They started to firm up pretty quickly".
– Home prices have started to firm up in some cities.
The result is a slow strangling of the firms that had started to think rationally about costs, customers and competitors.
Rather than being hauled over the coals, sensible firms have started to publish ugly details about the frightening condition of some of their sites.First to come clean was Toshiba.
Several months earlier, Noam Scheiber, a senior editor at the magazine, had started to report a story about Andreessen Horowitz, a major Silicon Valley venture-capital firm.
But even Shell's most ambitious technical boffins may be starting to wonder about the firm's venture into the Arctic wastes.
Should Japanese businessmen start to believe that the country's economy is now past its worst, they too will have many straightforward investment opportunities.A growing number of big firms are starting to worry about where their next wave of profitable growth will come from, points out Chris Zook of Bain Consulting.
Now the investment firms and the Eurocrats will start to squabble about the definition of "retail" clients and "large" dealers.
A consumer who is local to some firm j ≠ i will form part of firm i's non-local return demand, (6), if she (i) starts to search from firm j, and continues to search without stopping at (ii) firm i or (iii) any other firm k ≠ j, i, but then prefers to buy from firm i rather than (iv) buying from firm j, (v) buying from any firm k or (vi) taking the outside option.
A quote from the boutique research firm GaveKal sums it up perfectly: "when the Fed worries about something, I start to worry about something else".
