Wealth

DAVID RUSK'S recently released book, "Baltimore Unbound: A Strategy for Regional Renewal," provides a lucid, well-reasoned and easy-to-understand wake-up call for Baltimoreans.Anyone looking at Baltimore's soaring crime rate and other social problems would be hard pressed to argue with Mr. Rusk's conclusion that "Baltimore City is programmed for inexorable decline." Although Baltimore is hardly unique among declining American cities, the factors which Mr. Rusk identifies as being coincident with the degeneration of metropolitan areas are extreme in Baltimore.

One benefit of living in a rich country is that we can pay psychologists and professors to explain why wealth doesn't make us very happy. It's true. Researchers have found that, once people can meet basic needs, psychological dividends from additional money steadily decrease. Making $100,000 does not make you twice as happy as $50,000. So why does losing money, and the prospect of losing money, make us so miserable? The short answer is that it doesn't have to. If you think about money in the context of what economics says about true fulfillment, having less of it shouldn't be quite so painful.

HOUSTON -- With his maverick bid for president, billionaire H. Ross Perot joins a colorful list of rich Texas tycoons who have brought their grab-them-by-the-horns business style to the world politics.Although their millions pale next to Mr. Perot's nearly $3 billion estimated fortune, several moneyed Texas candidates have parlayed a keen business instinct into political success -- or in one case, spectacular political disaster.While political neophytes have sprung from the ranks of the rich in other states, Texas has been particularly vulnerable to the phenomenon because of a relatively weak party system that encourages outsiders to jump in the race, observers here say."

GUANGHAN COUNTY, China -- After decades of tilling the earth with little to show for it, Wu Daifu is finally living up to the meaning of his name, "bringer of wealth."But it is not in his fields of wheat, rice and rapeseed that this peasant-turned-entrepreneur finds the way to a better life.Mr. Wu -- a shrewd 49-year-old who served 25 years as his district's Communist Party secretary -- has become a one-man capitalist conglomerate, relying much more on sideline enterprises than farming.PD He earns more than $2,000 a year by hiring others to collect andsell back to a paper mill its waste pulp.

New U.S. government data indicate that the concentration of corporate wealth among the highest-income Americans grew significantly in 2003, as a trend that began in 1991 accelerated in the first year that President Bush and Congress cut taxes on capital. In 2003, the top 1 percent of households owned 57.5 percent of corporate wealth, up from 53.4 percent the year before, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis of the latest income tax data. The top group's share of corporate wealth has grown by half since 1991, when it was 38.7 percent.

HOME SALES account for about one-sixth of the so-called wealth-effect spending, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan said last week in Orlando, Fla., at a conference on mortgage lending sponsored by America's Community Bankers. The capital gain on the sale of the average existing home "generally far exceeds" the down payment on the seller's next home, he said. Fed economists estimate that the average profit from the sale of an existing home over the past five years was more than $25,000 after expenses.

Mercantile Bankshares Corp.'s wealthy-client unit has undertaken a reorganization plan that cuts about 30 jobs and uses the savings to invest in new technology and make new hires that it can better position within the unit, a top bank executive said yesterday. "This is not about cost reductions," said Wallace Mathai-Davis, chairman of Mercantile's investment and wealth-management business. "It's about leveraging and redirecting our resources. It's about repositioning and placing our resources in a different area."

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- To "Madame X," who grows orchids in Le Boule, a community of wealth and power high above the capital, a return of exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide would be an ill omen of increased bloodshed and revenge by the poor.But as 19-year-old "Filibert" sees it, Father Aristide is the best hope for bringing Haitians together in a climate of peace that would allow him and hundreds other street kids and political activists to come out of hiding from security forces.If Father Aristide does not return it would be the poor, he said, who would be the victims of revenge.

WASHINGTON -- The bean-counters of the world are harming Mother Earth, an environmental think tank charges.In a 110-page report to be released today, the World Resources Institute finds new villains in the continuing pollution of the planet: accountants and economists.The report documents the ongoing destruction of Costa Rica's forests and fisheries, and finds that part of the ecological devastation is linked to the way governments and banks around the world measure economies.It seems strange to say that something as trivial-sounding as statistics could contribute to worldwide environmental problems.

Top Deutsche Bank executive Margaret Preston is leaving the company after nearly two decades to run the private-wealth-management unit of Mercantile Bankshares Corp., Mercantile confirmed yesterday. "Margaret is a superb professional, and will add significantly to our ability to provide leading investment and wealth-management services to our clients," said Wallace Mathai-Davis, the new chairman of wealth management for Baltimore-based Mercantile. Preston, 44, is a Harvard Business School alumna and investment industry veteran whose roles have ranged from securities analyst to chief operating officer, and has a proven record of building businesses along the way. The move, effective early next month, will keep Preston in Baltimore, where she said she would remain a trustee of the Alex.