Category: Big Business

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Payback!

Evidently, if you click through this

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and order a Kindle 2 from Amazon, I’ll get a 10% kickback!

I really like my v.1 Kindle, and the improvements in v.2 aren’t significant enough for me to upgrade, but if you’re on the fence about whether to get one, you can read my rambles about the device in general here, here, and here.

My biggest complaint remains that the store doesn’t have all the semi-obscure (read: less commercial) stuff that I read, esp. that Everyman’s edition of Montaigne.

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F*** You, You Whining F***: 1/5/09

Editors and publishers must now learn how to use telephones.

(In a bonus piece of cluelessness, this article also focuses on publishers’ debilitating problem of returns from bookstores . . . without ever mentioning e-publishing! God forbid you mention a distribution venue that eliminates the cost of physical production, shipping and returns in an article about cutting costs!)

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Well, it was SORTA like D-Day . . .

This article covering the collapse of Lehman Bros. and the “death of Wall Street” isn’t as good as the multi-part extravaganza that the WSJ ran about Bear Stearns. There are way too many players involved, too small a space in which to tell the story, and so the death knell — Goldman and Morgan becoming plain old banks — is treated as an afterthought.

That said, the article features this awesome passage:

Rolling up to the meetings at around the same time was Goldman’s chief, Mr. Blankfein. A Goldman aide, referring to days of meltdowns and meetings, carped to Mr. Blankfein: “I don’t think I can take another day of this.”

Mr. Blankfein retorted: “You’re getting out of a Mercedes to go to the New York Federal Reserve — you’re not getting out of a Higgins boat on Omaha Beach,” he said, referring to the World War II experience of a former Goldman head. “So keep things in perspective.”

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Write What You Know?

I don’t know whether the Sulzberger family exerts any influence on the NYTimes‘ editors. All I know is that today’s business section seems pretty heavily loaded on the Bernard Madoff case. Bernie’s a legendary money manager who appears to have been bilking hedge funds and the super-wealthy out of their money in a huge (he says $50 billion) Ponzi scheme.

Now, I know it’s a big story (although no one knows how deep the losses really are yet), but I get the feeling that if it weren’t about the pain of wealthy people and socialites, we might not see four articles totaling more than 4,500 words in one edition: 1, 2, 3, and 4.

The best part about today’s Lifestyles of the No-Longer-So-Rich coverage in the Times is that the paper chose this very day to debut a new bi-weekly web column about . . . money strategies for the wealthy!

Of course, these strategies aren’t just for the wealthy! Writes columnist Paul Sullivan, “While his [Robert Seaberg, head of wealth management at — no lie — a branch of Citigroup, the bank that lobbied for a $300 billion backstop from the U.S. government and plans to fire 52,000 people next year, most of whom I assume are not super-wealthy] findings are geared toward the highest end of the investing community, people at every wealth level should take note.”

After all:

While losing 40 percent of $100 million gives those investors more wiggle room than that same decline on $100,000, it still requires them to re-evaluate their view of risk, if not a change to their lifestyles.

Good to know!

For my part, I’m just happy that Amy & I started watching Arrested Development this month. I expect to find out that Madoff had a cross-eyed Judy Greer for his secretary:

Or that his sons are really amateur magicians or anxiety-prone dilettantes. But Life doesn’t always imitate canceled TV, I guess.

(Update! The NYPost has a couple of pieces on the story, too. I was convinced that one of their quotes was by an alias for Andre 3000, but it turns out that Montieth Illingworth is a real person! Oh, and it turns out that Madoff’s key strategy was betting on the spread between bids and asks, which — to my untrained ear — sounds a bunch like the “vacuuming up nickels” strategy of LTCM that went awry when it scaled up. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the case of a long-time friend of my mother who got into trouble similar to this, although in his case, I don’t think it wasn’t a Ponzi scheme as much as a case of “I just lost some of X’s money on some bad investments, so if I just move some of Y’s money into X’s account, no one will be any the wiser once my next batch of investments pay off.” And the missing money added up to around $2.5 million, which is bad, but not as bad as (allegedly) $50 billion.)