I've been a little disappointed in the Times recently as they seem to have lost their edge, but #1 and #2 have restored my faith somewhat....good journalism....
1/ Wow. WOW.
Some articles really open your eyes, and this is one of them. Joe Nocera from the Times explains how Bank Of America and Merrill Lynch scammed LinkedIn out of millions in their recent stock offering. These banks haven't changed a bit......evil disgusting bastards....
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Was LinkedIn Scammed?
By JOE NOCERA
Published: May 20, 2011
If there’s one thing we’ve all learned in the aftermath of the financial crisis, it’s that stiffing your client is not a crime. Not if you’re an investment bank.
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Deutsche Bank, according to a recent report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, sold its clients subprime mortgage bonds that one of its own traders at the time described as “pigs.” Goldman Sachs took unseemly advantage of unsuspecting clients to offload its most toxic assets in 2007 and 2008. During the subprime bubble, this kind of behavior was par for the course.
It still is, apparently. On Thursday, LinkedIn, an Internet company that connects business professionals, became the first major American social media company to go public. The company had hired Morgan Stanley and Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch division to manage the I.P.O. process. After gauging market demand — which is what they’re paid to do — the investment bankers priced the shares at $45. The 7.84 million shares it sold raised $352 million for the company. For this, the bankers were paid 7 percent of the deal as their fee.
For a small company with less than $16 million in profits last year, $352 million in the bank sounds pretty wonderful, doesn’t it? But it really wasn’t wonderful at all. When LinkedIn’s shares started trading on the New York Stock Exchange, they opened not at $45, or anywhere near it. The opening price was $83 a share, some 84 percent higher than the I.P.O. price. By the time the clock had struck noon, the stock had vaulted to more than $120 a share, before settling down to $94.25 at the market’s close. The first-day gain was close to 110 percent.
I have no doubt that most everyone at LinkedIn was thrilled to see the run-up; most executives at start-ups usually are. An I.P.O. is an important marker for any company. And, of course, the executives themselves are suddenly rich. But, in reality, LinkedIn was scammed by its bankers.
The fact that the stock more than doubled on its first day of trading — something the investment bankers, with their fingers on the pulse of the market, absolutely must have known would happen — means that hundreds of millions of additional dollars that should have gone to LinkedIn wound up in the hands of investors that Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch wanted to do favors for. Most of those investors, I guarantee, sold the stock during the morning run-up. It’s the easiest money you can make on Wall Street.
As Eric Tilenius, the general manager of Zynga, wrote on Facebook: “A huge opening-day pop is not a sign of a successful I.P.O., but rather a massively mispriced one. Bankers are rewarding their friends and themselves instead of doing their fiduciary duty to their clients.”
There is nothing wrong with a small “pop” in the aftermath of an I.P.O.; investors, after all, don’t want to buy a stock that is going to go down immediately. But during the Internet bubble of the 1990s, the phenomenon of investment bankers wildly underpricing I.P.O.’s so that money could be diverted to favored investors got completely out of hand — stocks would sometimes rise 500 percent on the first day. It was obscene.
Indeed, most business journalists writing about the LinkedIn deal focused on the first-day run-up as evidence that we’ve entered another Internet bubble. But over at the Business Insider blog, Henry Blodget — who knows a thing or two about bad behavior on Wall Street — had the perfect analogy for what the banks had done to LinkedIn.
Suppose, he wrote, your trusted real estate agent persuaded you to sell your house for $1 million. Then, the next day, the same agent sold the same house for the new owner for $2 million. “How would you feel if your agent did that?” he asked. That, he concluded, is what Merrill and Morgan did to LinkedIn.
It’s worth remembering that most of the young Internet companies with those eye-popping I.P.O.’s back in the day are long gone. With their flawed business models, maybe they were doomed from the start — but the cash they left on the table at the I.P.O. might have allowed at least a few of them to survive.
Similarly, LinkedIn is still a fragile enterprise. Its business model remains unproved. It is going to have to grow awfully fast to justify its stock price. Its executives may yet rue the day they let themselves be sold down the river by their investment bankers. LinkedIn is supposed to be the client, but it was treated like the mark.
Ever since the financial crisis, investment bankers have been constantly questioned about whether they have any larger social purpose besides making money. What they invariably say is that they play a critical role in capital formation, meaning that they help companies raise the money they need to grow and prosper.
The LinkedIn deal suggests something darker. The crisis hasn’t changed them a bit. They’re still just in it for themselves.
2/ What's the American public really concerned about? Bin Laden? The IMF sexual predator? The antics of the Trumpster? Nope, it's the economy and unemployment. All of the other stuff is just noise. Charles Blow has a great column this week.....
OP-ED COLUMNIST
A Summer to Simmer
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: May 20, 2011
Wow. What a week.
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Times Topic: Economy
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This week we lurched back and forth between the prurient and philosophical, between personal egos and our national ethos, between Schwarzenegger and Strauss-Kahn and President Obama and his considered-but-contentious vision of a new Middle East.
But, interestingly enough, this week’s big news, both high and low, has no more legs than last week’s fake furor over a rapper reciting poetry at the White House or the week Osama bin Laden was killed in a Pakistani safe house.
The one true constant in this country for the foreseeable future, and the issue that’ll likely consume the summer, is the economy. As a Gallup poll reported earlier this week, “Three in four Americans name some type of economic issue as the ‘most important problem’ facing the country today — the highest net mentions of the economy in two years.” Only 4 percent each mentioned “ethics/moral/religious/family decline; dishonesty” or “wars/war (nonspecific)/fear of war.”
For the poor and unemployed struggling to land a job and provide some family security, the sexual exploits of rich sexagenarians may provide a moment of socio-economic schadenfreude, but it’ll do nothing to salve the long-running, underlying angst.
For the powerless and voiceless making choices between bills and food, articulating a more coherent North African and Mideast policy that doesn’t sacrifice our moral standing to our strategic interests may feed the soul, but not the stomach.
For far too many Americans, this will not be a summer for the silly or even democratic existentialism. This will be yet another summer to simmer, yet another summer to wonder when the recovery that now wafts freely between the Temples of Greed on Wall Street will make its way to the half-barren bungalows on Main Street, yet another summer to see just how little regard “job creators” — a favorite Republican term of art for the G.O.P.’s corporate Geppettos — have for the American people who built this country.
Take these recent examples:
As The New York Times reported last Friday, health insurers are reporting record profits for the third year in a row as people postpone or forgo care. Yet the insurance companies are still pressing for higher premiums.
And who among the insured is cutting back on needed health care? Many doing so are seriously ill.
According to a July 2009 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation entitled “Health Care and the Middle Class: More Cost and Less Coverage”: “Nonelderly adults with medical debt are almost twice as likely to have an ongoing or serious health problem compared to others with private coverage. Unfortunately, the privately insured who have medical debt are also as likely as the uninsured to postpone care, skip recommended tests and treatments and not fill drug prescriptions — any of which can lead to more serious illness and even disability, which are difficult and costly to treat.”
In short, we as a country may pay for these companies’ profits later with a sicker population.
Also last week at a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee about oil subsidies, John Watson, C.E.O. of Chevron — which reported last month that first-quarter net income rose 36 percent from the same period last year to $6.21 billion — said that “I don’t think American people want shared sacrifice. I think they want shared prosperity.” The problem is, Mr. Money Bags, that you and other corporate interests are the only ones sharing in the prosperity. For Americans on the lower end of the income spectrum, it’s all sacrifice.
And a USAToday/Gallup poll released earlier this week found that nearly 7 in 10 said that higher gas prices were causing financial hardship, more than half said that they “have made major changes” to compensate and 21 percent said that the impact is so dramatic that “their standard of living is jeopardized.”
And lastly, The Wall Street Journal reported last week on some 40 states that use prepaid debit cards to issue payments like unemployment benefits and child support. Turns out, the banks love these cards because “they largely escaped the recent crackdown by U.S. lawmakers and regulators on fees, interest rates and billing practices for credit and debit cards.”
So the fat-cat bankers are allowed to fleece the most needy and most vulnerable in the most outrageous of ways. Some charge fees for checking the balance on the card, others charge high withdrawal fees, and the most callous even charge an “inactivity fee” when the recipient doesn’t use the card. According to The Journal, one bank executive said of his bank: “Prepaid debit cards and other products will help the company recover roughly half of the revenue likely to be lost from swipe-fee rules being written by regulators.” How do these people sleep at night? On pillows stuffed with cash, no doubt.
This summer has the potential to be another turning point for the electorate, and it’s not necessarily pegged to the performance of the president. It may hinge largely on the callousness of conservatives and their seemingly inexorable desire to overplay their hand.
This may be the summer that we see more clearly that the working class has developed a lingering sense of disillusionment, that right-wing politicians have developed an unshakeable immunity to empathy and that corporations have developed a taste for blood squeezed from turnips.
And it may be the summer for seeing through the right-wing squawk machine that hopes to distract us from the damage the rich and the right are doing by manically hurling torches at the Obama administration to see if something catches fire.
This week, Representative Paul Ryan, a Republican of Wisconsin, suggested to the Economic Club of Chicago that the president’s attempt to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans amounted to “class warfare” and promoted “class envy.” Ha! The war is already being waged against the poor and vulnerable, and the envious have-nots didn’t start it. The right and its cabal of economic cannibals did.
3/ Hmmmm...not sure I'm ready to buy my vegetables at this market.....the train comes a little too close for comfort....one minute.....
4/ Fabulous interview with Bill Maher on Hardball, nine minutes of our most "out there" comedian on issues from Newt, Schwartzenegger and Republicans.....unusual setting as they are outside on a terrace somewhere with an live audience....
Bill Maher told Chris Matthews that the attention being paid to the Arnold Schwarzenegger case is overblown.
Speaking on Tuesday's "Hardball," Maher said that the revelation of the former governor's love child "should not be a giant surprise."
Matthews wondered if the scandal said anything about American politics. "Can you compartmentalize?" he asked, noting that Schwarzenegger "didn't do anything on public time."
"Well, you can do that, but not in America," Maher said. "You can do that in sophisticated countries. We are not one of those. We are a childish country, and if somebody has their pee-pee in the news, it's going to be the top story for a lot of people."
The two also discussed Newt Gingrich, who has recently kicked off his campaign for the presidency. Maher called him "ugly" inside and out, and Matthews said he "looked like the devil."
Maher noted that people often call Gingrich a "professor" bursting with ideas. "He's a professor of idiocy," he said. "He has never ever been a brilliant man."
5/ So what's happening in Wisconsin? Have the massive protests slowed down the Governor and the Republican Legislature in it's assault on the working poor? Nope, if anything they've doubled down. Rachael Maddow looks at the state and in 9 minutes brings us up to date with the latest shenanigans....
If you don't have 9 minutes, click on the link and slide it forward to about mid-point, and watch the Wisconsin Senate President snarl, yes snarl at Fred Prosser, the 50 year veteran of the Senate. An incredible display of anger, incivility and contempt. Who are these people?
Note - you may have to watch an ExxonMobil commercial about how "fracking" is necessary....grit your teeth......
6/ Katy Perry with "Waking up in Vegas"........they must have had fun making this video, love the multiple Elvises.....3 minutes of pure fantasy.....
7/ David Pogue, the Tech guy for the Times, has a very useful article today - 25 tips for using your personal technology better.....
STATE OF THE ART
Ins and Outs of Using Gadgetry
By DAVID POGUE
Published: May 18, 2011
Every time a reader asks me a basic question, struggles with a computer or lets a cellphone keep ringing at a performance, I have the same thought: There ought to be a license to use technology.
Stuart Goldenberg
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Pogue’s Posts Blog: 25 More Tech Tips and Tricks (May 19, 2011)
Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
To reduce blur with an iPhone, frame the shot with your finger already on the button, then snap the photo by lifting off the screen instead of tapping it.
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I’m not trying to insult America’s clueless; exactly the opposite, in fact. How is the average person supposed to know the essentials of their phones, cameras and computers? There’s no government leaflet, no mandatory middle-school class, no state agency that teaches you some core curriculum. Instead, we muddle along, picking up scattershot techniques as we go. We wind up with enormous holes in our knowledge.
This week, for example, a reader asked me about those weird, square, pixelated black-and-white bar codes that are cropping up on billboards, movie posters, signs, magazine ads and business cards. Nobody ever bothered to explain them. (They’re QR codes — quick response bar codes. You can scan them with your iPhone’s or Android phone’s camera, using a special app that translates it into an ad or takes you to a related Web page.)
That interaction made me realize that it’s time to publish the first installment of what should be the Big Book of Basic Technology Knowledge — the prerequisite for using electronics in today’s society. Some may seem basic, but you’ll probably find at least a couple of “I didn’t know thats!” among them.
Cellphones
¶ Searching for a signal scarfs up battery juice appallingly quickly. Turn your phone off, or put it into Airplane Mode, before you travel out of cellphone range — for example, on a plane or, for AT&T users, Manhattan and San Francisco.
8/ Stephen Colbert has John Lithgow, a classically trained actor, read Newt's bizarre press release....hilarious......4 minutes.....
John Lithgow is an alumnus of the London Academy Of Music & Dramatic Art, which some have argued is the world's finest acting school. And on Thursday night's Colbert Report, he perhaps got to put all of that training to its most important use yet: a dramatic interpretation of the now-infamousNewt Gingrich press release.
After an introduction from Colbert, wherein the host realized he didn't have the gravitas to pull off reading Rick Tyler's PR-spin tour de force, Lithgow took the stage and gave the performance of a lifetime.
Colbert summed it up best:
I am sure that won back all of Newt's supporters that haven't just watched a 'Dexter' marathon.
9/ Climate scientists were in Miami for a trade show, and discussing the new report about the melting of the icecaps accelerating....and Rick Scott, our Governor was there but not buying any of this global warming stuff.....
Why are we not surprised.....
Climate scientists are lending their computer modeling and data analysis and research findings and learned assumptions to the new governor’s first state hurricane conference this week. Gov. Rick Scott seems fine with that, as long as the brainy guys confine their theories to the short term.
In his short speech opening the conference Wednesday, for example, Scott didn’t object to warnings that Florida is statistically likely to absorb a big hit in 2011. He promised Florida would be ready. “We’re going to be very prepared.”
Scott, however, only accepts climate science devoted to the upcoming hurricane season. When it comes to the long-term stuff – the overwhelming research that warns of man-made global warming – he remains Florida’s denier in chief.
Earlier this month in Copenhagen, 400 climate scientists mulled over new data and issued a warning that the melting of the Arctic ice cap was much more profound than they had previously thought. Among the other consequences, they warned, the world’s sea level will rise faster than earlier projections, least 2 feet 11 inches and perhaps as high as 5 feet 3 inches by 2100.
Such findings might appear to be particularly interesting to the governor of a state with 95 percent of its population clustered within 35 miles of a 1,200-mile coastline. The notion of a hurricane storm surge rolling ashore atop higher seas ought to add another, urgent dimension to a Florida disaster preparedness agenda.
But no. We may have just endured the fourth hottest April in recorded history, surpassed only by the record-setting Aprils of 2005, 2007 and 2010 (according to those whacky scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Institute), but issues associated with global warming went unmentioned by the governor and his new director of emergency management at the 25th annual Governor’s Hurricane Conference in Fort Lauderd
10/ Movie Review
Out this weekend is Pirates of the Caribbean 4 with Johnny Depp, and the review for this one is.....just OK. If you liked the first three, go for it.......
Whether the effort was absolutely necessary is both an obvious and a naïve question. Why would the Walt Disney Company, which distributes these movies, and Jerry Bruckheimer, who produces them, ever want to leave well enough alone? In Hollywood, gratuitous excess — not necessity — is the mother of invention.
Not that “On Stranger Tides” is especially inventive. Gore Verbinski, who directed the first three installments with wanton energy, rococo visual flair and a flagrant disregard for narrative coherence, has been replaced by Rob Marshall, who specializes in turning well-loved pieces of popular art (“Chicago,” “Memoirs of a Geisha,” “Nine“) into tedious, literal-minded prestige movies. So while this picture is called “On Stranger Tides,” it is by far the least strange of all the “Pirates” episodes so far, with none of the cartoonish exuberance or creepy-crawly effects that made its predecessors intermittently delightful.
Now for an excellent movie that's exciting, dramatic and will make you think - Netflix "Inside Job". Well worth the time....here's the trailer......
And still in the cinematic theme, Onion's Today Now interviews the five year old screenwriter of the "Fast and the Furious" movies.....2 minutes....
Todays wedding joke
I was a very happy man. My wonderful girlfriend and I had been dating for
over a year, and so we decided to get married.
There was only one little thing bothering me...It was her beautiful younger
sister. My prospective sister-in-law was twenty-two, wore very tight mini
skirts, and generally was bra-less. She would regularly bend down when she
was near me, and I always got more than a nice view. It had to be
deliberate. Because she never did it when she was near anyone else.
One day her 'little' sister called and asked me to come over to check the
wedding invitations. She was alone when I arrived, and she whispered to me
that she had feelings and desires for me that she couldn't overcome. She
told me that she wanted me just once before I got married and committed my
life to her sister.
Well, I was in total shock, and couldn't say a word. She said, 'I'm going
upstairs to my bedroom, and if you want one last wild fling, just come up
and get me.'
I was stunned and frozen in shock as I watched her go up the stairs. I stood
there for a moment, then turned and made a beeline straight to the front
door. I opened the door, and headed straight towards my car.
over a year, and so we decided to get married.
There was only one little thing bothering me...It was her beautiful younger
sister. My prospective sister-in-law was twenty-two, wore very tight mini
skirts, and generally was bra-less. She would regularly bend down when she
was near me, and I always got more than a nice view. It had to be
deliberate. Because she never did it when she was near anyone else.
One day her 'little' sister called and asked me to come over to check the
wedding invitations. She was alone when I arrived, and she whispered to me
that she had feelings and desires for me that she couldn't overcome. She
told me that she wanted me just once before I got married and committed my
life to her sister.
Well, I was in total shock, and couldn't say a word. She said, 'I'm going
upstairs to my bedroom, and if you want one last wild fling, just come up
and get me.'
I was stunned and frozen in shock as I watched her go up the stairs. I stood
there for a moment, then turned and made a beeline straight to the front
door. I opened the door, and headed straight towards my car.
And behold, my entire future family was standing outside, all clapping!
With tears in his eyes, my father-in-law hugged me and said, 'We are very
happy that you have passed our little test. We couldn't ask for a better man
for our daughter. Welcome to the family.'
And the moral of this story is:
With tears in his eyes, my father-in-law hugged me and said, 'We are very
happy that you have passed our little test. We couldn't ask for a better man
for our daughter. Welcome to the family.'
And the moral of this story is:
Always keep your condoms in your car.
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