When a credit card users make a purchase using his or her card, the merchant is charged a transaction fee by its bank that typically includes a fixed charge plus a percentage of the amount charged.
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Back in the late '80s, Drexel Burnham was busy coming to market with a succession of shaky leverage buyout deals with fixed-charge coverage ratios of just one times.
For cyclical properties like airlines, industrials and even hotels, fixed-charge coverage of just one (suggesting that a company's earnings are just enough to satisfy debt, lease and principal repayment over the next year) can evaporate overnight.
Last week, the regulator, Ofgem, published its simplification plan, which said suppliers would be forced to have no-frills tariffs, which would consist of a standing charge - fixed by the regulator - plus a unit charge for energy used.
Traditional home-equity loans mostly charge fixed rates, and the borrower gets the money in one lump sum.
In contrast, management consultants, who charge a fixed fee for their work, are regarded as more trustworthy.
Mr Goldstein's boss, Hans-Peter Bauer, who was in charge of fixed income, currency and derivatives trading, went by the wayside just before Christmas.
This is made worse by an odd pricing system, under which firms charge a fixed amount, instead of billing their customers by the hour.
"Because we don't make a profit, because the rates of interest we're allowed to charge are fixed by the government, it's quite hard to generate income, " he said.
The prices mobile operators charge for fixed-line-to-mobile and for mobile-to-mobile interconnection are expected to fall by half over the next four years, says Philip Townsend, a telecoms analyst at Natexis Bleichroeder, a brokerage.
He was in charge of fixed-income trading at Salomon at the time of a bond-trading scandal in 1991, in which traders under Meriwether made false bids in an effort to manipulate the market in two-year notes.
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With small customer bases over which to spread their fixed costs, they tend to charge higher fees per dollar invested.
Even when the client and vendor agree to a fixed fee, the vendor can charge for work not outlined in the original contract.
For Tony Volpon, a managing director in charge of emerging markets fixed income in the Americas over at Nomura Securities in New York, there are distinct factors changing the demand and supply of labor in the direction of tighter conditions.
At the beginning of the trial Sibanda, of no fixed abode, pleaded guilty to a charge of murder.
The Tote will also keep its seven-year monopoly on pool betting (where stakes are pooled and the winners take the lot, minus taxes and an administration charge, as opposed to fixed-odds betting where the bookmaker bears the risk).
The state government confesses it can no longer supply potable water free of charge, and has introduced monthly fixed charges - but only residents in affluent neighbourhoods, like Victoria Island, Lekki and Ikoyi, pay.
The fund has an annual management charge of 0.25% and a fixed expense of 0.15% for all investors which was previously 1% for retail investors and 0.6% for institutional investors.
Because the number of potential customers for such experimental sensors is small, the firms manufacturing them have to charge a high price per unit just to cover the fixed costs of designing the product, setting up the factory, and so forth.
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For all its success, for instance, Oracle Japan sells its databases through other Japanese software houses, which continue to charge for their services (now packaged with an Oracle database) on a fixed-price basis.
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