Philadelphia may have too diverse a business community to be considered a company town. But the presence of some of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies and prestigious researchers acts like a magnet.

All sorts of firms have gravitated here to provide products and services to them. Other companies are spun off from research being done in the region.

The attraction can be seen in Deloitte LLP’s 12th annual Greater Philadelphia Fast 50, a list that ranks technology companies by revenue growth in percentage terms from 2003 to 2007. Squarely at the top are three life-sciences companies.

Exton-based ViroPharma Inc. had revenue growth of 12,541 percent during that five-year period. Close behind it is Globus Medical Inc., of Audubon, Pa., with 10,142 percent. In third place is Auxilium Pharmaceuticals Inc. with a growth rate of 985 percent that looks positively pedestrian in comparison.

Each is a young company that has tapped the talent, capital and other resources that have pooled here.

In all, 15 of the 50 companies come from the life-sciences industry, said Michael Purcell, a partner in the assurance practice of Deloitte & Touche LLP in Philadelphia. Plus, some of the software developers on the list make products and services used in the medical world. (You can see the complete list on the PhillyInc. blog here.)

Even as investment activity has slowed dramatically this year, the financings getting done in the Philadelphia area tend to involve life-sciences firms, Purcell said.

It’s worth tracking fast-growing tech companies because they create jobs that pay better than most. They also can just as easily implode as inflate. In an entrepreneurial culture, failure is an option. Not venturing in the first place is the failure.

And fast growth gets attention of another kind, usually from acquisition-minded companies. Several companies that have appeared on previous Fast 50 lists have been acquired by blue-chip companies. Ecount, of Conshohocken, was bought by Citigroup in 2007. Viasys Healthcare, also of Conshohocken, was snapped up by Cardinal Health in 2007.

As Inquirer staff writer Suzette Parmley reported in this morning's Business section, more luxury condominium units and hotel rooms are planned for Center City.

The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel & Residences Philadelphia is the name of the 58-story tower being developed by Ardmore's Mariner Commercial Properties Inc., local cable fortune heir Brook J. Lenfest and Dallas' Gatehouse Capital Corp. It would be Center City's sixth-tallest building.

The architect of the 670-foot tall structure is Cope Linder Architects, the firm that has been working on the plans for the SugarHouse Casino on the riverfront. Lead architect is David Ertz, who also designed the condo tower at 1706 Rittenhouse Square St.

The Boston firm of Frank Nicholson Inc. is handing the interior design of the175-room hotel.

You can take your time booking a room. It won't open until 2012.

As funding options dwindle for small pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, Big Pharma is on the hunt for deals at bargain prices. So are the medium- sized medicine makers.

With almost $2 billion in annual sales, Cephalon Inc. is in the second category. Its executives told analysts on its earnings call Tuesday evening that they’re “actively” looking at potential deals.

Marc Goodman, of Credit Suisse, noted that no initial public offerings are getting done and lots of small companies need cash. He wondered if Cephalon, which had $847 million in cash as of Sept. 30, was looking to part with some of it.

“It’s not just the IPO market being poor,” said Cephalon chairman and CEO Frank Baldino Jr. “The ability to raise money has been increasingly difficult especially in this financial environment we are in.”

Baldino said many companies “simply can’t complete the trials that they have started,” referring to the costly clinical testing required to prove a drug is safe and effective.

“It’s nice that we have such a positive cash-flow business that we can spend that cash on these opportunities,” Baldino said.

Last week, Cephalon agreed to provide $20 million to Watertown, Mass.-based Acusphere Inc., which has been working on a formulation for an injectable version of Pfizer’s pain-reliever Celebrex. That drug would be aimed at the hospital market and compete with a generic drug called Toradol, which generates more than $400 million in annual sales.

Cephalon chief financial officer J. Kevin Buchi said the challenge is sorting through all the “stuff.” Frazer-based Cephalon wants to make sure “the things that we acquire are things that make sense for our business, some things that we think are likely to get approved and have good commercial opportunity.”

Spoken like one of the hunters, rather than the hunted.

For those who like their leading economic indicators local, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia tracks them for Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware.

The numbers released today are not good for Pennsylvania. The Fed says the state's leading index has been negative for 14 months in a row. The trend "suggests contraction in the state's economy" through the second quarter of 2009.

In New Jersey, the trend is no growth through next year's second quarter, and Delaware's small economy is facing contraction.

Building permits were down in September in Pennsylvania, but up in New Jersey and Delaware.

Rohm & Haas Co. shareholders today voted overwhelmingly in favor of Dow Chemical Co.'s $78-per-share offer to buy the Philadelphia specialty chemical company.

Do the math. Rohm & Haas' shares are trading for around $68 today. Dow is offering $10 more. So the approval should come as no surprise.

Of the 195 million shares outstanding, 87 percent were voted, Rohm & Haas said. And of the votes cast, more than 99 percent of them were in favor of the deal.

The transaction is expected to close in early 2009. Rohm & Haas will keep its name and Philadelphia will remain its headquarters.

The markets showed yesterday that they can still blast off as well as blow up.

No one can say exactly why the market rises or falls in a given day. Traders, money managers and market watchers will all give you their take on the action.

But any trading session is the sum of millions of investment decisions by thousands of participants.

One of the biggest gainers locally was Vishay Intertechnology Inc. Its shares (ticker symbol:VSH) rose 28 percent, or 96 cents, to $4.35 on a day when the Malvern company released third-quarter earnings. Given that its stock price rose, you would be forgiven for thinking that Vishay had a great quarter.

Vishay had a net loss of $351.9 million, or $1.68 per share, compared with net earnings of $35.2 million, or 19 cents per share, for the third quarter of 2007. Management said its short-term outlook was “uncertain.”

Vishay released those numbers in the morning. But its stock really didn’t start its march higher until about 2:40 p.m. - around the same time the major indexes began their ascent.

There are any number of reasons that people were willing to bid up stock prices yesterday. From a valuation basis, the bulls keep telling us that stocks have rarely been this cheap. Bloomberg News said that the Standard & Poor’s 500 index was valued at 10.7 times estimated earnings before trading began Tuesday.

But if stock prices are reflections of future earnings and most companies have been reducing their profit forecasts, why would the Dow Jones industrial average and S&P 500 rocket 11 percent higher?

Please don’t tell me it’s in anticipation of the Federal Open Market Committee’s announcement later today of a cut in the federal funds rate to 1 percent. That might help, but last time I checked, few economists were calling for us to avert a recession.

And until the indexes rise for more than one or two sessions, I’ll avoid calling it a stock market rally. Yesterday’s gain was only the fifth by the Dow this month.

Remember: The Dow’s biggest point gain was 936.42 on Oct. 13. At yesterday’s close, it remained 322.49 points below the Oct. 13 close of 9387.61.

Last week, I spoke to a group of 30 middle school students about what’s been going on with the U.S. economy, the credit crisis and the massive federal efforts to address both.

The seminar teachers at Haverford Middle School wanted to bring home the historic events of the last few weeks to their students.

The textbooks on this financial disaster haven’t been written yet. As an observer of the swirl of government rescues, market swings and bank takeovers, I can’t think of a better time to have a discussion about our economy and economics in general.

But I viewed this talk as a challenge because I’ve found it hard to explain to adults what’s been going on and why. Economics really doesn’t get taught until high school. How would younger students digest it?

Their teachers, Kristin Luther and Mona Ezra, wondered about it, too. They’d planned to present some basic economic concepts, such as what’s a recession, and discuss why the price of a gallon of gas rises and falls.

Never in a million years did they expect their students to be asking about foreign investment in the United States or how mortgage-backed securities work.

(But then few of us ever expected that the man running the Federal Reserve, whose academic specialty was the Great Depression, would wind up needing to apply what he’d learned.)

Let’s face it. Economics can be really dull. Analyzing trade patterns and concentrations of economic activity may win you a Nobel Prize, but most people would rather hear about why companies shrink a product’s packaging instead of raise the price.

That is, they do until you have a frightening phase like we’re going through right now. Then, none of us can read enough about how the experts think the economy works. And we realize that, just like any other profession, economists don’t agree on a lot of things, including how to fix the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.

As I prepared for my talk, I stumbled on a publication on the U.S. Department of State’s Web site called “An Outline of the U.S. Economy.” I think it should be mandatory reading right now.

The most recent edition was assembled by two former Wall Street Journal reporters and posted in 2001. So it’s not exactly ripped from today’s headlines. Still, it presents a concise history of the U.S. economy and describes many of its component parts. Read this and you’ll understand better the role government has played in the economy over the years.

The outline also asks provocative questions: “Is there a limit to how much growth can - and should - be sustained?” and “How ‘free’ is business in America’s free enterprise system?”

The Haverford Middle schoolers had their own questions. Why do stock prices go up and down? Why should teenagers should care about the economy? But their most telling question was:

Why were all of the companies involved in the subprime mess allowed to do what they did?

Telling these children that “it was largely legal” isn’t a very good answer. Never mind legality, these students wanted to know why it was ethically appropriate.

Such a simple question. But so many possible reasons: Public policy to encourage everyone to own a home. Cheap credit. Financially engineered securities that were misunderstood by those who created them, bought and sold them, and rated them. Inadequate oversight.

And let’s not forget the simplest answer of all: greed.

It’s hard to resist the lure of “more and better now” in a credit-card society. And investors, seduced by ever-higher returns, check reason at the door when an investment class is in full bubble.

These are hard lessons and I hope we’re learning from what has become a global crisis because our children have lots of questions.

For many of us who have financial plans, this market retreat is testing how well we’ve prepared.

But the stumbling economy will pinch everyone, especially those lacking the basics of how to manage their finances.

That’s why it was impressive to see 180 girls from West Philadelphia and other city high schools on the University of Pennsylvania campus Friday attending a one-day financial conference.

The sixth annual DollarDiva conference was presented by Wharton Women, a group of undergrads at the business school.

The curriculum was designed to teach about saving, budgeting, preparing for job interviews, and applying to college. It was smartly presented by the Wharton student organizers.

One exercise was modeled off The Price is Right game show. On a big screen flashed images of items, such as Ugg Australia Classic Short Boots or a gallon of milk. The girls, most wearing pink DollarDiva T-shirts, were asked to write down their guesses for each price.

Judging by the hoots that filled the room when some of the answers were revealed, lots of them knew the value of the luxury items.

The goal? To get them to think about the cost of things and how that spending would fit into a budget.

Surveys have shown that men tend to have a higher "financial literacy" than women. That’s why programs like DollarDiva, which attracted 20 corporate sponsors, are so important.

The half-dozen high school girls I talked with reassured me that many of the concepts discussed at the conference have come up in their classes.

All of us can learn to be financially fabulous, as the divas say. But it takes discipline to practice it week in and week out.

Quotable

We are seeing so many companies in China literally going out of business by the thousands, caught in the squeeze between sinking demand and higher operating costs in terms of labor, social cost and taxes, just as we predicted it would happen a year ago.

- James M. Papada III, chairman and CEO of Technitrol, a Philadelphia maker of electronic components with seven factories in China, talking to securities analysts on a conference call last week.

Around the newsroom, I’ve joked that given the choice between averting economic disaster and the Phillies’ winning the World Series, I’d pick baseball.

Call it Faustian. But allegiance to a sports team can cause fans to make irrational and expensive choices. When your teams have lost as much as ours have, there would seem to be no price too high to pay for a championship - even the financial ruin of the world’s biggest economy.

Inquirer sports writer Frank Fitzpatrick earlier this month noted a parallel between hard times and Philadelphia baseball success.

Now we have evidence of a correlation between the diverging fortunes of Fightin’ Phils and the U.S. economy. With tongues firmly in cheek, the stats keepers at West Chester’s Moody’s Economy.com “confirm” that victory for the Phillies usually spells defeat for the U.S. economy.

In a commentary titled “A World Series of Irrational Exuberance” on the Dismal Scientist Web site, Ed Friedman and Ryan Sweet postulate that Philadelphia baseball could be a “leading economic indicator.” Didn’t the credit crisis begin in August 2007, when the Phillies began a run for their first playoff appearance in 14 years?

We should have seen calamity coming once the Phils won the National League East this season.

Now, the U.S. economy hangs in the balance.

Moody’s Economy.com notes that in 1983 and 1993, when the Phils lost the World Series, the economy took off. Rare as they are, Philadelphia victories are Pyrrhic ones. High jobless rates followed the Philadelphia Athletics World Series’ wins in 1929 and 1930 and the Phils’ 1980 championship.

Philadelphian to the core, the Moody’s team concedes that while the “rational economic choice” would be to ring those cowbells for the Tampa Bay Rays, it’s “incapable of such behavior.”

So we’d better enjoy the parade down Broad Street. It’ll be something to cherish on the unemployment line.