THE HQ COMPANIES ARTICLES

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Equifax’s Small Business Delinquency Index (SBDI) for the transportation industry continues to relentlessly spiral upwards to levels not seen since the Great Financial Crisis. These SBDI numbers in the above graph are not adjusted for inflation, so the situation is actually more dire. BOTTOM LINE:

• Almost 100% of all goods (electronics, motor vehicles, pharmaceuticals, gravel, sand, hazardous materials, machinery, food, the vast majority of commodities)—that’s over 55.5 million tons of goods daily in the US—travel their last 250 miles via a short-haul (or short-distance) truck...and an uncomfortably high share of those trucking companies are close to bankruptcy...and there is no replacement transportation that can substitute for the service they provide, which is hauling your goods or components from the ships/airplanes/long-haul trucks to your grocery store, your wholesaler, your retailer, your home, your business.

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Kathleen Graham’s Panelist Remarks During econVue's 8/25/25 Panel Presentation

These topics covered at the Jackson Hole 2025 Economic Symposium all involve factors that impact people significantly AND are all topics that are in flux currently, i.e., major impactors on people’s lives where what the outcome/direction will be is currently unknown. The question then becomes: how will people respond to such uncertainty in the near term? This article covers likely responses from US employers and US employees.

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Kathy Graham was requested by econVue to join as a Contributing Author and Panelist. econVue is a global consortium of economic, geopolitical experts from a wide range of specialties who discuss trending issues. econVue is also one of the top Substack thought leaders in terms of subscription numbers.

Kathy's Top 3 Predictions for 2025, which was all about The AI Explosion, was published on econVue on 1/16/2025. It turned out to be pretty timely given the news that arrived a week later about China's DeepSeek AI.

Kathy's predictions focus on:

1. Escalating Operational Costs: Training AI models will become increasingly expensive ...

2. Legal and Ethical Challenges: Intellectual property disputes, privacy concerns, and biases in AI systems will create new regulatory pressures and risks ...

3. Resource Strains: The growing reliance on AI will dramatically increase energy and water consumption, raising environmental concerns and pushing industries toward nuclear energy and sustainable solutions ...

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An article co-authored by Kathy Graham that was featured in the Practice section of NACD's Directorship for Boardroom Intelligence magazine.

1. The risk of unmet stakeholder expectations is incinerating business value.

2. Enterprise risk professionals recognize that it is vital to understand the expectations of stakeholders, which is only possible via the reporting of knowledgeable staff who have their fingers on the pulses of those stakeholders. These critical reporting processes are vulnerable to human frailties, such as the biases of management.

3. There is a path to mitigate human capital systemic bias, ensuring more reliable enterprise intelligence for the purposes of reputation risk management. This path is built around three core actions: ...

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THE LAND OF LEMONS AND NUTS.
A children's book on finance, economics, and world trade. ISBN 978-0-9821161-0-4.

CAREERS IN HEDGE FUNDS.
Hedge Fund and Financial Management, Izzy Nelkin, Elsevier, ISBN 0-7506-6007-4.

ALTERNATIVE INVESTMENTS A THROUGH Z.
Financial Engineering News.

THE ROLE OF THE BANKER IN THE AGRARIAN UNITED STATES.
Smithsonian's Financial History magazine.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF U.S. INVESTMENT ASSOCIATIONS.
Smithsonian's Financial History magazine.