Here’s part of a comment, from Curious Capitalist regular Yagdyu, that deserves wider distribution: Most bloggers and blog commentors are either rich people or are friends and family to rich people. Our access to millions and millions of dollars allow[s] us to waste time on the internet giving baseless opinions on issues that affect less [...]

In May 2003, Nicholas Carr published an article in the Harvard Business Review called “IT Doesn’t Matter” that launched his glorious career as a technology pundit and made a lot of people in Silicon Valley really angry. Carr’s argument was that for most big companies, information technology had become a simple necessity, not a source [...]

A couple of weeks ago, when I wrote a post about Facebook and LinkedIn, Paul Lukasiak commented: These social networking sites are kinda scary to me… In real life, people move on, make new friends, forget old acquaintences, etc, etc, etc… Now, for the rest of your life, you will be stuck with that guy [...]

Art Zadrozny of West Chester, PA, writes in response to my column on ExxonMobil’s stinginess: Did you not read your own words in the article about Exxon’s approach to oil exploration? Why would the company want to put itself in the same situation it found in 1981 – investing heavily in development, only to see [...]

After a long tenure as the most interesting (if not always the most accurate) of Wall Street’s economic forecasters, Steve Roach started work Monday as Morgan Stanley’s Asia chairman. So it was a little weird to encounter him late in the afternoon in Grand Central Station, rushing for a train. Apparently he doesn’t move to [...]

So Pearson, which owns the Financial Times and part of the Economist, is talking to GE, owner of CNBC, about putting in a bid for Dow Jones. And now Ron Burkle is apparently contemplating on a bid, too. Which puts the much-discussed dangers posed by Rupert Murdoch’s bid for Dow Jones in perspective. Yes, Murdoch [...]

According to the FT, An unprecedented coalition of large companies, pension funds, and trade unions will on Monday urge corporate America to scrap quarterly earnings guidance in an attempt to curtail the influence of hedge funds and other short-term investors. The move, backed by leading corporate figures such as Jeff Kindler, chief executive of Pfizer, [...]

On the side of a van this morning at 97th Street and Amsterdam Avenue:

The notion that the U.S. is stingy about government benefits in comparison with the rest of the wealthy world is widely held, and is mostly backed up by the data. But in the case of retirement benefits, it’s getting less true by the day. Yet few here in the States have caught on. Consider what [...]