Diego Segura

Can you tell which is which? I can’t. We had a sales team for a few years, then we didn’t. Can you tell when we made the switch? I can’t.

We love this quote from Mark Twain: “travel is fatal to prejudice.” If you’re traveling to enrich yourself, to better yourself, then this is really what resonates with Rimowa, and what we’ve always stood for.

The Commerce Department estimates that American corporations paid out 44 percent of their pretax profits in dividends last year, up from 23 percent in 1980.

Last fall, as the panic heated up, hardly anyone had heard of Meredith Whitney. ``I guess my clients knew who I was,'' she says, ``but the rest of the world -- I don't think so.''

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"There is a tremendous squeeze these days," said Arnold Kaufman, editor of Standard & Poor's Outlook newsletter, which tracks dividend trends. "Profits are no longer high enough to pay for dividends at many companies."

Karp’s genius was to make it look and feel like an important book from an important man.

The market took Whitney's skeptical argument and ran with it. On the first day of trading after her report, Citigroup's shares tanked. Four days later, Citigroup Chief Executive Officer Charles Prince resigned. In January, Citigroup slashed its dividend and set out to raise more capital.