It's understandable that some economic forecasters, spooked by gloomy indicators, say the U.S. is heading into or already in a recession — but they may be overlooking key factors that buffer negative forces, according to Richard Kovacevich, chairman of Wells Fargo & Co.

Drive around the biggest cities in Arizona and you'll see an interesting contrast in land usage: packed-full swaths of retail, residential, business and industrial buildings bellied up to vast fields pockmarked with weeds and here and there, a house or two, or even a shiny new casino.

Maricopa County, Arizona is proposing to implement 53 measures to cut pollution from tiny particles (PM-10) that are small enough to be inhaled.

Consumers are worried, and that's a bad sign for the economy. Consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of the economy; these days people appear reluctant to buy big-ticket items like cars and major appliances.

The new consumer sensibility, widely heralded in the business press, is the Experience Economy. Our world of mediated, staged and multi-sensory experience — an increasingly unreal world — gives rise to people desiring authentic or "real" experiences. But what is authenticity?

W. P. Carey professors Stephen Happel and Marianne Jennings are free-market defenders. For almost two decades they have evangelized the fundamentals of supply and demand, specifically in the secondary market for event tickets.

The Federal Open Market Committee voted 9-1 today to lower the rate at which banks lend to each other to 3 percent from 3.5 percent. Just eight days ago the Fed lowered that rate by three-quarters of a percent.

A big change may be ahead in the relationship you have with your electric utility. That's because the worrisome carbon footprint is stomping all over the options electric utilities have to meet increasing demand for power.

Housing prices in the Phoenix metro area continue to plummet and the rate of decline has accelerated, according to Karl L. Guntermann, a professor of real estate and finance at the W. P. Carey School of Business.

Electric utilities are in the business of selling electrons. The more they sell, the more they earn. But today, a whirlwind of forces is sweeping electron sellers into counterintuitive activities such as promoting conservation and offering rate structures designed to cut peak consumption.