Seen in a letter from a reader in this week’s Economist, who wrote:

SIR – I would like to reassure readers that all is not doom and gloom on the oil front (“Nostalgia for calmer days”, April 22nd). I recently took my car to a petrol station and was pleasantly surprised to find that the price of premium-grade petrol had been reduced from 90 halala to 60 halala per litre. For those unfamiliar with Saudi Arabia’s currency, this works out at 60 cents per American gallon.

John Christopher Williams
Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

Verified Person, a company that provides employee background checks, has a new product to offer its corporate clients: constant screening of currently employed employees. You can read a transcript or listen to the interview on NPR’s Marketplace, which featured a story about this yesterday afternoon (May 8, 2006).

On the one hand, Verified Person point out specific instances where current employees, like a pharmacist who was also manufacturing and selling drugs on his own as a side business, were caught and removed, thus saving the public from harm. And they argue that criminal acts are a matter of public record, so there are really no privacy issues involved. Don’t want people to find out what you’ve done? Just don’t do anything bad.

On the other hand, does anyone like the idea of being constantly monitored? Where does the line between your work life and private life lie? It’s things like this that make me wonder how people ran businesses 50 years ago. There was no such technology back then, and businesses seemed to thrive fine. Has life really gotten so complicated that basic trust is no longer good enough?

In the past 10 years, the increase in female employment in developed economies has contributed more to global growth than China. Does that surprise you? “A guide to womenomics”, an article in this week’s Economist magazine (4/15/2006), highlights the positive and impactful role of women’s participation in many things economics, financial, and corporate. Some of the other interesting (and perhaps controversial) items mentioned:

• A basket of Japanese stocks selected by Goldman Sachs because they ought to benefit from women’s greater purchasing power outperformed the Tokyo stockmarket 96% to 13% over 10 years

• Corporations with more women in senior positions earn a higher ROE than those that have fewer
• A study by Digital Look found that women make better investors than men
• Countries with higher female employment rates have higher fertility rates than those with lower participation
• The best way to boost prosperity in developing countries is to educate girls

This article is sure to draw letters from readers in forthcoming issues. I love articles that question mainstream thought and am a woman in finance myself.

But with so many of the items above mentioned just in passing in the article, I really would have liked to have seen references and details on the specific studies and points mentioned in the footnotes, especially coming from the Economist.