are so high that they’ve triggered riots in some poor countries. No wonder many sharp-eyed market observers worry that the two-decade stretch of low inflation is coming to an end.

That’s hardly certain, but the risk is high enough and immediate enough that you need to confront some serious questions about today’s landscape. For most of us, those questions about inflation boil down to these three:

• Read the original story here
• If the above link is broken, view our cached copy instead.

The forgettable first half of 2008 is stumbling to a close. On Friday, the Labor Department reported that American employers axed 49,000 jobs in May, the fifth straight month of job losses—an event that signals a recession sure as the glittery ball dropping on Times Square augurs a New Year.

The report, which inspired a 394-point decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average Friday, was the latest in a run of bad news. Auto sales, the largest retailing sector in the U.S., were off 10.7 percent in May from the year before. And housing? Ugh. Nationwide, according to the Case-Shiller Index, home prices in the first quarter fell 14 percent.

• Read the original story here
• If the above link is broken, view our cached copy instead.

. . . I remember how it used to be, back before 15 year olds had credit cards & shady mortgage lenders were authorizing $400,000 mortgages to people who earned $25,000 a year.

Yesterday, David Brooks offered up some sobering facts about how far we have come from Benjamin Franklin’s ethic of "hard work, temperance and frugality".  His  NYT Op-Ed piece stems from a recent report on the sorry state of our "financial decadence":  For a  New Thrift: Confronting the Debt Culture.  Brooks calls this one of the most important economic reports you’ll read this year.

• Read the original story here
• If the above link is broken, view our cached copy instead.

iTunes, earlier in April, became the nation’s No. 1 music retailer, besting bricks-and-mortar giant Wal-Mart.

Here’s a quick look at how iTunes has (and hasn’t) changed over the years:

-In 2003, iTunes offered 200,000 songs. Today, there are more than 6 million available.

-More than 4 billion songs have sold on iTunes.

-Singles were priced at 99 cents back then. Today, they are still 99 cents.

-All songs sold until last year included digital rights management software to prevent illegal copies. Without those DRM restrictions, the record companies would not have agreed to sell songs at iTunes. Today, most, not all, iTunes songs have DRM protections, but that will likely disappear very soon. Digital songs sold at Amazon, for one, do not include DRM software.

• Read the original story here
• If the above link is broken, view our cached copy instead.

Prior to the Web 2.0 revolution of online communities and user-generated content, employers could still control their brand and their corporate message via their sites, online ads, and e-mail communications. Not anymore.

• Read the original story here
• If the above link is broken, view our cached copy instead.

Web 2.0 makes headlines, but how does it make money? That question puzzles countless heads of companies who know they should have a strategy for Web 2.0 but don’t quite understand what it’s all about. Author Amy Shuen can add other questions to the mix:

• Read the original story here
• If the above link is broken, view our cached copy instead.

With so many media outlets talking about a recession, many people probably assume the U.S. is officially in a recession. However, as of April 2008 we are not “officially” in a recession, at least not yet, as this brief PowerPoint presentation and podcast explain.

Apple Inc’s (AAPL.O) iTunes online music store has surpassed Wal-Mart Stores Inc (WMT.N) to become the largest music retailer in the United States, the company said on Thursday, citing industry data.

• Read the original story here
• If the above link is broken, view our cached copy instead.

I was asked to speak about Web 2.0—those interactive websites where we, the public, supply the material (Facebook, MySpace, Craigslist, eBay, YouTube, Flickr, TripAdvisor, and so on, not to mention blogs, podcasts and amateur video).

• Read the original story here
• If the above link is broken, view our cached copy instead.