Work in process

Work in process,work in progress, (WIP) goods in process, or in-process inventory are a company's partially finished goods waiting for completion and eventual sale or the value of these items. These items are either just being fabricated or waiting for further processing in a queue or a buffer storage. The term is used in production and supply chain management.

Optimal production management aims to minimize work in process. Work in process requires storage space, represents bound capital not available for investment and carries an inherent risk of earlier expiration of shelf life of the products. A queue leading to a production step shows that the step is well buffered for shortage in supplies from preceding steps, but may also indicate insufficient capacity to process the output from these preceding steps.

Just-in-time (acronym: JIT) production is a concept to reduce work in process with respect to a continuous configuration of product. Just in sequence (JIS) is a similar concept with respect to a scheduled variety in sequence of configurations for products.

United States

Coordinates: 40°N 100°W / 40°N 100°W / 40; -100

The United States of America (USA), commonly referred to as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a federal republic composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major territories and various possessions. The 48 contiguous states and Washington, D.C., are in central North America between Canada and Mexico. The state of Alaska is in the northwestern part of North America and the state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. At 3.8 million square miles (9.842 million km²) and with over 320 million people, the country is the world's third or fourth-largest by total area and the third most populous. It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries. The geography and climate of the United States are also extremely diverse, and the country is home to a wide variety of wildlife.

Janet Yellen

Janet Louise Yellen (born August 13, 1946) is an American economist. She is the Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, previously serving as Vice Chair from 2010 to 2014. Previously, she was President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco; Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton; and business professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business.

Yellen's ability to connect economic theory to everyday life is considered one of the defining characteristics of her career, and President Obama cited her understanding of the high "human costs" of unemployment when he nominated her to succeed Ben Bernanke as Chair of the United States Federal Reserve. On January 6, 2014, the U.S. Senate confirmed Yellen's nomination. She was sworn in on February 3, 2014, making her the first woman to hold the position.

Early life and education

Yellen was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Anna (née Blumenthal) and Julius Yellen, a physician. Her father's family originally came from the Polish town of Suwałki. She graduated from Fort Hamilton High School in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. She graduated summa cum laude from Pembroke College (Brown University) with a degree in economics in 1967. At Brown, Yellen had switched her planned major from philosophy to economics and was particularly influenced by professors George Borts and Herschel Grossman. She received her Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 1971 for a thesis titled Employment, output and capital accumulation in an open economy: a disequilibrium approach under the supervision of James Tobin and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, who later called Yellen one of his brightest and most memorable students. Two dozen economists earned their Ph.D from Yale in 1971, but Yellen was the only woman in that doctoral class.

Wall Street

Wall Street is a 0.7-mile-long (1.1 km) street running eight blocks, roughly northwest to southeast, from Broadway to South Street on the East River in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, New York City. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, the American financial sector (even if financial firms are not physically located there), or signifying New York-based financial interests.

Anchored by Wall Street, New York City has been called both the most economically powerful city and the leading financial center of the world, and the city is home to the world's two largest stock exchanges by total market capitalization, the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. Several other major exchanges have or had headquarters in the Wall Street area, including the New York Mercantile Exchange, the New York Board of Trade, and the former American Stock Exchange.

History

Early years

There are varying accounts about how the Dutch-named "de Waal Straat" got its name. A generally accepted version is that the name of the street was derived from an earthen wall on the northern boundary of the New Amsterdam settlement, perhaps to protect against English colonial encroachment or incursions by Native Americans. A conflicting explanation is that Wall Street was named after Walloons— the Dutch name for a Walloon is Waal. Among the first settlers that embarked on the ship "Nieu Nederlandt" in 1624 were 30 Walloon families. The Dutch word "wal" can be translated as "rampart". However, even some English maps show the name as Waal Straat, and not as Wal Straat.

Global recession

A global recession is recession that affects many countries around the world—that is, a period of global economic slowdown or declining economic output.

Definitions

The International Monetary Fund defines a global recession as "a decline in annual per‑capita real World GDP (purchasing power parity weighted), backed up by a decline or worsening for one or more of the seven other global macroeconomic indicators: Industrial production, trade, capital flows, oil consumption, unemployment rate, per‑capita investment, and per‑capita consumption".

According to this definition, since World War II there were only four global recessions (in 1975, 1982, 1991 and 2009), all of them only lasting a year (although the 1991 recession would have lasted until 1993 if the IMF had used normal exchange rate weighted per‑capita real World GDP rather than the purchasing power parity weighted per‑capita real World GDP). The 2009 global recession, also known as the Great Recession, was by far the worst of the four postwar recessions, both in terms of the number of countries affected and the decline in real World GDP per capita.