Money Talking

A week of climate change marches, meetings, speeches and pledges in New York City is coming to an end. World leaders came for the U.N. Climate Summit and regular folks joined the People's Climate March on Sunday. Business executives also gathered and made pledges to fight climate change. This week on Money Talking, regular contributors Rana Foroohar of Time magazine and Joe Nocera of the New York Times examine what corporate leaders around the globe are doing to reduce emissions and embrace sustainability in their businesses and whether they are doing enough. Also, a look at the movement to get university endowments, pensions and individuals to divest from fossil fuel companies - how could it affect the climate change? According to Arabella Advisors, various entities have already committed to divest over $50 billion in assets from fossil fuel companies.

Fights at work are never pleasant. In this week's Money Talking management conversation, WNYC's Business Editor Charlie Herman speaks with two experts who write and work with Harvard Business Review about how to stay composed during workplace kerfuffles and how to deal with office hotheads. Annie McKee is an executive coach, senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of Primal Leadership: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence. Here are a few of her pieces of advice. 

Linda Hill is a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School and author of Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader. She says it's important to choose the right words when communicating with colleagues. But before you speak, you've got to listen. 

To hear the full conversation, click on the audio above or read more from McKee and Hill. And if you have tips you'd like to share, leave us a comment below or send an email.

The Chinese e-commerce website Alibaba is expected to have one of the largest IPOs ever when it goes public Friday. This week on Money Talking, regular contributors Rana Foroohar of Time magazine and Joe Nocera of the New York Times discuss who benefits, what you really get when you buy a share of the company and how much of a threat Alibaba could be for U.S. internet retailers like Amazon and eBay. 

Work is messy, but that doesn't mean that you have to be a hot mess at work. This week, as a part of Money Talking's first management conversation, WNYC's business editor Charlie Herman speaks with two experts from the Harvard Business Review on getting organized and maximizing your productivity at the office. Sarah Green is a senior associate editor at HBR and author of the article "8 Ways Not to Manage Your Email (and Five and a Half Tactics That Work)." Here are a few of Green's tips for how to handle that glut of email.

Herman also talks to Ron Friedman, a social psychologist who specializes in human motivation and author of "How to Spend the First 10 Minutes of Your Day." He says it's important to define your goals for the day and stick to them. 

To hear the full conversation about how to be more productive and organized with your email and your to-do list, click on the audio above. If you have some tips you'd like to share, leave us a comment below. 

Economists estimate that more than 200,000 jobs were created in August and that the unemployment rate dropped from 6.2 percent to 6.1 percent. We'll learn whether they're right when the monthly jobs report is released Friday morning. It's a report that always gets a lot of attention, but it's going to be even more as we approach the midterm elections in November. That's because how the economy is doing and how people perceive their personal finances could determine who they chose in the voting booth. This week on Money Talking, regular contributor Rana Foroohar of Time magazine and guest Cardiff Garcia of the Financial Times take a closer look at the economy and what it could mean for the upcoming election. Then a look at what Apple might have in store with its big announcement next week and the future of Uber and other "shared-economy" tech companies.

Congress returns from its summer recess in a little over a week, and there's a lot of work to be done on issues related to business and finance. This week on Money Talking, guest host Heidi Moore speaks with Ben White of Politico and Tim Fernholz of Quartz about what Congress could do this fall when it comes to tax inversions, infrastructure spending, immigration and the minimum wage. 

The retirement system in the United States is in shambles. Most people no longer have pensions. Many workers are not putting enough money into their 401ks and IRAs to build up enough retirement savings. And in today's society, Social Security payments cover very little of a retired person's costs. So, what's to be done? 

This week on Money Talking, Joe Nocera of The New York Times and Rana Foroohar of Time magazine rethink retirement and discuss possible solutions to the problems plaguing America's retirement system. This conversation is also available as a video from MetroFocus, the weekly news magazine from New York and New Jersey public television stations THIRTEEN, WLIW21 and NJTV. 

There's been a lot of upheaval in the media world in the last few weeks. Gannett announced it will spin off its newspapers into a stand alone company. This follows Tribune which just sold off its publications, including the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. This follows the earlier, high-profile spin-off at Time Warner, which sent print publications like Time and Fortune off on their own. And, of course, we can't forget the grandaddy of these splits led by Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Wall Street Journal.  This week on Money Talking, guest contributors Heidi Moore with the Guardian and Derek Thompson with the Atlantic discuss what these media moves mean, why they're happening now and what they say about the future of journalism. 

This week on Money Talking, a summer smackdown in the business world. First, Rupert Murdoch ended his courtship of Time Warner by sending an email to that company's CEO Jeff Bewkes saying his $80 billion offer was off the table. Has the media world finally hit "Peak Murdoch"? Then, the Federal Reserve and FDIC told 11 of the largest banks that their plans to avoid bankruptcy without causing severe problems for the economy were not up to snuff. And finally, tax inversions. American companies are expressing interest in moving their headquarters overseas in order to lower their taxes. But after Walgreens abandoned plans to "move" to Switzerland, are inversions becoming less popular? Cardiff Garcia of the Financial Times and Diane Brady of Bloomberg Businessweek join Money Talking.

Since the genome was sequenced 10 years ago, personalized medicine has started to catch fire. Pharmaceutical companies are now developing drugs for so-called orphan diseases, which affect only a small sliver of the population. It sounds great, but there’s a potential problem: The cost. Some of these drugs cost a thousand dollars a pill. This week on Money Talking, regular contributors Joe Nocera of the New York Times and Rana Foroohar of Time magazine speak to guest host Heidi Moore of the Guardian about what personalized medicine means for consumers, drug companies and insurance companies. This week's episode also explores what Argentina's default means for the global economy and a set of American hedge funds that invested in the country.