Joseph N. DiStefano writes business stories for the Inquirer, including the PhillyDeals column on Wednesdays, as well as the blog at www.philly.com/phillydeals.
Email Joseph N. at JoeD@phillynews.com
Joseph N. DiStefano: The Harrisburg city financial meltdown is starting to raise broad questions on how local officials do business with professional advisers, as debt piles up on the taxpaying public.
"As Temple goes, so goes Philadelphia," says multistate apartment mogul Mitchell Morgan, who says he paid for his Temple University accounting and law degrees in the 1970s by selling shoes. To Morgan, Temple is the people's university, in the middle of the city, and growing fast.
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Ex-governors sized up as university presidents
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Who will run Penn State, now that president Graham Spanier has been ousted amid the child-rape scandal ripping Joe Paterno's football program?
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Jobs go begging - as do workers
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The Labor Department says 3.4 million jobs were open in Sept, but 15M people need a job.
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Banking, pay TV: flat but not standing still
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PhillyDeals: In these industries, some companies are gaining customers, others are losing them and all are threatened by merger and acquisition.
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Occupy challenges the Center City establishment
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Some look out, some look in. In New York, Occupy Wall Street has held arresting protests: a solemn Iraq War veterans' march, a pirate-themed Bank of America Corp. raid.
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Delaware bank boss sees seeds of slow recovery
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Americans are still living through one of those "creative destruction" periods described by Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, says Mark A. Turner, boss at WSFS Financial Corp., the biggest bank still based in Delaware and the second-largest in the Philadelphia Federal Reserve district.
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Chem firm shows revival needn't include layoffs
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When Ray Dombrowski was named "chief turnaround officer" in early 2009 at the plastics- and chemical-maker Chemtura, now based in Philadelphia, its industrial sales were collapsing in the recession.
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TicketLeap competing with TicketMaster
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The Halloween business is really competitive," says Steve Kopelman, Arizona-based operator of haunted house attractions across the nation's Midwest and Southwest.
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Girard investments recover, but school still shrinks
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Stephen Girard, early Philadelphia's self-made millionaire global trader, energy and transport pioneer, war financier, and vegan slaveholder, left most of his $10 million fortune to the city, so it could build Delaware Avenue, hire cops, and fund other public projects - especially the Girard College for orphans.
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Oracle buys cloud-computing firm
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Oracle Corp. boss Larry Ellison didn't used to like this cloud-computing thing. He expected Oracle would keep selling big business software systems, updates, and maintenance onto client servers, instead of letting customers move their secure data functions online to the world computing cloud.
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Afghani here on business visit finds people 'so respectful'
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Zuhal Zahed, visiting from Afghanistan for two weeks on a commercial exchange program, says business Philadelphia-style takes getting used to.
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