Excellent graphic via the boys at Gigaom showing the ecosystem around the ITMS/iPhone App store:
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click for ginormous graphic
Hat tip Buzz
Source:
The Apple App Store Economy
Gigaom, Jan. 12, 2010, 9:00am
http://gigaom.com/2010/01/12/the-apple-app-store-economy/
Bloomberg reports that former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was “asked” to join current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee panel looking at the pass through payments made to AIG trading partners such as Goldman Sachs and SocGen.
Bloomberg:
“Paulson was invited to a Jan. 27 hearing set by Edolphus Towns, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, about the decision to fully reimburse AIG’s bank counterparties for $62.1 billion in derivatives. Stephen Friedman, the former Federal Reserve Bank of New York chairman who serves on the board of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., was also asked to appear, Towns said in a statement yesterday.
“Chairman Towns is well aware of the fact that President Bush’s Treasury secretary orchestrated this bailout,” Jenny Rosenberg, a spokeswoman for the New York Democrat, said in an e-mail explaining why Paulson was invited.
The request widens the probe into what lawmakers have called a “backdoor bailout” of banks that benefited from the $182.3 billion U.S. rescue of AIG. Geithner, who ran the New York Fed when AIG was saved in 2008, agreed to testify before the committee after Darrell Issa, a California Republican, released e-mails last week showing that the New York Fed asked AIG to withhold data about bank payments.”
One question: Why not just subpoena him?
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Source:
Paulson Asked to Testify at AIG Bailout Hearing With Geithner
Hugh Son
Bloomberg, Jan. 16 2010
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a4kpRjxnjM4I&
WHEN: 7 p.m. Tuesday, June 16
The mortgage crisis, which is costing millions their homes and has driven the world to the brink of an economic abyss, has raised difficult questions for the nation’s business press. Why was the public taken by surprise? What kind of reporting was missing and what kind is needed now? What are the lessons for financial journalism and what is its true purpose?
Join the Columbia Journalism Review and the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute for a panel discussion on the future of business journalism in the wake of the economic meltdown.
Panelists include:
• WILLIAM ACKMAN is a noted investor and founder at Pershing Square Capital Management, L.P.
• BILL GRUESKIN (moderator) is the dean of academic affairs at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and the former Deputy Managing Editor/News for The Wall Street Journal.
• JEFF MADRICK is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and a former economics columnist for The New York Times. He is editor of Challenge Magazine, visiting professor of humanities at The Cooper Union, and senior fellow at the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, The New School.
• GRETCHEN MORGENSON is assistant business and financial editor and a columnist at The New York Times.
• DEAN STARKMAN is managing editor of The Audit, an online critique of financial journalism of the Columbia Journalism Review, and the author of “Power Problem,” a critique of business coverage in the runup to the meltdown, an article supported by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute in the current issue of CJR.
I have to call foul on a surprisingly foolish article in today’s NYT. Less than a month into 2010, it is already a leading candidate for the dumbest article of the year. It reads like it was written by the PR firm for a group of VCs and Palo Alto law firms.
There were numerous ignorant comments in the article, but this is the one that actually made me laugh out loud:
“Newer restrictions, like those on executive compensation, have made I.P.O.’s even less attractive to some entrepreneurs, said Doug Collom, a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a Silicon Valley law firm. “Lawyers now have a profound significance in the boardroom,” he said.”
WTF is this idiot talking about? Last I checked, none of the Silicon Valley tech firms had received TARP money during the bailouts. The exec comp restrictions this dimwitted Wilson Sonsini lawyer mentioned came with the nearly trillion dollar taxpayer bailout/subsidy for insolvent banks and the incompetent execs who ran them into the ground — not dot com start ups.
What a tool.
I cannot figure out who is more responsible for this brain dead exercise in ignorance and spin — the writer who (re)typed it from a press release, or the editor who let this nonsense slide by.
Here’s some more stupidity:
“In the last two years, only 18 tech start-ups have gone public, compared with 143 in the two years prior. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which tightened corporate governance and accounting rules, has taken a lot of the blame.”
Astonishingly, the article fails to note the massive decrease in IPOs across all sectors due to the recent turmoil. Even more amazingly, the author somehow fails to deploy so much as one single word regarding the total collapse in the markets, or the simple fact that investors have seen precisely zero gains over the past 11 years.
Quite bluntly, I am embarrassed that this is what passes for Journalism today.
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UPDATE: January 18, 2010 3:02pm
Here is a chart of IPOs going back about 3 decades. Note after the 1987 and 2000 and 2008 crashes, the IPO numbers plummeted. I do not know what the actual impact of Sarbanes Oxeley was on IPOs, but the data shows that after SARBOX passed, the number of new IPOs actually went up.
I am NOT suggesting there is a correlation between SARBOX and any subsequent increase in IPOs; I am merely pointing out that blatherings of those mentioned above is factually incorrect, and belied by actual data.
Have a look at these two charts, courtesy of Jim Bianco. They show the number, and the dollar amount raised in IPOs; There appears to be no correlation with SARBOX, but a huge correlation with market crashes.
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click for larger chart
click for larger chart
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More charts after the jump.
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Source:
For Many Start-Ups, a Spot on the Nasdaq Is No Longer the Goal
CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
NYT, January 17, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/technology/start-ups/18venture.html
Excel Spreadsheet for IPOs anbd secondaries, Bianco Research
Equity IPO And Secondary
Some Factoids about the 2009 IPO Market
Jay R. Ritter, Cordell Professor of Finance
University of Florida, Jan. 14, 2010
http://bear.cba.ufl.edu/ritter
As Haiti continues to struggle through the disastrous earthquake, Byron Pitts reports on the efforts of the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division to help rescue, feed and protect citizens.
January 17, 2010 6:13 PM
I have an odd problem.
Most birthdays and holidays, I seem to end up with a pile of media — CDs, DVDs, other forms of digital recording. Much of these goods come from Amazon.com. Percentages being what they are, some of the discs are damaged.
Examples:
• Californication Season One Disc 1 plays really poorly — freezes, doesn’t advance, skips — its a bad recording (Having seen the first 6 episodes on Showtime, I bought the DVD for my wife, and for the next 6 to catch up with season 2).
• Marvin Gaye’s The Master 1961 1984 Box Set as soon as I got the set, I ripped it. But I didn’t notice Disc one (of 4) has only one channel; the other 3 are fine.
Californication was apparently a wide-spread production problem, and Amazon refunded the discs despite the purchase being made on November 11, 2009 and the discs open (The return window closes on January 31, 2010). Amazon gave me a hard time about replacing Disc 1 of the Marvin Gaye Box Set.
For the holidays, I received the Curb Your Enthusiasm full set, and BBC’s The Planet with David Attenborough (an 11-part series shot entirely in high-definition — the video is spectacular) I cannot possibly watch/listen to all of this stuff within 60 days of receipt. Half the stuff I buy for myself is for future usage, and the gifts are sometimes not reviewed for many months. For the holidays, I gave a managing director at our firm the Family Guy – The Total World Domination Collection — 23 DVDs. He has an other 5 weeks left to finish checking it out.
Short of hiring someone to preview all of my digital media, or becoming a torrent phreak, is there any sort of solution to these production errors of digital products?
Any ideas how best to handle this?
Roll over the circles for each industry below to compare 2008 employment levels with those projected for 2018. The largest circles represent major employment sectors.
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click for interactive graphic
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Credit: Nelson Hsu and Robert Benincasa/NPR
(Employment numbers are in thousands.)
One of my pet peeves has been the cronyism on Corporate America’s Boards of Directors. As I noted in Bailout Nation:
“But don’t for a moment think their terrible track record had a negative impact on their compensation. Despite their performance, these CEOs were paid as if they were enormous successes. The compensation figures that follow are enormous; that they were paid for such abject failure is a national embarrassment. It is also an indictment of three major corporate governance issues that have not been discussed widely enough.
The first is the crony capitalism that was rife in boardrooms across the United States. The cronyism of major corporate boards, especially those in the finance area, has become legendary. Rubber-stamp directors who rarely buck the chair man or challenge the CEO are unfortunately all too common. These boards did not serve either their companies or their shareholders well.”
That was all I had space for regarding criticizing Boards of Directors — barely more than a paragraph. It is a topic worthy of its own book.
And now, that book is here: Money for Nothing: How the Failure of Corporate Boards Is Ruining American Business and Costing Us Trillions by John Gillespie and David Zweig.
From the Sunday NYT Business review:
IT sounds like good work if you can get it, and thousands of people in corporate America do. On average, they attend 8 to 12 meetings annually. Although they are supposed to have fiduciary obligations, they often appear simply to warm their assigned seats, and to raise their hands when their leader calls for a vote. For that, they can receive as much as $640,000 a year . . .
“Underworked, overpaid corporate boards are doing serious harm to the shareholders of public companies and the economy. In the wake of the global economic debacle, the name of the game for authors of business books is assigning blame. Many recent books have pointed accusatory fingers at the problems of specific firms like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Fannie Mae, and of certain executives.
But “Money for Nothing” casts a much wider net, blaming the financial crisis on a systemic collapse of corporate democracy caused by the failure of many if not most corporate boards to simply do their jobs. “The boards were supposed to monitor risks, provide judgment and supervise managers on behalf of shareholders,” Mr. Gillespie and Mr. Zweig write. “Boards, at the very least, should have acted in the classic sense like a governor on an engine that measures and regulates the machine’s speed and, if necessary, turns it down to keep it from blowing up.”
They devote an entire chapter, “The Myth of Shareholders’ Rights,” to showing the heavily lopsided power of corporate managements in board elections and proxy votes. And they explain why so many companies incorporate in Delaware, where state laws exempt corporate executives — and directors — from financial liability for their actions.”
I could not agree more.
Being a Director of several small firms, I have learned quite a few things about BofDs. On the one hand, it is frustrating when you are unable to respond to certain criticisms due to the need for secrecy (for strategic or litigation reasons). But for the most part, it is a very interesting experience — working with very smart and experienced people, getting an education in all manner of legal/accounting/regulatory issues, watching how some CEOs can execute well. Oh, and it is also potentially lucrative, though I have yet to enjoy any windfalls from my board seats. (One day, I will write up those experiences, warts and all).
To fix the problem, I go even further than the authors of Money for Nothing do – I would assign a fiduciary obligation on the parts of the big institutional holders of stock (on behalf of the actual owners): The mutual funds, pension funds, CALPERS, etc. I would assign an actual obligation to vote the shares (most don’t now), and mandate they perform true analyses of all board candidates. Mom and pop do not have the time, expertise or ability to analyze and vote on every director for every stock they own. Put the burden on those who do have the staffing and ability — the mutual funds.
Lastly, the asset management needs to be separated from the business side — so mutual funds don’t whore out their clients (the investors) when pursuing 401k business and free money like syndicate/IPO.
The bottom line: A Board seat is serious business, and most of America’s directors have done a lousy job discharging their duties.
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Source:
Taking Away Directors’ Rubber Stamps
HARRY HURT III
NYT, January 16, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/business/17shelf.html
"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." —John Maynard Keynes
After 3 quarters in a row that averaged just 1.2%, Q4 GDP grew 2.8%, a touch below expectations of 3.0% BUT Nominal GDP grew well below forecasts. Because the price deflator was up just .4% vs the estimate of 1.9%, Nominal GDP was up 3.2% vs the estimate of 4.9%. Personal Consumption rose 2.0% vs the forecast of 2.4%. Fixed Investment rose 3.3% helped by a 5.2% increase in equipment and software spending and residential construction rose by 10.9%. Trade was a slight drag on GDP growth and government spending was as well led by a 12.5% decline on national...
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