Not long after the AOL-Time Warner merger was announced in 2000, Steve Case and Jerry Levin came to London to talk to all the UK AOLians and Time Warnerites about the deal. I had just moved to London a few months before, and the main thing I remember from the gathering was Case declaring that his goal was to make AOL Time Warner “the …
Are Citi and Merrill going to hire CEOs who can only fix yesterday’s problems?
In the comments to my post on Chuck Prince’s resignation, somebody with the very creative handle “Anonymous” makes an excellent point:
You may recall that Prince got the job when Citi was reeling from one legal scandal after another, which was not a Weill forte. If the trend continues, the next CEO will be good at sorting out subprime
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Survey: Two-thirds who call in sick aren’t
This just in! From AccountingWeb:
While 34 percent of people who call in sick to work at the last minute do so because of illness, 66 percent are taking time for other reasons, according to the 2007 CCH Unscheduled Absence Survey.
No kidding! So what were we doing–hitting the salon for a mani-pedi? Hitting that Super Wednesday sale at …
Citigroup’s Chuck Prince stops dancing
As expected, CEO Chuck Prince stepped down at Citigroup’s extra special board meeting Sunday. As not entirely expected, former Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs co-CEO Bob Rubin took over as interim chairman and Citi Europe’s Win Bischoff as interim CEO. And the WSJ, NYT, and FT are all reporting (Sunday night) that Citi will announce …
Have we reached the consumer debt limit?
Wondering why the banking sector’s problems keep failing to go away? Take a look at this chart:
Since the early 1980s, we Americans have been piling on debt. Much of that surely has been to the good, enabling us to enjoy our houses and cars and fridges while paying for them rather than waiting until we’ve saved up all the money. The …
It’s official: Peak oil is here and “the long emergency” has begun
This is a few days old, but nonetheless very much worth sharing:
When historians glance back at 2007 through the haze of their coal-fired stoves, they will mark this year as the onset of the Long Emergency – or whatever they choose to call the unraveling of industrial economies and the complex systems that constituted them. And if they
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Won’t meet at a brothel? You’re fired
That’s what Steve Biegel, a top American exec who worked for Japanese advertising giant Dentsu, alleges he was told. According to Ad Age:
The former creative director at Dentsu USA has filed suit against the holding company, claiming he was fired after he complained about being put in sexually-charged work situations that included side
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Are we biased against baldies at work?
Steve Rushin’s piece in the current TIME, titled “The Bald Truth,” points out that Americans haven’t voted a bald president into office for 51 years. He writes:
If the 2008 presidential election comes down to a choice between Hillary Clinton and front runner Rudolph Giuliani, Americans will elect a woman before they will elect a bald
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We’re all web writers now
My colleague Jim Poniewozik blogs today about the impending Hollywood writers’ strike–and how it relates to the sitch faced by us right-coast writers. Seeing as he’s totally invading my turf and writing more eloquently than I could about labor, damn him, I’ll simply reprint his argument here and agree with it. [Jim, I expect the same …
Jimmy Cayne has better things to do than deal with silly Wall Street crises
The W$J has a big front-page story on Bear Stearns CEO James Cayne’s priorities:
During 10 critical days of this crisis — one of the worst in the securities firm’s 84-year history — Bear’s chief executive wasn’t near his Wall Street office. James Cayne was playing in a bridge tournament in Nashville, Tenn., without a cellphone or an
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Explaining why we have a mortgage problem
I hesitate to share things that have already been shared by bloggers far more prominent than I (in this case Paul Kedrosky, who got it from Marc Andreessen), but this ITV comedy Q&A on the mortgage meltdown by John Bird and John Fortune is just too brilliant to pass up:
The description of the typical subprime borrower as an unemployed …
Lot’s of mini-recessions, but no actual recession
Business Week‘s Michael Mandel has this to say about the economy’s apparent resilience:
[W]e now may be in a world of mini-recessions–sharp falls in one or two sectors which do not pull down the whole economy. Think about the different parts of the economy as being connected by springs (or slinkys, if you want). A sharp drop in one
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