Monthly Archives: January 2010

Wall Street: “Trust Us.” Me: “No!”

Posted on January 18, 2010 | 4 comments

Last week the Wall Street Journal wrote an article on the SEC‘s efforts to ban “naked access,” which is a system whereby big stock traders are given direct access to brokers’ computers so that they can trade faster. The SEC fears that this could be destabilizing to markets. Wall Street says that naked access improves liquidity. They also say that “high-speed trading firms are sophisticated and have risk-management tools that limit the likelihood of destabilizing trades.”

Haven’t we heard that song before? Wall Street said that they were sophisticated traders of mortgage-backed securities, and that their risk-management models would keep them from getting in trouble. We know how that turned out. I’m no expert on naked access, but I know that when Wall Street says “trust us,” I make sure they haven’t just stolen my wallet.

Along the same lines, here is an article in Slate describing how Wall Street has always complained about regulations that ended up helping the industry.

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Posted in Business, Politics

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Shareholder Governance and Technology

Posted on January 12, 2010 | 2 comments

In many of the discussions about executive compensation and Wall Street bonuses, it has been noted that shareholders are, theoretically, supposed to exercise some control, at least via election of directors. However, retail investors rarely take the time to read their proxy statements, let alone vote. This morning Eliot Spitzer (yes, that Eliot Spitzer) wrote an article in Slate listing several websites that are trying to use technology to both educate shareholders and to inspire them to get active and take control of the companies they own.

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Posted in Business, Trends

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Who Rents What Movies?

Posted on January 12, 2010 | Leave a comment

Check out this totally cool map that shows the top 10 Netflix rentals by zip code for 12 metropolitan areas.

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Posted in Business, Pop culture, Trends

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Business Schools Adding Creative Thinking

Posted on January 12, 2010 | Leave a comment

The NY Times recently wrote a story about how business schools are, in the wake of the financial meltdown, realizing that they need to teach future business leaders to think in creative, flexible and interdisciplinary ways. This is news? I’m no captain of industry, but to me it seems incredibly obvious that in business, like in the rest of life, the right way to make decisions is to pull together disparate data points to draw a conclusion, and then be willing to change that decision as new data comes in. Maybe the fact that this is news is what has been wrong with business schools all along.

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Posted in Business, Trends

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Is Twitter Destroying Civilization?

Posted on January 12, 2010 | 2 comments

Vanity Fair recently ran an article about “tweethearts,” who are women leveraging their popularity on Twitter (and their looks) into more popularity, and potentially business opportunities. Apparently the article is somewhat controversial, since it makes the women appear to be twits more than twilebrities, but given how the women posed for the article photo (see below), I’m not sure they can complain.

But I want to focus on how these women emphasis the speed and brevity of Twitter. Read these two quotes:

  • “Facebook is just way too slow,” says Stefanie Michaels, a twilebrity from Brentwood, California. “I can’t deal with that kind of deep engagement.”
  • “Sometimes,” says Julia Roy, a 26-year-old New York social strategist turned twilebrity, scrunching her face, “when you’re Twittering all the time, you even start to think in 140 characters.”

Um, hello? Facebook is too deep? You think in 140 characters? That sounds like the brain of a Golden Retriever, not a businessperson. So using Twitter makes you shallow and unable to think complex thoughts? If constant Tweeting turns people into vapid soundbites, making us a nation of Tila Tequilas instead of George Wills, then we are on the road to ruin. There are serious challenges facing this country, and they won’t be solved through discussions made up of 140 character Tweets. We need more depth, not less.

Tweethearts, courtesy of Vanity Fair

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Posted in Business, Pop culture, Technology, Trends

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Terrorism: As Dangerous As A Tornado?

Posted on January 11, 2010 | 2 comments

The Wall Street Journal this weekend ran a very interesting article about terrorism, and how incredibly unlikely it is for an American to die in a terrorist attack, and how Americans should maybe toughen up and look at the numbers instead of spending billions of dollars and millions of hours taking off their shoes at airports to prevent something that is statistically rare. The main article is here, and the sidebar that runs the numbers in detail (by Nate Silver!) is here.

The chance of an American dying in a terrorist attack is 1 in 3,000,000, or about the same as being killed by a tornado. Every day, 50 Americans are murdered, but we certainly aren’t spending the time and money to prevent those deaths that we are spending on the much less deadly terrorism. Obviously, this is a complicated issue that can’t be decided purely on statistics, but the point that we are maybe not focusing on the right things, and that we are maybe giving the terrorists a bigger psychic role than they deserve, is a good one.

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Posted in Politics, Pop culture, Trends

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Politicians Should Start Their Careers Outside Politics

Posted on January 11, 2010 | 3 comments

I was reading recently about Senator Byron Dorgan’s retirement, and the article claimed that he had been in politics for 40 years. I looked up his biography on his official site and on Wikipedia, and both confirmed the 40 year figure. Dorgan worked in business for 2-3 years, and then became State Tax Commissioner at age 26, and has been an elected official ever since.

Then this weekend’s NY Times magazine had a long piece on the GOP’s moderate vs. Tea Party battle, as personified by the race in Florida between Charlie Crist and Marco Rubio. It turns out that Rubio has never done anything but hold elective office, serving as a West Miami city commissioner right out of law school.

Dorgan and Rubio might be great legislators — I don’t know enough about either of them to judge — but doesn’t it seem like we should want our politicians to have lived in the real world? Think of all the things we regular folks have to do: hunt for jobs, worry about insurance, cooperate with coworkers we hate, shop for cars, get things done at work, etc. Career politicians don’t have to do any of that stuff. They never need to execute and accomplish, and they get rewarded for being obstinate. They stop worrying about money, since they get to pay their family as “consultants” out of campaign funds. And they have staff to take care of life’s little details.

I’m not expecting our politicians to follow the lead of Cincinnatus, who left his farm to run Rome, and then returned to his farm. But maybe some experience in the real world, not the political world, would get our legislators to work — WORK — on policy, instead of spending all their time posturing and campaigning.

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Posted in Politics

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