Underwater? Move to El Paso.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. If you no longer want to keep paying your underwater mortgage, but you want to protect your assets, there's always Texas.That's right. The state that George W. Bush will soon call home again will...

Nov 18 2008

When Boom Looks Like Bust

With crude oil prices climbing toward $140 a barrel, one might think that energy-rich west Texas is walking mighty tall. And that would be largely true. "Boom times are back for now," the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas said of...

Jun 17 2008

Don't Trust Prediction Markets in the Final Hours

After the polls closed in Texas last night, the DEM.TX.OBAMA contract on InTrade - the one judging his chances of winning the Texas primary - spiked up to 85, before embarking on a long and steady decline to zero....

Mar 05 2008

Dependent Variables in Political Prediction Markets

There's a great example of the mathematics of dependent and independent variables over at InTrade right now. The betting company has just launched a CLINTON.LIFELINE contract, which reflects her chances of winning all three of the Ohio, Texas, and...

Feb 26 2008

Obama a Comfortable Favorite in Texas?

Over at InTrade, Hillary Clinton is tanking. Her chances of winning Ohio were 65% yesterday; that contract last traded at 47.5%. Meanwhile, her chances in Texas have plunged from 48% yesterday to just 30% now. The last time we...

Feb 20 2008

Fantasy Football Television Inroads Continue

The allure of fantasy football continues to bring changes to the television landscape. Time Warner Cable is launching an updated version of an interactive fantasy-football tracker in five new markets, bringing the application to a total nine divisions for the...

Sep 27 2007

US Population Density Datapoint of the Day

"If every American were given a house on a quarter acre, so that every family of four had a full acre, that distribution would not use up half the land in Texas."

Jun 12 2007

The Glossy Tabloid Bubble Gets Leaky

Well, you could see this coming. Celebrity weeklies -- those pesky magazines that have crowded out all other life at the newsstand like foreign weeds in a Texas lake -- are finally losing their momentum. People and Us were both...

Aug 14 2007

The Next Big Import: Lawsuits

On the heels of deadly pet food, defective tires, tainted toothpaste and now lead-contaminated Mattel toys, another wave of imports are likely to hit U.S. shores: class action product-liability lawsuits. "The general law is, if you're in the business of...

Aug 02 2007

Leverage Datapoint of the Day

I've somehow managed to avoid so much as mentioning the Clear Channel saga on this blog until now; for some reason I just couldn't get excited about it. But Heidi Moore gets a good quote in her summing up...

May 15 2008

Inside the Clear Channel Trial: What is Unique?

[UPDATE: The two private equity firms and the six banks have reached an agreement over the financing of the Clear Channel Communications buyout. The new deal lowers the price to $36 per share, from $39.20 per share. In the annals...

May 13 2008

Clear Channel Court Clash: Crowds, Emails, and a House

With a $22 billion in financing at stake, a hearing over the disputed buyout of radio giant Clear Channel Communications drew a packed audience in lower Manhattan today. Runners for hedge fund managers and law firms showed up early at...

Apr 24 2008

Idle Chatter: Clear Channel, 'NYT,' CAA, more

-U.S. ad spending grew 0.2 percent last year. And we weren't even in a recession yet! [TNS] -Clear Channel and its private equity buyers might have to go to court to force the banks financing the sale to hold up their end of the bargain. [NYT] -New York Times Co. ...

Mar 26 2008

Extra Credit, Tuesday Edition

When a rose is not a rose: TAF is not "just" the discount window: "To call TAF the discount window without the stigma is like calling a person a corpse that is not dead." Subprime warning signs were made...

Dec 18 2007

Gag Orders in the Age of Google

How many times have you Googled today? The urge to Google extends far beyond searching for old boyfriends and celebrity trivia, and has impacted the pursuit of justice, as a ruling suggests from a San Francisco judge overseeing a high-stakes...

Oct 28 2008

I Fell Asleep on the Keyboard and Got This Headline

Patent infringement lawsuits can make some bold claims. But few can top a complaint recently filed against the Japanese electronics maker Fujitsu in federal court in Manhattan. A company called LinkCo contends that Fujitsu perpetrated a huge fraud during an...

Oct 16 2008

Zell, Plaintiffs Vie for Support of 'Partners'

The legal effort by a group of current and former Los Angeles Times staffers to wrest control of Tribune Co. away from Sam Zell is quickly turning into a war of words. Yesterday, Zell responded to the class-action lawsuit against him and other Tribune officials publicly, by calling the suit ...

Sep 18 2008

More Bad News, but Just How Bad Is It?

The disappearance of help-wanted ads in newspapers is one thing. Who knows if that's a true sign of a weakening jobs market or just further evidence of the precipitous decline of the newspaper business? But now the Conference Board has...

Mar 31 2008

There's No Place Like Home, C.E.O. Version

Former HealthSouth chief executive and current federal convict Richard Scrushy is understandably eager to leave the confines (such as they are) of the unfenced federal correctional facility in Texas where he is serving more than six years for bribery....

Jun 09 2008

Depressing Graphic of the Day

For fans of dead-tree media (and, believe it or not, there are still millions of us out there), there exists an irresistibly gruesome graphic that plots newspaper layoffs around the country. It resembles nothing so much as an epidemiological...

May 28 2008

One Man's Tort Is Another's Poison

If you're a lawyer for a hedge fund, you may want to beef up your defense practice. Your own defense, that is. The New York Law Journal reported yesterday that two former hedge fund managers are suing their law...

Aug 16 2007

E.D.S. Untangles an Indian Mess

Electronic Data Systems Corp. will have to pay nearly $500,000 to settle federal securities regulators' charges, including one that the Texas company didn't properly account for huge bribes that a rogue subsidiary in India paid to keep business rolling in...

Sep 26 2007

RIAA Now Wants to Avoid Infringement Case

Ars Technica reports: The RIAA has apparently had a change of heart towards a Texas woman accused of sharing music over KaZaA when she was 16 years old. In Maverick v. Harper, the industry group has backed off its demand...

Oct 20 2008

'L.A. Times' Refugees v. Sam Zell: The Complaint

What are you doing for the next three hours? Maybe you want to read the complete, 115-page text of the class-action complaint against Sam Zell and Tribune Co. today by former employees of the Los Angeles Times? It's here. I asked Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond ...

Sep 16 2008

Charlie Wilson's Way And Another Bhutto's Death

The closing title card of Charlie Wilson's War is derived from a statement Wilson himself made to George Crile, as cited on the last page of Crile's 2003 book that gave the film its title: "These things happened. They...

Dec 29 2007

Art and Excess, Miami Edition

Jay McInerney goes to Art Basel Miami Beach: At the Margulies Collection, a mind-boggling private trove of Modern and contemporary art housed in a humongous warehouse, I overhear this: EUROPEAN ACCENT: That's a portrait of Komar and Melamid. TEXAS...

Feb 19 2008

After Super Tuesday

Tomorow is the start of the Conservqative Political Action Committee meeting. The always-packed meeting of activists will be especially important for McCain to prove his bona fides with conservatives. Last year, he came in last place in the CPAC straw poll.

Feb 06 2008

Lerach Can't Change His Stripes

Does Bill Lerach have no shame? You will recall that the onetime scourge of Corporate America just this May began serving a 24-month sentence for his role in a scheme to pay secret kickbacks to plaintiffs in securities lawsuits. At...

Sep 10 2008

Class-Action Scorecard: A Win for Plaintiffs

There's been a lot of news on the class-action front this week, most of it focused on the Supreme Court, and that musical, magical word: Stoneridge. The ruling in that landmark case means that Enron plaintiffs probably won't get a...

Jan 18 2008

Goodbye Gonzales

Whoever replaces him, policy will stay the same.

Aug 27 2007