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?” Rahodeb asked, using Wild
…
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), but I still figure the time is …
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 …
Japan, as you may know, has been dipping in and out of a recession for the better part of two decades now. Are the country’s workers depressed? No! So long as there’s air to breathe, water to drink and fig leaves to wear over their privates, life is good! So says this insane video (thanks to my husband’s friend Janey Choi for the heads-up).
Been pretending to know what’s up when everybody at work is all web 2.0 this and that? Here’s a handy glossary from McKinsey Quarterly:
What’s in Web 2.0
Blogs (short for Web logs) are online journals or diaries hosted on a Web site and often distributed to other sites or readers using RSS (see below).
Collective intelligence refers
…
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 an impressive …
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 the biggest
…
I just took three days off, so imagine my alarm when an e-mail shows up in my inbox today with this subject line: “Had a good vacation? Great. You’re fired.” Turns out it’s a news item from the AFL-CIO plugging its online legal resource for workers. Here, according to the union, are
Top Ten Strange But True Reasons Used to Fire
…
…but this guy does. Check out this treatise on InsideHigherEd.com by a professor who lives in Pittsburgh about why he loves his 120 mile commute. He’s tired of defending his reasons for taking a job so far away:
Sometimes my inquisitors are mollified by these justifications; more often they still seem to doubt my veracity and/or my
…
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 confronts every …
Marci Alboher has a smart piece on the New York Times’ online edition about the art of self-promotion. The writer she refers to in the lede is actually me; before we met, I had cheerfully and, in retrospect, rather insensitively complimented her on her horn-tooting skills. It appears she didn’t take it so well, at least at first.
Alboher …
