NBOSI | OHENE

By Pavlos Eleftheriadis Just a few years ago, Greece came perilously close to defaulting on its debts and exiting the eurozone. Today, thanks to the largest sovereign bailout in history, the country’s economy is showing new signs of life. In exchange for promises that Athens would enact aggressive austerity measures, the so-called troika -- the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund -- provided tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans. From the perspective of many global investors and European officials, those policies have paid off. Excluding a one-off expenditure to recapitalize its banks, Greece’s budget shortfall totaled roughly two percent last year, down from nearly 16 percent in 2009. Last year, the country ran a current account surplus for the first time in over three decades. And this past April, Greece returned to the international debt markets it had been locked out of for four years, issuing $4 billion in five-year governm

WALL STREET JOURNAL REPORTS: LEADERSHIP 125 Years of Change in the U.S. Economy—and the Dow How the Business World Has Been Transformed, From the Democratization of Capital to the Rise and Fall of Labor By JOHN STEELE GORDON July 7, 2014 For the past 125 years, The Wall Street Journal has been covering the evolution of the American economic ecosystem and the businesses that make it up. It has thus chronicled the most extraordinary period of economic change and growth in world history. A DIFFERENT WORLD Indeed, the business world of 1889 today seems almost something from an alien planet. Offices were nearly totally masculine preserves. About the only jobs for women outside the home were as teachers, nurses and telephone operators. Almost all large corporations were run by members of the WASP establishment. Ledgers were mostly handwritten, as were most invoices and even many contracts. There were no standardized rules for keeping books, and almost no government regulation of busi