Federal law requires a lender to disclose the annual percentage rate, the finance charge, the amount financed and the total of payments, in a prescribed format, before the borrower signs. The disclosure is standardized so it can be compared across lenders. The borrower is not expected to know what to ask.
economics
Whistleblower bounties
The Dodd-Frank Act directs the SEC to pay a person who voluntarily provides original information leading to a successful enforcement action a share of the money recovered, where sanctions exceed a million dollars. Not protection from retaliation, though that exists too. Payment. The law attaches a financial reward to pushing information out.
Knowledge management
An entire American consulting and software industry exists to capture what employees know before they leave. It arose in the 1990s and has been repeatedly reinvented, which is itself evidence. A problem that stays solved does not need solving every decade.
Consultants
American corporations spend heavily on external advisers who arrive, learn the business, produce recommendations, and leave. A recurring complaint inside those companies is that the consultants are selling back knowledge the firm once had. The complaint is often accurate, and the spending continues.
Own-costs
Own-costs. The German term for what a thing costs the producer before any margin, and it appears in ordinary commercial speech as well as in accounting.
Zu Selbstkosten abgeben — to hand something over at own-cost — is a specific and meaningful statement in German business. It names an exact point on a scale everyone is assumed to know exists.
Under the line
Under the line. The German for the net result, and the line in question is the one drawn across a column of figures before the total is written beneath it. The phrase assumes a column exists.
Graded by the task
German collective agreements set Entgeltgruppen — pay bands graded by the task rather than by the person. The description of the role determines the band. Promotion means being assigned different work, and the money follows the work rather than the individual.
Cost accounting as a discipline
Kostenrechnung. German business education treats cost accounting as a discipline in its own right, with its own vocabulary and its own exams, distinct from financial accounting. Selbstkosten, own-costs. Deckungsbeitrag, contribution margin. Zuschlagskalkulation, overhead absorption. The tradition assumes a price is built upward from documented inputs, and teaches the building.
The shortage of skilled workers
Fachkräftemangel is a permanent topic in German public debate, with its own government programmes, its own immigration legislation, and its own annual statistics. The noun refers to a shortage of Fachkräfte specifically — not of workers, and not of graduates.
Headcount and budget
American organizational power is counted in people and dollars, and both are stated plainly in reviews and negotiations. How many people do you have? is a question about standing, asked directly, and answered.