Ferguson Case Study Essay Example for Free

Ferguson Case Study Essay Ferguson biggest reason for drop in income of 1980 was the cost of goods sold. It accounted for $2,568 (U. S. $millions) of cost and expenses on the income statement. The reason for this high cost of goods sold is because of the decline in value of the U. S. dollar in relation to other countries in which the firm was operating in. For instance a good majority of their product was made in England at a time when the pound was at an all-time high which made the cost of selling the good in the U. S. ollar extremely expensive to American firms. Also their operations in Germany were halted because they German mark was appreciating in value at the same time the United States dollar was depreciating which made it too hard to sell the products for Massey- Ferguson at a profit. 2. Massey- Ferguson market value of common stock at the end of the fiscal year of 1980 was 176. 9 million dollars. This number was much lower than its book value of equity because the market was unsure of the company’s ability to pay back its short and long term debt causing a plunge in its market value. The debt was being used to expand its operations before 1980 and because of this the book value of equity in the company was high because they had a lot of assets that they had purchased in the company’s growth period. 3. The Canadian government had a big incentive in helping to refinance Massey- Ferguson Company. They wanted to keep them operating in Canada because they provided a lot of jobs to Canada and because it was politically convenient because an election was about to take place. Another big reason was because Argus Company was invested in Massey – Ferguson and if they had to provide more cash for Massey- Ferguson to not go under they may scale back some of their growth and possibly lay people off or pursue other opportunities elsewhere so that cost of making their products is even lower than Canada. 4. It would be hard for Massey-Ferguson to pay down their debt by issuing equity because of the lack of new ways to pay for the new debt that they are acquiring. Many investors were already weary of the ability for Massey-Ferguson to become competitive again because of the massive amount of debt that they already had. Also borrowing more to pay the debt that is already owed is not a good strategy for reparining a decaying company. Furthermore they had failed to pierce the US market which provided a lot of new revenue and continued to fail at adjusting to foreign markets which were outperforming the US at the time making it hard for them to compete because of the exchange rate between the foreign country and the US firm.

Corporate Social Responsibility Essay -- Social Responsibility Essays

Contemporary business is one of the most important factors to promote social development and six elements have significant influence on it. They are corporate social responsibility, technological paradigm shifts, financial market, legislation, environment issues and business ethics. Corporate social responsibility is called CSR for short. The definition of CSR is companies should be responsible for suppliers, costumers, environment and community besides earn profit and responsible for their shareholders. The core of CSR is protecting their employees, including not discrimination, respect different culture. Technological paradigm shifts reflect social development. There are three industrial revolutions in history. Each of them bring science and technology progress rapidly and that has given a powerful propel to the productive force of the world and business, economic and social development of humanity. Comprehensive financial market systems consist of securities market, discount marke t; insurance market a foreign exchange market, finance and business are independent and mutually primitive. Government makes legislation in order to ensure the interests of citizens are protected. Legislation related many filed such as business, environment, and public services. Environment issues are big problems for modern society. Environment involves many fields, for instance business. Most companies pay much attention on business ethics. Because good business ethics is the basis of cooperation .If companies lost business ethics that means they lost company loyalty. As people all know if companies cannot manage their business with integrity or treat their clients and vendors without respect, they won’t earn partners trust and establish unbreakable ... ...distillation, desalination and ultraviolet disinfection [10]. And Reengineering solutions to global warming are receiving ever more attention, and for good reason. Science reported that top U.S. climate scientists gathered at Harvard this month to explore ways reengineering might lower the global temperature. Mimicking the natural cooling effects of volcanic eruptions by releasing massive amounts of sulfur into the atmosphere is one idea. Another is to increase the planet's reflectivity by spraying seawater on ocean clouds or floating shiny Mylar balloons into low-Earth orbit [11]. At present environmental issues are regarded by all the countries and it is a subject very worthy to be studied. People try their best to find the best way to solve these issues. That is not only benefit for nature, but also good for sustained development of human society. ..

“Death Stars” by Paz Marquez Essay

The short story centers on the character of Alfredo Salazar who is the main protagonist of this tale. The protagonist of the story is very vulnerable in realms of love. This is a short story that revolves around the love affair of Alfredo, Julia and Esperanza. Alfredo who is the son of the old man Don Julian, a more than 30 year man and a bachelor, he is in a 4 year long engagement with his fiancà ©e Esperanza but his feelings has been shipped to Julia Salas when he thinks he was instantly fell in love with her when he first met her who is a relative of the judge and started to have deep conversation with her. He experiences an immediate attraction to her, but alas, he is soon to be married with his fiancà ©e. He conservatively flirts with Julia through secret meetings and subtle declarations, but in the end, he lets her go, with her gaining the late knowledge of his impending marriage. He was trap in his own complication in choosing what he wants to do and what he wants to have. B ut society strict rules required him to restrain such unwelcome emotions and so he proceeded to marry Esperanza. But in the very end, he found himself merely infatuated with Julia after he deliberately made a decision by choosing Esperanza. But it is really ashamed that it has taken him far too long, too many years wasted, to realize his feelings for the other woman was just like a death star, a star that sparkles and light radiate from it which he seeks love Julia but only to found out that light of the star no longer exist in the world. If he realize this earlier on by his own error but clouded by lusting for love blinded him to do so, he can be truly happy all those years with Esperanza in their marriage long ago instead of just being not unhappy in his marriage and instead of Esperanza behavior being an out of reach for him which I think that Esperanza know who is the woman that he tries to go after which is tragic that I do feel sorry for her in her situation, obviously taking her for granted in my opinion and her behavior is understandable after what this man have done even though there i s no physical cheating involve but still classifies him in the level of cheating where his emotional detachment to her and a sudden attachment to Julia unfaithfulness which is cheating. Alfredo himself wants what he really wanted and what he really felt. He wanted to live. He wanted to find love. He is clung to that dream of his  through Julia which in reality in the end of the story does not really exist in the first place. He long yearns for his long lost love for Julia is what he been thinking all these years when he visited her at her hometown on his business trip who is still unmarried to which is only to come realize the woman he felt in love with is only a mere fragment of his imagination that wasn’t there in the beginning. Dead stars are celestial bodies in the solar system that have long been extinguished, but can still be seen. What he felt for Julia was long gone that it never exist in the first place just like a pattern of his imagination gone wild. So all these years he had been seeing the light of dead stars, long extinguished, yet seemingly still in their appointed. In the story, dead stars symbolize a dream for something that is nonexistent, a thing that is only a distant memory even though the person he vastly desired love from before which the person is right next to him standing suddenly feel like it never occur at all but only the mere illusions of the fabric of the dark shadows of reality. I feel sympathy for Alfredo in the story, he was describe physically an ordinary man who probably makes a living as a lawyer or something, engage with his fiancà ©s for years who is very patience in waiting because that this time era, woman have to wait on the man.

Memory and Nature Wordsworths Tintern Abbey

First published in William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s groundbreaking joint collection, Lyrical Ballads (1798), â€Å"Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey† is among the most famous and influential of Wordsworth’s odes. It embodies the crucial concepts Wordsworth set out in his preface to Lyrical Ballads, which served as a manifesto for Romantic poetry. Key Concepts of Romantic Poetry Poems made â€Å"by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation,† choosing â€Å"incidents and situations from common life ... in a selection of language really used by men.†The language of poetry used to delineate â€Å"the primary laws of our nature ... the essential passions of the heart ... our elementary feelings ... in a state of simplicity.†Poems designed solely to give â€Å"immediate pleasure to a human Being possessed of that information which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural philosopher, but as a Man.†Poems illustrating the truth of â€Å"man and nature as essentially adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting properties of nature.†Good poetry as â€Å"the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: t he emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced and does itself actually exist in the mind.† Notes on Form â€Å"Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,† like many of Wordsworth’s early poems, takes the form of a monologue in the first-person voice of the poet, written in blank verse—unrhymed iambic pentameter. Because the rhythm of many of the lines has subtle variations on the fundamental pattern of five iambic feet (da DUM / da DUM / da DUM / da DUM / da DUM) and because there are no strict end-rhymes, the poem must have seemed like prose to its first readers, who were accustomed to the strict metrical and rhyming forms and the elevated poetic diction of 18th-century neo-classical poets like Alexander Pope and Thomas Gray. Instead of an obvious rhyme scheme, Wordsworth worked many more subtle echoes into his line endings: â€Å"springs ... cliffs†Ã¢â‚¬Å"impress ... connect†Ã¢â‚¬Å"trees ... seem†Ã¢â‚¬Å"sweet ... heart†Ã¢â‚¬Å"behold ... world†Ã¢â‚¬Å"world ... mood ... blood†Ã¢â‚¬Å"years ... matured† And in a few places, separated by one or more lines, there are full rhymes and repeated end-words, which create a special emphasis simply because they are so rare in the poem: â€Å"thee ... thee†Ã¢â‚¬Å"hour ... power†Ã¢â‚¬Å"decay ... betray†Ã¢â‚¬Å"lead ... feed†Ã¢â‚¬Å"gleams ... stream† One further note about the poem’s form: In just three places, there is a mid-line break, between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next. The meter is not interrupted—each of these three lines is five iambs—but the sentence break is signified not only by a period but also by an extra vertical space between the two parts of the line, which is visually arresting and marks an important turn of thought in the poem. Notes on Content Wordsworth announces at the very beginning of â€Å"Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey† that his subject is memory, that he is returning to walk in a place he has been before, and that his experience of the place is all bound together with his memories of being there in the past. Five years have past; five summers, with the lengthOf five long winters! and again I hearThese waters, rolling from their mountain-springsWith a soft inland murmur. Wordsworth repeats â€Å"again† or â€Å"once again† four times in the poem’s first section description of the â€Å"wild secluded scene,† the landscape all green and pastoral, a fitting place for â€Å"some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire / The Hermit sits alone.† He has walked this lonely path before, and in the second section of the poem, he is moved to appreciate how the memory of its sublime natural beauty has succored him. ...’mid the dinOf towns and cities, I have owed to themIn hours of weariness, sensations sweet,Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;And passing even into my purer mind,With tranquil restoration... And more than succor, more than simple tranquility, his communion with the beautiful forms of the natural world has brought him to a kind of ecstasy, a higher state of being. Almost suspended, we are laid asleepIn body, and become a living soul:While with an eye made quiet by the powerOf harmony, and the deep power of joy,We see into the life of things. But then another line is broken, another section begins, and the poem turns, its celebration giving way to a tone almost of lament, because he knows he is not the same thoughtless animal child who communed with nature in this place years ago. That time is past,And all its aching joys are now no more,And all its dizzy raptures. He has matured, become a thinking man, the scene is infused with memory, colored with thought, and his sensibility is attuned to the presence of something behind and beyond what his senses perceive in this natural setting. A presence that disturbs me with the joyOf elevated thoughts; a sense sublimeOf something far more deeply interfused,Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,And the round ocean and the living air,And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;A motion and a spirit, that impelsAll thinking things, all objects of all thought,And rolls through all things. These are the lines that have led many readers to conclude that Wordsworth is proposing a kind of pantheism, in which the divine permeates the natural world, everything is God. Yet it seems almost as if he is trying to convince himself that his layered appreciation of the sublime is really an improvement over the thoughtless ecstasy of the wandering child. Yes, he has healing memories he can carry back to the city, but they also permeate his present experience of the beloved landscape, and it seems that memory in some way stands between his self and the sublime. In the last section of the poem, Wordsworth addresses his companion, his beloved sister Dorothy, who has presumably been walking with him but has not yet been mentioned. He sees his former self in her enjoyment of the scene: in thy voice I catchThe language of my former heart, and readMy former pleasures in the shooting lightsOf thy wild eyes. And he is wistful, not certain, but hoping and praying (even though he uses the word â€Å"knowing†). ... that Nature never did betrayThe heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege,Through all the years of this our life, to leadFrom joy to joy: for she can so informThe mind that is within us, so impressWith quietness and beauty, and so feedWith lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor allThe dreary intercourse of daily life,Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturbOur cheerful faith, that all which we beholdIs full of blessings. Would that it were so. But there is an uncertainty, a hint of mournfulness underneath the poet’s declamations.