The dress Toni Braxton wore to the Grammys. A Jacqueline Suzanne novel. The Federal Reserve chairman told Congress last week the economic slowdown has yet to run its full course. As a result, everybody from Nortel and Cisco to Lucent got caught with their pants down.
Inventory is the lubricant of a strong economy.
People can't spend money and buy products if they are out of stock. They often sell their manufactured goods to distributors that keep them on hand so they can ship goods to retailers. Sometimes they ship unfinished goods to other companies that use them to make more complex products. Fancy computer systems are supposed to ensure that no one ends up with too much inventory that is costly to store. Retailers stop ordering.