Archive for May, 2008

• How Much Not to Have Tea With Him
  Eddy Elfenbein, May 5th, 2008 at 12:20 pm

  From Reuters:

  How would you like a film role with Johnny Depp, tea with Alan Greenspan or tennis lessons from Andre Agassi?
  It’s all up for sale in an online auction to benefit the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial, a human rights advocacy group.
  Tea with Greenspan and his wife, NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell, was going for $11,000, according to the Web site here. Bidding ends on May 7.
  Last year tea with Greenspan went for $45,000, promoters of the event said. No word on whether the winner received investment tips.

  If their home is in foreclosure, then yes, they probably did get investment advice.
  Here’s the page to place a bid.

• RIP: Robert Vesco
  Eddy Elfenbein, May 5th, 2008 at 11:57 am

  Robert Vesco, one of the great financial swindlers, is dead. Given that it’s Vesco, I guess I should say that he’s allegedly dead. It’s takes a real genius to flee to Cuba. Then get arrested in Cuba for double-crossing Castro.

  If Mr. Vesco indeed eluded the American authorities until his final day, it was the fitting end to his nearly four decades on the run. He was wanted for, among other things, bilking some $200 million from credulous investors in the 1970s, making an illegal contribution to Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 presidential campaign and trying to arrange a deal during the Carter administration to let Libya buy American planes in exchange for bribes to United States officials.
  Mr. Vesco last made the news a decade ago when he was sentenced to prison in Cuba, where he had taken sanctuary, for a financial scheme. He emerged in recent years and lived a quiet life in Havana until he contracted lung cancer. After about a week in a hospital, friends say, he died and was buried in an unmarked grave.
  Given the controversial nature of the man, none of his friends dared be identified for fear of running afoul of the Cuban authorities. While word of Mr. Vesco’s death could be the final ruse of a 72-year-old modern-day buccaneer who had every reason to drop off the radar, it would have to be an elaborate one.

• JobVent On NICK
  Eddy Elfenbein, May 5th, 2008 at 11:15 am

  I noticed this posting on Nicholas Financial (NICK) at JobVent, a site where you can complain about your company.

  Certainly one of the poorest managed companies I’ve ever experienced. The executive management is way too young and inexperienced and has never worked in any significant roles for other companies, so they only know one way to manage – through fear & intimidation. They install branch managers and expect them to turn a branch around in 60 days or they’re pretty much out the door. Talk about cheap? This company expects its employees to scrub the toilets, change the light bulbs, sweep the floors, etc..You name it they are too cheap to out-source to a 3rd party. Probably could be a highly successful company if the CEO would get out of the way, hire some outside executive management and spend more time developing employees.

  Obviously, since I don’t know the source, I can’t say how reliable it is. However, sometimes these rants can tell you a lot about the firm.

• Yahoo Plunges
  Eddy Elfenbein, May 5th, 2008 at 11:10 am

  I don’t have much to add to the Yahoo/Microsoft story beyond the obvious. I can’t believe Yahoo (YHOO) can be so out-of-touch. Microsoft (MSFT) was willing to pay $33 a share, and Yahoo wanted $37. I wouldn’t have paid $15. The company simply isn’t worth it. Yahoo is going to get smacked, and they really deserve it.

• Media Self-Absorption Watch
  Eddy Elfenbein, May 4th, 2008 at 9:22 pm

  Check out this unintentionally hilarious paragraph from a completely fatuous editorial in today’s Washington Post.

  Chelsea has been winning kudos in this campaign as an effective surrogate for Hillary Rodham Clinton, but I keep wondering whether she’s an effective representative for us. Like me, Chelsea’s a twentysomething (28 to my 29), a member of the generation that, as it happens, I spend a lot of time learning and writing about. We’re ironic, sarcastic and self-deprecating, a reflection of the pop culture and politics that played out while we grew up in the 1980s, 1990s and onward. We were weaned on Chevy Chase movies (“Spies Like Us,” of course, being the best), grunge and MTV’s “The Real World” (seasons 1 and 2 only, please) and trained by the Onion, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to detect spin in the most banal comments. People my age shed privacy at the nearest high-speed Internet connection and, more often than not, display the very grown-up qualities of self-awareness and self-reflection.

  Allow me to translate: “Me! Me! Me! Me! Me! Me!”
  I have a feeling that self-awareness somehow escaped this writer. His description of his generation probably accurately describes about, say, 0.3% of the population.
  I’m having a hard time deciding what’s the worst sentence. Maybe this?

  Maybe Chelsea reached this workplace ideal of neatly combining altruism with affluence at her first job at McKinsey, an elite consulting firm, where she specialized in health care, or possibly now, at her hedge fund.

  I won’t even go into the part where he talks about his near-stalking of Ms. Clinton. After that, it gets kinda creepy.

• Virtual Recession Sparks NY Times Ad Sales Halt
  Eddy Elfenbein, May 3rd, 2008 at 11:03 am

  ScrappleFace has the scoop:

  With the nation on the verge of “a near-virtual likely recession”, The New York Times stopped selling advertising today in an effort to help readers conserve “what little money they have left.”
  “We realized we were sending mixed messages,” said Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., “Our reporters and columnists say ‘Economic disaster is upon us’, but our advertisers say ‘Spend, buy, borrow’.”
  “Our integrity,” he said, “demands that either we stop reporting on predictions of a very-probable, possibly-imminent, almost-certain recession-like economy, or we stop encouraging people to buy stuff, take on debt and live it up as if the world were not practically about to end.”
  The moratorium on advertising sales will continue at least through January 2009, Mr. Sulzberger said, when he anticipates a positive change in what he called “the chief economic indicator,” a housing benchmark determined by which political party controls the White House.

• What Recession?
  Eddy Elfenbein, May 2nd, 2008 at 11:15 am

  An editorial from the New York Sun:

  The common definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth, as we reminded readers in a January 24, 2008, editorial, “Recession Looms?” Well, despite the determination of politicians in Washington to deliver a “stimulus” to counter a recession, despite the persistence of the huffing and puffing from Paul Krugman about how the economy is about to go into a recession, despite the harrumphing of even the likes of Alan Greenspan, somehow the recession is proving elusive.
  That is certainly the indication from the Department of Commerce, which yesterday announced that the gross domestic product in the first quarter of 2008 grew at a seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 0.6%. That’s a real rate of growth, which means that the economy grew faster than inflation, which was itself not negligible. It was the same real growth rate that the government measured in the fourth quarter of 2007.
  We’d like to see stronger growth, like, say, in the third quarter of 2003, when the economy started to get the feel of the Bush tax cuts and grew at an astonishing seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 7.5%. Or the year that began in April of 1983 and ended in March of 1984, when President Reagan’s supply-side measures began to work their incentives and when the American economy grew consistently at a supercharged rate of more than 8%.
  But two consecutive quarters of 0.6% growth is not bad, when measured against, say, the fourth quarter of 1990 and the first quarter of 1991, when real GDP shrank at an annualized rate of 3% and 2%. That was negative growth, not merely slow growth. Another genuinely bad patch was in spring and summer of 1980. In the second quarter of 1980, growth was negative 7.8%.
  What we’re seeing now — a national unemployment rate of 5.1% in March, a stock market whose indexes are up nearly 5% for the month of April — does not a recession make. In the early 1980s, we saw double-digit unemployment rates. In the early 1990s, the unemployment rate reached 7.8%. A 5.1% national unemployment rate is not a recession. There may yet be a recession, but Mr. Krugman & Co. will have to wait a bit more.
  This is not to minimize the pain or hardship felt by those who have been affected by the job losses on Wall Street, who face losing their homes in a foreclosure proceeding, or who have been affected by the flight of manufacturing jobs overseas. But the American economy and the capitalist system and open markets are remarkably robust.
  President Bush has now presided over 26 consecutive quarters of positive GDP growth, beginning immediately after the quarter that included the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. President Reagan was credited with the “Seven Fat Years” in a book of that name by Robert Bartley that derived its title from Genesis. President Bush has two more quarters to go to make it to 28 quarters of growth, which would be seven fat years of his own and leave responsibility for protecting the Bush boom to whomever America elects as the next president.

• Ricepec
  Eddy Elfenbein, May 1st, 2008 at 2:58 pm

  Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos are thinking about creating a rice cartel:

  The plan appears to be in a nascent stage. “I think it’s time to do it, probably within the term of this administration,” Noppadon Pattama, Thailand’s foreign minister, said Wednesday.
  But if successful, a cartel could have far-reaching consequences on the rice market, sustaining prices at their current historic highs and worsening a food crisis that is hurting Asia’s poorest consumers. The price of Thai B-grade rice, a benchmark variety, has nearly tripled in recent months and is now hovering at about $1,000 a ton.
  Maintaining rice prices would please large-scale rice farmers and traders in countries like Thailand and Vietnam, but it would anger places like the Philippines, Singapore and Hong Kong, which rely heavily on imported rice. Plans for the cartel were front-page news in the Philippines on Thursday.

• The S&P 500 Total Return Index
  Eddy Elfenbein, May 1st, 2008 at 2:26 pm

  Including dividends, the S&P 500 is down -5.0% for the year, and up 8.3% for the decade.
  
  Here’s the same chart adjusted for inflation. The CPI for April hasn’t come out yet so I assumed 0.5%.
  

• Timmay Radio Is Born
  Eddy Elfenbein, May 1st, 2008 at 1:30 pm

  If you’ve never heard of Tim Sykes, at this point, that’s probably your fault. He’s a one-man media, blogging and trading empire.
  Tim has redesigned his site which now includes a podcast with yours truly. Enjoy.