NEWSLETTER
RSS
MOBILE
HELP
Jerry Abejo has revisited the idea of blog aquisitions, and doesn't really seem to get it. He's not only way off the mark factually (Gawker Media gets over 200 million pageviews a month, not 30 million), but he also seems to give far too much weight to people who for whatever reason don't want to buy blogs. Surely the relevant universe, however, is the smaller number of people who are willing to bid against each other to buy blogs - and Abejo doesn't seem to have talked to any of those.
... ContinueApparently Citigroup is considering selling off as much as $400 billion in "non-core assets", including its retail banking operations in Germany.
Is Citibank Germany really non-core? It would seem so. I bank with Citi in the US, and on Wednesday I used my ATM card to withdraw some euros from the Citibank on Friedrichstrasse in Berlin. The transaction has now appeared on my online banking statement. As a "NONCITIBANK ATM WITHDRAWAL".
.The meme of the day, as admirably summed up by Paul Murphy, is the question of why exactly insider trading is illegal, and whether it should be. I seem to recall a trenchant column by Holman Jenkins in the WSJ around the time of the Martha Stewart case arguing that it shouldn't be, but I can't find it right now, partly because the WSJ keeps on telling me that "search is momentarily unavailable".
... ContinueWarner Brothers is closing down its two art-house production companies, Picturehouse and Warner Independent Pictures, with the loss of about 70 jobs. The idea, according to Warner's Alan Horn, is that "between both New Line and main Warner's, we had the pieces in place to release any movie we want".
But why not sell Picturehouse and Warner Independent Pictures rather than just closing them down?
... ContinueYou thought New York City landlords were notoriously greedy and aggressive? Wait till you see what private-equity companies get up to when they enter the space. Gretchen Morgenson reports:
... ContinueTime Out New York declared last year that the Kalahari, in Harlem, was the ugliest condo in the city (no mean feat that). "This is reminiscent of the Kalahari Desert," they said. "Municipal buildings in the Kalahari Desert, that is."
But if it's nasty on the outside, it does redeem itself when it comes to the "internationally acclaimed artists" chosen for the building's art collection. How that happened I don't really know: normally the phrase "internationally acclaimed artist" is code for "we're pulling a fast one on you". But somehow the building managed to end up with an El Anatsui on its walls - something genuinely coveted by a large number of very serious art collectors.
... ContinueDo you remember David Neeleman's ouster from JetBlue last year? He seemed happy to put a positive spin on it then:
Neeleman, JetBlue's largest individual investor, will be non-executive chairman. "I'm not a day-to-day operator," Neeleman, 47, said today in an interview. "It's not something I enjoyed."
He's changed his tune now, though.
... ContinueRaiders of the Lost Arc Elasticity, Part I, Part II, Part III: Robert Jensen finds the elusive Giffen good, with important results. "When we subsidized the price of rice and wheat, people consumed less of them, not more. And in a follow-up paper, we show that when you take together all the consumption substitutions people make, our large subsidies did not improve nutrition at all. In fact, in Hunan nutrition actually declined in response to the subsidy."
Tim Duy: Misunderstanding the CPI: A smart response to David Leonhardt.
Warren Buffett's Vega Games: How Berkshire could make $6 billion a year for, essentially, nothing.
And finally,
.I'm with Megan Barnett on this one: the time to announce a 10% increase in your dividend is not when you're simultaneously annoucing a $7.8 billion loss in a single quarter. Yes, $7.8 billion. I know we're all getting inured to large numbers these days, but that's a loss rate of $120 million per working day. At an insurance company. That's just ugly. It's good they're defenestrating promoting to vice chairman their CFO, but I'm slowly becoming disillusioned with this company. Not so long ago, they were the best insurance company in the world. Today, that would be Berkshire Hathaway. And I'm not even sure that AIG is in the top five any more.
I'm enjoying this conversation with Dean Rotbart far too much to stop now, even though I suspect it's of interest only to a handful of my readers. But I'm a blogger! So on I go; you're more than welcome to stop reading now if you have no more interest in this journalists vs bloggers story.
But anyway, a couple of datapoints for you. Firstly, the Washington Post has decided to syndicate stories from TechCrunch. Those stories might well include blog entries by Erick Schonfeld, who was guilty of propagating unconfirmed rumors yesterday. And Erick Schonfeld, it turns out, was on Dean Rotbart's list of star journalists under the age of 30 in both 1996 and 1997. Rotbart might like to maintain the distinction between bloggers and journalists, but it's clearly disappearing in front of his very eyes.
... ContinueYes, there really is a company called Charming Shoppes, and it's in the middle of a full-blown proxy war right now; it's even managed to delay its annual meeting at the very last second because (ahem) it was having difficulty getting "tabulations in place," according to the general counsel.
My bet is that CEO Dorrit Bern (you know I'm not making this up) is a goner, not that I know anything. But any company with the word "Shoppes" in its name deserves all the opprobrium it gets. Over time, I've managed to overcome most of my annoyance at the "International Shoppes" in American airports, but putting this horribly twee pseudoword in the name of a publicly-listed company? That's just wrong.
.Michael de la Merced got a timely interview with BlackRock's Laurence Fink this week, and the resulting story is well worth reading. But one question is not cleared up: what does this mean, exactly, on the subject of the $15 billion of subprime paper that BlackRock is buying from UBS?
... ContinueMalcom Gladwell's piece in the latest New Yorker, on Nathan Myhrvold and his company, Intellectual Ventures, is a rollicking good read. But once you've read it, it's worth sobering yourself down a bit with John Gapper. For while Myhrvold and his merry crew of idea merchants might seem to be a wonderful thing, there are also reasons to be a bit suspicious of them.
... ContinueApologies for the late start today, that normallly shouldn't be a problem for someone six hours ahead of New York. But you've never really understood what tariff barriers are until you've stood in a German customs office for five hours trying to retrieve a parcel you mailed to yourself so that you didn't need to worry about British Airways losing it. I now have renewed respect for anybody in the import/export industry. And, if you're thinking about mailing a parcel to Germany, don't. I promise you the recipient won't appreciate the gesture.
.Most of the time I have relatively little sympathy for troubled companies. But sometimes they just seem to run into so many body blows simultaneously that you've just got to wince a little. And ExpressJet is one of those cases.
... ContinueLandon Thomas has a wonderful piece, full of color, on the spat between Jimmy Cayne and Ace Greenberg. Boy can these multimillionaires get petty:
... ContinueSpreads and paradoxical liquidity: More from Steve Waldman.
Pain and inequality: "The average pain rating is twice as high for those in households with annual incomes below $30,000 as for those in households with incomes above $100,000."
Tropicana files for bankruptcy: Casinos hurting.
Take-Two's 'Grand Theft' has $500 million in sales: In one week.
.