Fiscal Year End Quotes

Every dollar counts. At the end of the fiscal year, you’ll realize that the bottom line is comparable to a sum total of figures that could be considered negligible.

If the case isn't plea bargained, dismissed or placed on the inactive docket for an indefinite period of time, if by some perverse twist of fate it becomes a trial by jury, you will then have the opportunity of sitting on the witness stand and reciting under oath the facts of the case-a brief moment in the sun that clouds over with the appearance of the aforementioned defense attorney who, at worst, will accuse you of perjuring yourself in a gross injustice or, at best, accuse you of conducting an investigation so incredibly slipshod that the real killer has been allowed to roam free. Once both sides have argued the facts of the case, a jury of twelve men and women picked from computer lists of registered voters in one of America's most undereducated cities will go to a room and begin shouting. If these happy people manage to overcome the natural impulse to avoid any act of collective judgement, they just may find one human being guilty of murdering another. Then you can go to Cher's Pub at Lexington and Guilford, where that selfsame assistant state's attorney, if possessed of any human qualities at all, will buy you a bottle of domestic beer. And you drink it. Because in a police department of about three thousand sworn souls, you are one of thirty-six investigators entrusted with the pursuit of that most extraordinary of crimes: the theft of a human life. You speak for the dead. You avenge those lost to the world. Your paycheck may come from fiscal services but, goddammit, after six beers you can pretty much convince yourself that you work for the Lord himself. If you are not as good as you should be, you'll be gone within a year or two, transferred to fugitive, or auto theft or check and fraud at the other end of the hall. If you are good enough, you will never do anything else as a cop that matters this much. Homicide is the major leagues, the center ring, the show. It always has been. When Cain threw a cap into Abel, you don't think The Big Guy told a couple of fresh uniforms to go down and work up the prosecution report. Hell no, he sent for a fucking detective. And it will always be that way, because the homicide unit of any urban police force has for generations been the natural habitat of that rarefied species, the thinking cop.

The Emperor’s Birthday is the traditional end of the fiscal year, for each count’s district in relation to the Imperial government. In other words, it’s tax day, except—the Vor are not taxed. That would imply too subordinate a relationship to the Imperium. Instead, we give the Emperor a present.

if there was any loose money lying around, the people in government would find a way to spend it. The worst sin in the bureaucracy was to give money back because it meant the bureaucracy’s budget could be reduced the following year. If at the end of the fiscal year they hadn’t spent all the money in their budget, there would be a rush to buy new office furniture, take a trip at the taxpayers’ expense, or spend the money on something else, just to assure their budget wouldn’t be smaller in the future. The idea of returning money to taxpayers once it had been collected from them had never come up before.

Then you can go to Cher's Pub at Lexington and Guilford, where that selfsame assistant state's attorney, if possessed of any human qualities at all, will buy you a bottle of domestic beer. And you drink it. Because in a police department of about three thousand sworn souls, you are one of thirty-six investigators entrusted with the pursuit of that most extraordinary of crimes: the theft of a human life. You speak for the dead. You avenge those lost to the world. Your paycheck may come from fiscal services but, goddammit, after six beers you can pretty much convince yourself that you work for the Lord himself. If you are not as good as you should be, you'll be gone within a year or two, transferred to fugitive, or auto theft or check and fraud at the other end of the hall. If you are good enough, you will never do anything else as a cop that matters this much. Homicide is the major leagues, the center ring, the show. It always has been. When Cain threw a cap into Abel, you don't think The Big Guy told a couple of fresh uniforms to go down and work up the prosecution report. Hell no, he sent for a fucking detective.

Lynum had plenty of information to share. The FBI's files on Mario Savio, the brilliant philosophy student who was the spokesman for the Free Speech Movement, were especially detailed. Savio had a debilitating stutter when speaking to people in small groups, but when standing before a crowd and condemning his administration's latest injustice he spoke with divine fire. His words had inspired students to stage what was the largest campus protest in American history. Newspapers and magazines depicted him as the archetypal "angry young man," and it was true that he embodied a student movement fueled by anger at injustice, impatience for change, and a burning desire for personal freedom. Hoover ordered his agents to gather intelligence they could use to ruin his reputation or otherwise "neutralize" him, impatiently ordering them to expedite their efforts. Hoover's agents had also compiled a bulging dossier on the man Savio saw as his enemy: Clark Kerr. As campus dissent mounted, Hoover came to blame the university president more than anyone else for not putting an end to it. Kerr had led UC to new academic heights, and he had played a key role in establishing the system that guaranteed all Californians access to higher education, a model adopted nationally and internationally. But in Hoover's eyes, Kerr confused academic freedom with academic license, coddled Communist faculty members, and failed to crack down on "young punks" like Savio. Hoover directed his agents to undermine the esteemed educator in myriad ways. He wanted Kerr removed from his post as university president. As he bluntly put it in a memo to his top aides, Kerr was "no good." Reagan listened intently to Lynum's presentation, but he wanted more--much more. He asked for additional information on Kerr, for reports on liberal members of the Board of Regents who might oppose his policies, and for intelligence reports about any upcoming student protests. Just the week before, he had proposed charging tuition for the first time in the university's history, setting off a new wave of protests up and down the state. He told Lynum he feared subversives and liberals would attempt to misrepresent his efforts to establish fiscal responsibility, and that he hoped the FBI would share information about any upcoming demonstrations against him, whether on campus or at his press conferences. It was Reagan's fear, according to Lynum's subsequent report, "that some of his press conferences could be stacked with 'left wingers' who might make an attempt to embarrass him and the state government." Lynum said he understood his concerns, but following Hoover's instructions he made no promises. Then he and Harter wished the ailing governor a speedy recovery, departed the mansion, slipped into their dark four-door Ford, and drove back to the San Francisco field office, where Lynum sent an urgent report to the director. The bedside meeting was extraordinary, but so was the relationship between Reagan and Hoover. It had begun decades earlier, when the actor became an informer in the FBI's investigation of Hollywood Communists. When Reagan was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, he secretly continued to help the FBI purge fellow actors from the union's rolls. Reagan's informing proved helpful to the House Un-American Activities Committee as well, since the bureau covertly passed along information that could help HUAC hold the hearings that wracked Hollywood and led to the blacklisting and ruin of many people in the film industry. Reagan took great satisfaction from his work with the FBI, which gave him a sense of security and mission during a period when his marriage to Jane Wyman was failing, his acting career faltering, and his faith in the Democratic Party of his father crumbling. In the following years, Reagan and FBI officials courted each other through a series of confidential contacts. (7-8)

The world is in the midst of a war, but it is not the kind of war you may be imagining. It is a currency war in which nations compete to lower the value of their currency in order to help their industries gain greater profits from exports. The currency disputes have arisen from a conflict of interest between the United States and China. The U.S. has been struggling against a massive fiscal deficit and foreign debt in recent years, especially since the global financial crisis. With so much at stake, the era of U.S. dollar hegemony seems to be ending. China has been raking in profits from its biggest export market, the U.S., by keeping its yuan, also known as the renminbi, undervalued. China has also been purchasing U.S. treasury bonds to add to its foreign reserves, worth more than $2 trillion. In September, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act with a vote of 348 to 79. Under the bill, the U.S. is allowed to slap tariffs on goods from China and other countries with currencies that are perceived to be undervalued. Basically, the U.S. is pushing China to allow the yuan to appreciate. “For so many years, we have watched the China-U.S. trade deficit grow and grow and grow,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on the day of the vote, which was on Sept. 29 local time. “Today, we are finally doing something about it by recognizing that China’s manipulation of the currency represents a subsidy for Chinese exports coming to the United States and elsewhere.” But China does not want the value of its currency to increase because a stronger yuan will hurt Chinese exporters who will see a decline in exports to the U.S. once the currency’s value rises.

proper legal structure. The best structure is that of the Mondragon companies, which do not allow workers to own a tradable share of equity. Instead, in addition to their wages they each have an internal capital account the value of which depends on the business’s performance and on the number of hours the member works. A new member has to pay a large entrance fee, most of which is credited to his internal account. He receives interest at the end of every fiscal year, but he cannot withdraw the annually accumulating principal from his account until retirement. Almost all profits are divided between these individual accounts and a collective account that helps ensure the company’s survival. No buying or selling of shares takes place in this scheme, so it’s difficult for the firm to lose its worker-controlled status. Not until 1982, however, did the internal-capital-accounts legal structure exist in the United States (and then only in Massachusetts); prior to that, worker cooperatives had to make convoluted use of other categories, which sometimes made them vulnerable to degeneration.113 In any case, the survival rates of contemporary cooperatives put the lie to traditional theories of cooperatives’ unsustainability, for they appear to have higher rates of survival than conventional firms. During the 1970s and early 1980s, the death rate for co-ops in France (due either to dissolution or to conversion into a capitalist firm) was 6.9 percent; the comparable rate for capitalist competitors was 10 percent. A study in 1989 found much higher failure rates for capitalist companies than cooperatives in North America.114 A study conducted by Quebec’s Ministry of Industry and Commerce in 1999 concluded that “Co-op startups are twice as likely to celebrate their 10th birthday as conventionally owned private businesses.”115 A later study by the same organization found that “More than 6 out of 10 cooperatives survive more than five years, as compared to almost 4 businesses out of 10 for the private sector in Québec and in Canada in general. More than 4 out of 10 cooperatives survive more than 10 years, compared to 2 businesses out of 10 for the private sector.”116

The losers, according to the Times: “People Buying Health Insurance,” “Individual Taxpayers in the Future,” “The Elderly,” “Low-Income Families,” and people in high-income, highly taxed states like California and New York. “In the long run, most Americans will see no tax cut or a tax hike,” the Washington Post wrote in its own analysis.38 The final loser was the US Treasury, and government itself: by the end of the fiscal year in which the bill went into effect, the deficit had grown to $779 billion.39

We’re engaged to be engaged,” Rebecca said. “We’re waiting until the end of the physical year to officially announce.” “You mean fiscal year?” Dear God, she was a moron. “Yes, that’s what I meant.

It’s also worth noting that getting more resources will be perceived as recognition or a reward. Leadership should publicly celebrate managers who are actively improving their operational efficiency, for example by coming in under budget at the end of the fiscal year or “giving back” headcount allocation.

It’s just men being men. It’s just the end of the fiscal year; they’re really crunched. It’s not worth the fight.

We should note, however, that St. Martin’s Day marks the end of the old fiscal year and the beginning of the new one, as well as the beginning of winter. St. Bartholomew’s Day performs the same offices for autumn, and St. John’s Day is the Christian reinterpretation of the Janus bifrons, which, in antiquity, marked a pivotal point in the year. It so happens that a full set of rites take place on dates considered to be the ending and beginning of the year: purifications; purgings; removal of demons; expulsion of evil; the extinguishing and relighting of fires

Jim Cramer’s Mad Money is one of the most popular shows on CNBC, a cable TV network that specializes in business and financial news. Cramer, who mostly offers investment advice, is known for his sense of showmanship. But few viewers were prepared for his outburst on August 3, 2007, when he began screaming about what he saw as inadequate action from the Federal Reserve: “Bernanke is being an academic! It is no time to be an academic. . . . He has no idea how bad it is out there. He has no idea! He has no idea! . . . and Bill Poole? Has no idea what it’s like out there! . . . They’re nuts! They know nothing! . . . The Fed is asleep! Bill Poole is a shame! He’s shameful!!” Who are Bernanke and Bill Poole? In the previous chapter we described the role of the Federal Reserve System, the U.S. central bank. At the time of Cramer’s tirade, Ben Bernanke, a former Princeton professor of economics, was the chair of the Fed’s Board of Governors, and William Poole, also a former economics professor, was the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Both men, because of their positions, are members of the Federal Open Market Committee, which meets eight times a year to set monetary policy. In August 2007, Cramerwas crying outforthe Fed to change monetary policy in order to address what he perceived to be a growing financial crisis. Why was Cramer screaming at the Federal Reserve rather than, say, the U.S. Treasury—or, for that matter, the president? The answer is that the Fed’s control of monetary policy makes it the first line of response to macroeconomic difficulties—very much including the financial crisis that had Cramer so upset. Indeed, within a few weeks the Fed swung into action with a dramatic reversal of its previous policies. In Section 4, we developed the aggregate demand and supply model and introduced the use of fiscal policy to stabilize the economy. In Section 5, we introduced money, banking, and the Federal Reserve System, and began to look at how monetary policy is used to stabilize the economy. In this section, we use the models introduced in Sections 4 and 5 to further develop our understanding of stabilization policies (both fiscal and monetary), including their long-run effects on the economy. In addition, we introduce the Phillips curve—a short-run trade-off between unexpected inflation and unemployment—and investigate the role of expectations in the economy. We end the section with a brief summary of the history of macroeconomic thought and how the modern consensus view of stabilization policy has developed.

The nation’s fiscal operating debt was already $10.6 trillion on the day President Barack Obama took office in January 2009. By the end of January 2012, however, the fiscal operating debt had increased 44.5 percent to $15.4 trillion. As of April 12, 2015, the fiscal operating debt was $18.152 trillion—a 71 percent increase in less than six and one half years.

The Chinese renminbi was fixed against the dollar from July of 2005 until June 2009. With a fixed exchange rate, a currency’s value is matched to the value of another single currency or to a basket of other currencies. So when a country pegs its currency to the dollar, the value of the currency rises and falls with the dollar. This action helped China survive the global financial crisis. But China removed the dollar peg after the global financial crisis ended last year. Meanwhile, Japan has also seen the value of the yen grow stronger. With the U.S. economy continuing to lag and growing fiscal uncertainty in European countries, the yen has continued to gain strength because it was the only currency that was stable. So countries like China expanded their purchases of the yen, resulting in the yen’s appreciation. As the yen continued to rise against the dollar, the Japanese government intervened in the currency market in September for the first time since March 2004. This is not the first global currency war the world has seen. In 1985, the finance ministers of West Germany, France, the U.S., Japan and the UK gathered at the Plaza Hotel in New York to sign the Plaza Accord. Under the deal, the countries agreed to bring down the U.S. dollar exchange rate in relation to the Japanese yen and German mark. As the recent currency war continues to spread around the globe, some countries are now saying that there is a need for a new Plaza Accord to stabilize the world economy and the global financial market.

By November 2016, the Obama administration had used up about 78 percent of the White House budget for its fiscal year, which begins and ends at the beginning of May. Meaning, the Trump transition didn’t have much to work with, and it left us only 22 percent of the budget, or about two and a half months of money, to pay federal salaries and upkeep costs from January 20 until the end of April. That meant, among other things, that we would have to go light on the lower-office appointments, at least for a little while.

I once worked with an executive team that needed help with their prioritization. They were struggling to identify the top five projects they wanted their IT department to complete over the next fiscal year, and one of the managers was having a particularly hard time with it. She insisted on naming eighteen “top priority” projects. I insisted that she choose five. She took her list back to her team, and two weeks later they returned with a list she had managed to shorten—by one single project! (I always wondered what it was about that one lone project that didn’t make the cut.) By refusing to make trade-offs, she ended up spreading five projects’ worth of time and effort across seventeen projects. Unsurprisingly, she did not get the results she wanted. Her logic had been: We can do it all. Obviously not. It is easy to see why it’s so tempting to deny the reality of trade-offs. After all, by definition, a trade-off involves two things we want. Do you want more pay or more vacation time? Do you want to finish this next e-mail or be on time to your meeting? Do you want it done faster or better?

That the New Deal should have been bigger, sooner, is a conclusion of long standing: John Maynard Keynes told Roosevelt he needed to approximately double the rate of “direct stimulus to production deliberately applied by the administration” in 1934, at a time when Roosevelt had reduced such expenditures in response to political pressure just like the kind that later came from Grassley or King.29 Roosevelt soon moved in the direction that Keynes suggested, getting the so-called big bill—amounting to nearly $5 billion—from Congress and allowing him to create the WPA to employ Americans nationwide under the direction of Harry Hopkins. But a few years afterward, once recovery seemed well under way, Roosevelt again cut relief spending—again in response to political pressure. For many economists—including Keynes—that premature reduction in fiscal stimulus was the cause of the 1937‒1938 recession.30 Only after making that fiscally cautious error did the Roosevelt administration adopt a deliberately Keynesian budget. Soon afterward, mobilization for war began.31 In 1941 Hopkins took a new job, directing Lend-Lease operations; Congress approved nearly $50 billion for the program—an order of magnitude more than the “big bill” that created the WPA.32 So when Grassley says the war ended the Depression, he is not stating an argument against the New Deal: he is stating an argument for a bigger New Deal, an argument that New Dealer Harry Hopkins at WPA should have had a budget more like World War II–era Harry Hopkins at Lend-Lease.33

In the course of the 1960s, the left adopted almost wholesale the arguments of the right,” observed Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a domestic policy adviser to all three of the decade’s presidents. “This was not a rude act of usurpation, but rather a symmetrical, almost elegant, process of transfer.” Exaggerating for effect—but not to the point of inaccuracy—Moynihan remembered that by decade’s end, “an advanced student at an elite eastern college could be depended on to avow many of the more striking views of the Liberty League and its equivalents in the hate-Roosevelt era; for example that the growth of federal power was the greatest threat to democracy, that foreign entanglements were the work of demented plutocrats, that government snooping (by the Social Security Administration or the United States Continental Army Command) was destroying freedom, that the largest number of functions should be entrusted to the smallest jurisdictions, and so across the spectrum of this viewpoint.”2 Driven primarily by the expanding war in Vietnam, this new current on the left took up individualistic and anti-statist themes that were once the province of the right. Another part of this convergence was the rise of the economics profession. The new economics appeared a success on its own terms; growth had picked up across the Kennedy years. By 1965, GNP had increased for five straight years. Unemployment was down to 4.9 percent, and would soon drop below the 4 percent goal of full employment. As James Tobin reflected, “economists were riding the crest of a wave of enthusiasm and self-confidence. They seemed, after all, to have some tools of analysis and policy other people didn’t have, and their policy seemed to be working.”3 With institutional economics a vanquished force, most economists accepted the tenets of the neoclassical revolution: individuals making rational choices subject to the incentives created by supply and demand. Approaching policy with an economic lens cut across established political lines, which were often the creation of brokered coalitions, habit, or historical precedent. Economic analysis was at once disruptive, since it failed to honor these accidental accretions, and familiar, since it spoke a market language resonant with business-friendly political culture.4 Amid this ideological confluence, Friedman continued his dour rumblings and warnings. Ignoring the positive trends in basic indicators of economic health, from inflation to unemployment to GDP, he argued fiscal demand management was misguided, warned Bretton Woods was about to collapse, predicted imminent inflation, and castigated the Federal Reserve’s basic approach. Friedman’s quixotic quest—and the media attention it generated—infuriated many of his peers. Friedman, it seemed, was bent on fixing economic theories and institutions that were not broken.

Significantly expanding our collective investment in fighting poverty will cost something. How much it will cost is not a trivial affair. But I would have more patience for concerns about the cost of ending family homelessness if we weren’t spending billions of dollars each year on homeowner tax subsidies, just as I could better stomach concerns over the purported financial burden of establishing a living wage if our largest corporations weren’t pocketing billions each year through tax avoidance. The scarcity mindset shrinks and contorts poverty abolitionism, forcing it to operate within fictitious fiscal constraints.

Lucent, Not Transparent In mid-2000, Lucent Technologies Inc. was owned by more investors than any other U.S. stock. With a market capitalization of $192.9 billion, it was the 12th-most-valuable company in America. Was that giant valuation justified? Let’s look at some basics from Lucent’s financial report for the fiscal quarter ended June 30, 2000:1 FIGURE 17-1 Lucent Technologies Inc. All numbers in millions of dollars. * Other assets, which includes goodwill. Source: Lucent quarterly financial reports (Form 10-Q). A closer reading of Lucent’s report sets alarm bells jangling like an unanswered telephone switchboard: Lucent had just bought an optical equipment supplier, Chromatis Networks, for $4.8 billion—of which $4.2 billion was “goodwill” (or cost above book value). Chromatis had 150 employees, no customers, and zero revenues, so the term “goodwill” seems inadequate; perhaps “hope chest” is more accurate. If Chromatis’s embryonic products did not work out, Lucent would have to reverse the goodwill and charge it off against future earnings. A footnote discloses that Lucent had lent $1.5 billion to purchasers of its products. Lucent was also on the hook for $350 million in guarantees for money its customers had borrowed elsewhere. The total of these “customer financings” had doubled in a year—suggesting that purchasers were running out of cash to buy Lucent’s products. What if they ran out of cash to pay their debts? Finally, Lucent treated the cost of developing new software as a “capital asset.” Rather than an asset, wasn’t that a routine business expense that should come out of earnings? CONCLUSION: In August 2001, Lucent shut down the Chromatis division after its products reportedly attracted only two customers.2 In fiscal year 2001, Lucent lost $16.2 billion; in fiscal year 2002, it lost another $11.9 billion. Included in those losses were $3.5 billion in “provisions for bad debts and customer financings,” $4.1 billion in “impairment charges related to goodwill,” and $362 million in charges “related to capitalized software.” Lucent’s stock, at $51.062 on June 30, 2000, finished 2002 at $1.26—a loss of nearly $190 billion in market value in two-and-a-half years.

Finally, these wars have been largely paid for by borrowing, part of the reason the US went from budget surplus to deficits after 2001,” according to the Costs of War report. “Even if the US stopped spending on war at the end of this fiscal year, interest costs alone on borrowing to pay for the wars will continue to grow apace. . . . Future interest costs for overseas contingency operations spending alone are projected to add more than $1 trillion to the national debt by 2023. By 2056, a conservative estimate is that interest costs will be about $8 trillion unless the US changes the way it pays for the wars.

I’ll tell you what I expect. If we keep splurging on overtime at the same rate we have been lately, my computer model says payroll will hit empty two weeks prior to the end of the fiscal year. What’s going to happen then?” “Nothing much,” Dick Voland said easily. “We’ll have ourselves an old-fashioned SDC with the board of supervisors.” “An SDC?” Frank Montoya asked with a frown. “What’s that?” “A stare-down contest,” Voland replied with a sardonic grin. “First guy to blink loses.” Montoya, chief deputy for administration, was not amused. “That’s no way to run a department,” he said.

Popular accounts portray Europe as either an economic phoenix or a basket case. The phoenix view observes that output per hour worked has risen from barely 50 percent of U.S. levels after World War II and two-thirds of those levels in 1970 to nearly 95 percent today and that labor productivity so measured is actually running above U.S. levels in a substantial number of Western European countries. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the euro zone has created more new jobs than either the United States or the United Kingdom. Its exports have grown faster than those of the United States. It provides more of its citizens with health insurance, efficient public transportation, and protection from violent crime. The basket-case view observes that the growth of aggregate output and output per hour have slowed relative to the United States since the mid-1990s. Between 1999, when EMU began, and 2005, euro-zone growth averaged just 1.8 percent, less than two-thirds the 3.1 percent recorded by the United States. Productivity growth has trended downward since the early 1990s, owing to labor-, product-, and capital-market rigidities, inadequate R&D spending, and high tax rates - in contrast to the United States, where productivity growth has been rising. The growth of the working-age population has fallen to zero and is projected to turn significantly negative in coming years. High old-age dependency ratios imply large increases in the share of national income devoted to health care, lower savings rates, potentially heavier fiscal burdens, and an aversion to risk taking. All these are reasons to worry about Europe's competitiveness and economic performance. One way of reconciling these views is to distinguish the distant from the recent past and the past from the future. Comparing the European economy at the midpoint and the end of the twentieth century, there is no disputing the phoenix view. Economic performance over this half century was a shining success both absolutely and relative to the United States. More recently, however, Europe has tended to lag. Although this does nothing to put the past in a less positive light, it creates doubts about the future. One way of understanding these changing fortunes is in terms of the transition from extensive to intensive growth. Europe could grow quickly for a quarter century after World War II and continue doing well relative to the United States for some additional years because the institutions it inherited and developed after World War II were well suited for importing technology, maintaining high levels of investment, and transferring large amounts of labor from agriculture to industry. Eventually, however, the scope for further growth on this basis was exhausted. Once the challenge was to develop new technologies, and once growth came to depend more on entrepreneurial initiative than on brute-force capital accumulation, the low rates of R&D spending, high taxes, conservative finance, and emphasis on vocational education delivered by those same institutions became more of a handicap than a spur to growth. Consistent with this view is the fact that Europe's economic difficulties seem to have coincided with the ICT revolution and the opportunities it affords to economies with a comparative advantage in pioneering innovation, as well as with globalization and growing competition from developing countries such as China that are moving into the production of the quality manufacturing goods that have been a traditional European stronghold. The question is what to do about it. Is it necessary for Europe to remake its institutions along American lines? Or is there still a future for the European model?