Help me understand investment banking if you can… as I see it, the business follows the “business cycle” with just two phases: 1) make up a bubble and earn record bonuses; then 2) d’oh! find out that all that money never really existed in the first place, but get bailed out by the government. Convenient.
Archive for the ‘business’ Category
Investment banking in a nutshell
Friday, March 14th, 2008Fantasy fishing
Thursday, February 28th, 2008salon.com: Watch people fish. Win $1 million.
Not sure if it’s worth it.
The Bernanke Put
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008Bubblegeneration: The Bernanke Put and the Macropocalypse: “By preventing the market from finding a bottom, the Fed just transferred risk from hedge funds, banks, and other people holding illiquid assets, to you – people holding liquid assets.”
Totally agree… while it decreases pain in the short term the “Bernanke Put” ensures that the wacked out compensation (bankers make money when they’re lucky or good; you lose money otherwise) and evil pervading wall street is here to stay.
Shopdropping
Tuesday, December 25th, 2007From the nyt: Anarchists in the Aisles? Stores Provide a Stage
Otherwise known as reverse shoplifting, shopdropping involves surreptitiously putting things in stores, rather than illegally taking them out, and the motivations vary.
Anti-consumerist artists slip replica products packaged with political messages onto shelves while religious proselytizers insert pamphlets between the pages of gay-and-lesbian readings at book stores.
Self-published authors sneak their works into the “new releases” section, while personal trainers put their business cards into weight-loss books, and aspiring professional photographers make homemade cards — their Web site address included, of course — and covertly plant them into stationery-store racks.
eharmony turning away customers?
Tuesday, October 9th, 2007We learned tonight that eharmony.com has been known to “reject” customers: “We don’t know why eHarmony has rejected over a million people looking for love”. Apparently this is part of a $10m advertising campaign by chemistry.com. But why? Dating sites are not in the business of turning down paying customers.
And while I missed the whole online dating scene myself, I may have come across a few profiles. And if the people who are not rejected are any indication, I bet you’re gonna feel pretty bad about yourself after being turned down by eharmony.
Mad Money by Jim Cramer
Sunday, September 30th, 2007
Breean checked out Mad Money by Jim Cramer from the library for me the other day. I was pretty skeptical cause he’s such a nutcase but the book is actually pretty good. I recommend it for some pretty simple but reasonable investing advice.
limo4me: the best Seattle town car service
Thursday, September 27th, 2007Because my 2002 post about flying to Phoenix somehow gets enough search traffic that somebody recently offered me $35 to place an ad on that page (still waiting on the reply!), I thought I would point out a business I’ve been using and highly recommend.
When we moved to Seattle two years ago, I knew very quickly that I would need a dependable town car service to the airport. Taxis are more expensive from our house (when they show up) so I looked around a bit. The guys at Limo4me.net have been on time absolutely every time I’ve called and have reasonable rates. What more could you ask for?
Women earning more than men
Monday, September 24th, 2007From the nyt: Putting Money on the Table:
For the first time, women in their 20s who work full time in several American cities – New York, Chicago, Boston and Minneapolis – are earning higher wages than men in the same age range, according to a recent analysis of 2005 census data by Andrew Beveridge, a sociology professor at Queens College in New York.
For instance, the median income of women age 21 to 30 in New York who are employed full time was 17 percent higher than that of comparable men.Professor Beveridge said the gap is largely driven by a gulf in education: 53 percent of women employed full time in their 20s were college graduates, compared with 38 percent of men. Women are also more likely to have graduate degrees. “They have more of everything,” Professor Beveridge said.
Why those cities? What makes Chicago different from Portland? Why not Denver?
Malcolm Gladwell and the Johnson School on Enron
Wednesday, January 10th, 2007Interesting Malcolm Gladwell piece in the New Yorker about “Enron, intelligence, and the perils of too much information.” In short, the world has changed and many fields have moved from puzzles (not enough information) to mysteries (too much information).
Let’s just quote from the end:
In the spring of 1998, Macey notes, a group of six students at Cornell University’s business school decided to do their term project on Enron. “It was for an advanced financial-statement-analysis class taught by a guy at Cornell called Charles Lee, who is pretty famous in financial circles,” one member of the group, Jay Krueger, recalls.
…
The students’ conclusions were straightforward. Enron was pursuing a far riskier strategy than its competitors. There were clear signs that “Enron may be manipulating its earnings.” The stock was then at forty-eight dollars—at its peak, two years later, it was almost double that—but the students found it over-valued. The report was posted on the Web site of the Cornell University business school, where it has been, ever since, for anyone who cared to read twenty-three pages of analysis. The students’ recommendation was on the first page, in boldfaced type: “Sell.”
Found the report on this page.
Dilbert again
Tuesday, January 9th, 2007Such is the life…
