The announcement by Halliburton that it is moving its headquarters to Dubai (actually, the company says it is opening “a headquarters” there, but it’s where the CEO will be so it sounds like the headquarters to me) is sure to be greeted by all sorts of theorizing about the company trying to escape U.S. regulators and Congressional …
Re Thursday’s post about the profit margins of online brokers, this list of the Top 50 Internet advertisers by media value (by TNS Media Intelligence, via ClickZ Stats) showed up today in my email inbox. Among the top 15 are Fidelity, E*Trade, TD Waterhouse, and Scottrade. That’s four of the five biggest online brokers. The other, …
My new column, headlined “Thanks, Rich People” is up online. It’s also in print in the last of the old-look Time magazines (with Dick Cheney and a cloud on the cover). Next week everything will look different. Seriously different. Anyway, here’s how the column begins:
During the 2004 election campaign, President George W. Bush pledged to
…
I had lunch Tuesday with Don Montanaro, CEO of a newish online brokerage called TradeKing. In case you hadn’t heard, the online brokerage business is back, with record volume in February.
Montanaro was one of the founders of Suretrade.com, an early online broker later devoured by Fleet which was itself later devoured by Bank of America. …
A reader who knows more about accounting than you do had this to say about my intimation Tuesday that stock-option backdating was a nearly victimless crime:
Nobody got hurt? I’m not so sure. If these companies had been accounting for the compensation they were paying these guys, earnings would have looked a lot different. I can’t believe
…
When I wrote my post earlier today about stock-option backdating, I hadn’t gotten as far as the editorial page of today’s WSJ, where Holman Jenkins weighs in ($) on the subject yet again.
His main point is that the whole backdating mess (uncovered initially by University of Iowa professor Erik Lie and then kept in the headlines mainly …
Last week I cited from memory what I thought was a story in William Greider‘s 1992 book Who Will Tell the People about newspapers and their security guards. The point was that in the old days any old nut off the street could walk in and harangue the reporters, while now he’d be stopped at the door. Anyway, I went home and looked through …
A while back, I wrote that the prevalence of stock-option backdating could be explained in part by the fact that hardly anybody took the accounting rules governing stock options seriously:
When supposed wrongdoing is this widespread, one can’t help but wonder: Are there really this many willful rule-breakers in corporate America, or did
…
When I posted the photo of people lining up for Powerball Mega Millions tickets in New York, I did it mainly out of guilt that I hadn’t posted anything yet today. But I learned a few minutes later, from Joel Slemrod of the University of Michigan, that it was highly relevant.
The relevance is that lottery winners have been increasingly …
At 1:45 p.m. today.
And no, I am not a professional photographer. What tipped you off?
Economist Jamie Galbraith has a cool little piece in the current issue of Mother Jones (link via Brad DeLong) about income inequality not between individuals but between counties.
Galbraith ends up using county income data to make pretty much the same point as I did in my column a few weeks ago: That the counties around Washington, …
Having failed to read Warren Buffett’s annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders the moment it went up online last week (horrors!), I only just learned–thanks to Frank Ahrens in the Washington Post (link via Romenesko)–that Buffett had some interesting things to say about the state of American metropolitan daily newspapers. They …
