This, just posted on W$J.com, is a great story: In January 2005, someone using the name “Rahodeb” went online to a Yahoo stock-market forum and posted this opinion: No company would want to buy Wild Oats Markets Inc., a natural-foods grocer, at its price then of about $8 a share. “Would Whole Foods buy OATS?” [...]
I’ve had CNBC on all day, what with its extensive coverage of the “War on Wealth” and all. I turned up the sound when John Snow–former Secretary of Treasury, now the figurehead (but hard-working) chairman of Cerberus Capital Management–showed up on screen a little while ago. Anchor Erin Burnett asked him a few questions about [...]
President Bush is set to announce this afternoon that the federal deficit will drop to $205 billion, or about 1.5% of GDP, for the fiscal year that ends in September. This is actually a worse deficit than folks were predicting early this year (I think Iraq war spending has had something to do with that), [...]
With the first of several congressional hearings to come on private equity taxation happening today in 215 Dirksen Senate Office Building (hurry! hurry! you can still get there for some of the exciting action!), the WaPo (yesterday) and the NYT (today) both have articles on the vigorous lobbying campaign being waged by the private equity [...]
The European Union’s finance ministers want to send former French finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn to Washington to run the International Monetary Fund. The way people get picked for these jobs is really, really silly, and in the end I can’t claim to care all that much who’s in charge at the IMF. But Strauss-Kahn is [...]
Citigroup bossman Chuck Prince had something interesting to say in the FT today: The Citigroup chief executive told the Financial Times that the party would end at some point but there was so much liquidity it would not be disrupted by the turmoil in the US subprime mortgage market. He denied that Citigroup, one of [...]
As any regular reader of this blog knows, I’ve been obsessed lately with the social networking site Facebook. This obsession was mainly in the service of journalism, and now that I’ve written my Time column on the subject I probably ought to move on. But now I’m being faced with the fundamental question that eventually [...]
In previous playings I had been appalled at how little payoff there seemed to be to attending college, but I almost always chose to anyway. Wanted to be a good example to Curious Capitalist Jr., I guess. Anyway, it turned out I had failed to read the part in the rules where it says college [...]
I know my occasional soccer posts are mostly ridiculous, but having just watched the U.S. beat Brazil 2-1 in an unhingingly thrilling and nerve-wracking U-20 (it obviously stands for “under 20,” but some of the players are already 20) World Cup game before a packed house of Ottawans, I have a couple of things to [...]
Last Friday, as part of the reporting for my column about Facebook, I chatted with Gina Bianchini and Marc Andreessen, co-founders of Ning. (Andreessen might also have been involved with some thing called Netscape that I seem to remember people talking about a lot in the mid-1990s.) Ning, which enables people to set up customized [...]
