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 you thought was pretty cool
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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 the market bottom out and
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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 Hong Kong …
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 has repeatedly toadied …
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
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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 Chicago lawyer/rabblerouser Tom Geoghegan …
My latest column is in the issue of Time with Mike and Arnie on the cover and online here. It begins:
In early June, the Organization For Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)–the club of the world’s wealthy and almost wealthy nations–released a 208-page document perversely titled Pensions at a Glance. Inside is a rundown of how
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Curious Capitalist Jr. took the photo above. He and all the rest of the second graders at his school did a Circle Line field trip today. I was one of the chaperones. Nobody fell out of the boat. And nobody got lost in the subway on the way back. A spectacular success.
One of CC Jr.’s classmates took this cool shot (with my camera) of …
Blogger/law professor Stephen Bainbridge, trolling for similar sob stories after a bad United Airlines experience, has found one of the great blog posts of our age, by one Brianna, who was stranded by United in Denver twice in one weekend last month. I was going to paste a sample here, but none of the ones I came up with did the thing …
A friend asks, apropos of my post about the dollar’s future as reserve currency:
As a currency becomes weaker and less sought after by central banks doesn’t it take a toll on the issuing nation’s economic standing in other ways? Did the pound’s decline as a reserve currency coincide with the decline of England’s power and influence?
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Early last week, UBS hosted its 13th annual Reserve Management Seminar in Thun, Switzerland. In attendance were the people whose job it is to figure out what to do with the foreign currency reserves held by their country’s central banks. They came from 78 nations, representing institutions with reserves totaling $4.8 trillion.
In other …
