Wednesday links

Greetings from Berkeley, California – I've been travelling all day, and didn't have nearly enough coffee at 6:45am to put up even a cursory linkblog. So apologies if you came here in search of something new and found nothing. To keep you tided over for the time being, then, here's a few belated links.

If hostile bank takeovers are better than friendly bank takeovers, as Sir Fred Goodwin seems to think, why are there so few of them?

David Neubert thinks, contra James Cramer, that Citigroup should not be broken up. In Boston, the bank's even trying to find internal synergies!

Vivien Jennings, the president of Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kansas, thinks it's Just Not Fair that authors link to their own Amazon.com pages from their own home pages. Because then people might buy those books from Amazon.com, and not from Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kansas.

Floyd Norris and John Carney look into the Dow Jones bylaws and come to the conclusion that a minority of Bancrofts could block a sale to Rupert Murdoch, should they be so inclined. Which is not to say that Ron Burkle is going to be the next owner of the Wall Street Journal, or anything as outlandish as that. This is all still very much in the realm of theory.

The Wall Street Journal runs a big front-page story on the link between globalization and inflation. Larry Ball is not quoted.

And finally: Synthetic mortgage-backed securities!

Back to more regular blogging tomorrow, I hope.