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By DENNIS NISHI

Tamara Guion-Yagy was disappointed when Tetra Tech, an environmental engineering firm in Pasadena, Calif., hired somebody else for the job that she wanted. The 40-year-old graphic designer thought she was being tried out when the firm hired her as a temporary worker.

So Ms. Guion-Yagy worked even harder at the same temp job, often staying late to finish work. Her manager responded by creating another full-time position for Ms. Guion-Yagy. “I knew I’d be good at the job and liked the work,” she says. “I just needed to show them how much.”

Dennis Nishi

When times are prosperous, companies are more likely to use temporary jobs as a low-risk way to vet full-time candidates. But the conversion rate from temporary to permanent worker has been low over the past few years as more companies lean on temps as a hedge against a double-dip recession, says Jonas Prising, president of Manpower North, a temporary-staffing company in Milwaukee, Wis.

“That’s why temps should do what they can to stand out in some way to improve their chances of getting hired full time or at least having their contracts renewed,” he says.

Become a source of ideas by really understanding the needs of your company and figure ways to apply your talents to this end. If you have logistics experience, for example, and know that consolidating shipping through a single supplier can save money, why not present your ideas in writing to the boss?

Be punctual and friendly, replace the office coffee with a gourmet blend or do anything else to increase your visibility in the office. Small gestures can make a lasting impression.

Work your way into the everyday office culture so co-workers will think of you as a colleague and somebody they can rely on. Laurie Ruettimann, a human-resources professional from Raleigh, N.C., recommends participating in workplace functions like office parties, picnics and lunch outings.

Volunteer for company-supported activities like charity work. It helped Sailor Brown get a full-time job at financial-services firm E*Trade Financial in New York. A weekend March of Dimes event gave the 40-year-old executive assistant the opportunity to interact with her boss and co-workers in a casual setting. And it allowed them to connect the hard-working temp from the office with a real human being who’s easy to get along with. Ms. Brown says she was hired full time soon after the event.

But don’t pester everyone about becoming a full-time employee. Put out your best work and let your actions sell you. Keep note of your accomplishments and bring them up when it’s time to renew your temporary contract.

Just being on the inside gives you an advantage over external candidates when applying for full-time jobs, says Mr. Prising. But don’t get complacent. Ready some options for when your contract is up.

—Email: sjdnishi@gmail.com

Por AMY GUTHRIE

Coca-Cola planea invertir US$5.000m en México durante 5 años

CIUDAD DE MÉXICO (Dow Jones)–Coca-Cola Co. planea invertir más de US$1.000 millones este año en México, un mercado clave para la productora de refrescos.

La inversión se enmarca dentro de un plan de inversión a cinco años por US$5.000 millones de Coca-Cola.

El presidente Felipe Calderón anunció la inversión tras reunirse con el presidente ejecutivo de Coca-Cola, Muhtar Kent, en Davos, Suiza, durante el fin de semana.

Como parte de la inversión, Coca-Cola planea aumentar el número de empleados en México de 90.000 en la actualidad a más de 100.000. Se estima que 800.000 empleos adicionales se generan a través de los canales de distribución y suministro de la compañía.

El mandatario señaló que indudablemente es una inversión importante que impulsará la economía local y creará más y mejores empleos para los trabajadores mexicanos.

En México se encuentran las dos mayores plantas embotelladoras en Latinoamérica de la marca Coca-Cola: Coca-Cola Femsa SAB y Arca Continental SAB.

By TOM L. FREUDENHEIM

Madison, Wis.

If a “movement” is a loosely organized or heterogeneous group of people favoring a general common goal, the Chicago Imagists—now the subject of a stunning exhibition at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art—don’t meet that definition. Rather, these artists, most of whom first showed together in the 1960s and ’70s under Don Baum’s direction at Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center, were more like young art buddies, sharing aesthetic attitudes rather than formal principles or aims. Which makes for an amazingly coherent display of work by 14 diverse artists, five of them women. At a time when abstraction held sway, the Chicago Imagists, like the New York-centered Pop artists, employed recognizable images, often drawn from popular culture. But the Midwest artists’ sources aren’t as obvious as the comics or advertisements appropriated by their more celebrated East Coast colleagues. That difference gives this exhibition a sense of excitement and discovery, and serves as a reminder of how narrowly regional so-called mainstream art actually is.

Baum and artist Ray Yoshida, an influential teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, served as godfathers to this group, and some of Yoshida’s paintings, given to the museum by his estate, introduce the painstaking and even studied approach that characterizes many of the works in the show. This is an art of meticulous and laborious brushwork, even when—as in the work of perhaps the best-known of these artists, Ed Paschke—there’s the suggestion of airbrushed surfaces, along with the garish colors and scale that become part of the puzzle in deciphering what is elusive, if evident, imagery. Karl Wirsum, with memorable visual power, brings forth motley figures, somewhere between cute and repellent. The most directly narrative works here are by Jim Nutt, often peppered with friendly visual and textual puns.

Uncommon for the time was the large number of female artists who shared this Imagist sensibility, of whom the best known is probably Gladys Nilsson. Her watercolors are full of Bosch-like folks, both joyful and grotesque, relating unreadable stories whose power seems at odds with the gentle hues of her delicate medium. A wholly different kind of imagery characterizes the work of Christina Ramberg, perhaps the most directly abstract painter here. Other discoveries, for me at least, include the work of Sarah Canright, whose “Shadow” (1969) combines baby blues and pinks into forms that meld Art Nouveau with Art Deco. It’s shown near “Untitled (Woman Disrobing)” (1979), a painting by Philip Hanson that conjures up the famous images of Folies Bergère dancer Loie Fuller—who was born near Chicago in 1862—by Toulouse Lautrec, Auguste Rodin and many others.

Robert Rauschenberg’s 1953 act of erasing a Willem de Kooning drawing describes a kind of fulcrum moment for many artists: confronting the powerful demons of your elders, their authority and their fame. If an art historian might decry Rauschenberg’s sacrilege, then there’s lots to be learned from the respectful manner in which this superficially rowdy bunch of artists came to terms with the art around them in one of America’s greatest museums. Notably, but not exclusively, the Dada and Surrealist holdings of the Ed and Lindy Bergman Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago must have had a strong impact on impressionable art students, along with the works of Jean Dubuffet, Ivan Albright and others who never neatly fit into any of the ‘isms’ of the time. That has long characterized the Second City’s art scene, as an ancillary exhibition at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, “Imagists in Context”—with works by Leon Golub, June Leaf, H.C. Westermann, and others—makes clear.

This assertive standing aside from fashionable movements may not be as obvious a Chicago mode as the city’s distinguished and influential architectural tradition, reflections of which can also be seen among the Imagist artists, especially Art Green and Roger Brown, both of whom created some of this exhibition’s most arresting works. Although Brown was primarily a painter with a style that melded comic-book and primitive-art sensibilities, his sculpture “Skyscraper With Pyramid” (1977), as well as Mr. Green’s large-canvas “Dead Reckoning” (1980) remind us that it’s difficult to be in Chicago without taking account of the scale, materials and above-average design quality of its many powerful buildings. But like most of the work here (and in contrast to an artist such as Golub), these are visual rather than political statements. If the Chicago Imagists’ sensibility is often an in-your-face aesthetic, stretching the limits of our taste, it’s also too smart to send out obvious messages.

This detour-worthy exhibition has been assembled from the significant holdings of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, many of them recent gifts of Bill McClain, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In a world of increasingly homogenized museum collections, it’s a tribute to the benefits of focused collecting.

Mr. Freudenheim, a former art-museum director, served as the assistant secretary for museums at the Smithsonian Institution.

The euro crisis may have stolen the headlines at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, but behind the scenes one of the biggest debates concerned the ongoing deglobalization of finance.

Bankers and regulators alike expressed alarm that the global reform effort is coming apart under the pressure of the euro crisis. Bankers fear national regulators are coming up with new domestic rules that undermine the commitment from the Group of 20 industrialized and developing nations to a global reform agenda. They worry that the free movement of capital, vital to the success of globalization, is being impeded.

For their part, regulators fear that any backsliding over the new Basel 3 rules will create new opportunities for regulatory arbitrage—making the global financial system more vulnerable to future shocks.

“If this generation of regulators allows financial protectionism to take hold it will have failed,” one person involved in setting the new standards said to me last week.

The balkanization of the financial system is most marked in the euro zone: Cross-border demand for southern European government bonds has virtually evaporated; cross-border lending is also drying up; and banks are reluctant to lend even to each other. Many banks are prioritizing domestic markets and shrinking international activities, among them French banks BNP Paribas and Société Générale, the Italian bank UniCredit and the U.K.’s Royal Bank of Scotland. For countries whose domestic financial systems are dominated by foreign-owned banks, including those in Central and Eastern Europe, this home bias is a potentially serious challenge.

The strains in the financial system extend beyond Europe. The cost of borrowing in dollars has risen to exorbitant levels everywhere, a clear sign the system is dysfunctional. Typically the price would be similar everywhere and close to LIBOR, the London Interbank Offered Rate. But Chinese banks must currently pay three times LIBOR and Indian banks must pay six times, according to Standard Chartered. That is handing a huge competitive advantage to U.S. banks that have plenty of dollar liquidity.

Regulators are contributing to this fragmentation. Many are using the discretion allowed under the Basel “Pillar 2″ rules to heap extra capital and liquidity requirements on subsidiaries of foreign banks. The Financial Services Authority is demanding that Santander and Morgan Stanley’s U.K. units comply with tough local rules; German regulator BaFin is restricting UniCredit’s ability to transfer capital and liquidity out of its German unit. Understandably, regulators want to minimize the risk of a local bank failure and protect the domestic economy from a sudden withdrawal of funding. But banks say these new demands make it harder to run a cross-border business and risk pushing up the cost of finance globally. Long term, banks may be less willing to deploy capital in markets seen as protectionist.

At the same time, Basel 3 rules are changing the shape of the global financial system—not always in ways regulators intended. Many argue the new liquidity rules are forcing euro- zone banks to deleverage faster.

The rules require banks to hold much larger reserves of liquid assets, tightly defined to consist primarily of cash and low-yielding developed-country sovereign bonds, and to use more expensive longer-term funding. Combined with higher capital requirements, this has driven down returns on equity, leading banks to push up borrowing costs and cut lending.

Policy makers at Davos acknowledged problems with the rules, including the perverse incentive to load up with sovereign bonds, the asset class at the heart of the current crisis. But there is no consensus over an alternative.

Some types of socially useful financial activity appear to be particularly vulnerable to the new rules. Trade finance, for example, is vital to the smooth functioning of global trade: Banks provide importers with letters of credit to reassure exporters they will be paid; exporters can then use these letters of credit to raise loans while their goods are being shipped.

Despite a historically very low default rate, the Basel rules will increase the risk weights on trade finance and make it subject to a bank’s overall leverage ratio, making it less economic for banks to provide it. The French banks, which traditionally dominated this market, are pulling back and it isn’t clear that Asian banks will easily be able to fill the gap given Western bank concerns over counter-party risks.

Similarly, Basel 3 will dramatically increase the risk weights on revolving credit facilities in a way that some bankers fear will undermine the vast commercial paper market, an important source of cheap, short-term funding for large highly rated corporations.

Meanwhile some countries are considering introducing rules that may be incompatible with the global agenda. Top of the list is the U.S.: some of the proposals in the Dodd-Frank Act will make it very hard to do business in the U.S. or with U.S. clients, according to European bankers. The U.K., Japan and Canada are worried that the current draft of the Volcker rule, designed to outlaw proprietary trading, will make it hard for banks to trade non-U.S. sovereign bonds, reducing market liquidity and potentially pushing up funding costs. If the U.S. gives special treatment to its own government bonds, Europe may be tempted to do the same, says European internal market commissioner Michel Barnier. At the same time, the E.U. is being urged to water down Basel 3 by delaying the introduction of the proposed leverage ratio and providing more favorable capital treatment for bank-owned insurers.

How can regulators stop the disintegration of the global financial system? The Financial Stability Board, which brings together national policy makers, is putting its faith in peer review: It will audit every country’s regulations to see how each complies with the Basel rules. Countries that deviate from the global standards will be named and shamed. But peer pressure may not be enough.

The truth is that regulators badly underestimated the degree of deleveraging that their quest for regulatory perfection would unleash, as some privately acknowledge. The world is now living with the economic consequences of this miscalculation.

The FSB has invested too much credibility in the reform agenda to change course—and anyway, it is the market that is now driving the process. That suggests the tension between the global rules and domestic financial interests is likely to grow—and regulators risk bringing about the very thing they most want to avoid.

Write to Simon Nixon at simon.nixon@wsj.com

Por PAUL HANNON

UNCTAD: China reduce brecha con EEUU como destino de inversiones

LONDRES (Dow Jones)–Estados Unidos continuó siendo en 2011 el destino favorito para las empresas que se están expandiendo internacionalmente, pero China redujo significativamente su diferencia con esa nación.

La Conferencia de Naciones Unidas para el Comercio y el Desarrollo, o Unctad, informó el martes que las empresas invirtieron US$1,5 billones en el extranjero en 2011, un aumento del 17% frente el año anterior pese a la creciente incertidumbre económica y la agitación en los mercados financieros globales.

La Unctad informó que los flujos de inversión extranjera directa, o IED, hacia las economías en desarrollo y en transición alcanzaron un máximo récord de US$755.000 millones.

La entidad proyecta un moderado nuevo incremento en los flujos globales a US$1,6 billones este año, aunque agregó que la estimación está sujeta a significativos riesgos e incertidumbres.

Luego de tres años de descensos, la inversión extranjera en las economías desarrolladas registró un fuerte aumento en 2011, con un 18% a US$753 billones.

Sin embargo, la inversión extranjera directa hacia Estados Unidos retrocedió en un 7,7%, aunque con un monto de US$210.700 millones la nación se convirtió en el mayor receptor de este tipo de inversión.

China ocupó el segundo lugar y atrajo US$124.000 millones en inversión extranjera, un aumento del 8,1% frente a 2010. Si se suman los US$78.400 millones que ingresaron a Hong Kong, la tasa de inversión extranjera directa hacia la Gran China alcanzó un poco menos de US$8.000 millones respecto de Estados Unidos.

La Unión Europea atrajo US$414.000 millones en inversión extranjera directa, lo que equivale a un aumento del 31,9% frente a 2010, pero no es necesariamente una señal de fortaleza.

La inversión extranjera directa hacia Latinoamérica se incrementó en un 34,6% a US$216.400 millones, encabezada por un crecimiento del 35,3% en los flujos hacia Brasil, y pese a un descenso del 10% en los flujos hacia Argentina.

Asia atrajo un 6,7% más de la inversión extranjera directa que en 2010, equivalente a US$392.900 millones, mientras India ocupó el primer lugar con US$34.000 millones, o un incremento del 37,9%.