Comp Change Means Mgmt Change on Wall Street

500k and restricted stock that vests only when the government has been repaid.  Wow.
My predictions:
1.  Goodbye to  Wall Street Executive who can afford to retire.  It will not be fun or rewarding and they will reinvent or play golf.
2.  Young Guns with lots of energy and significantly less experience will rise to prominence.
3.  Clever lawyers [...]

Republican Senators Have Courage

Fred Wilson beat me to a GM post that I wanted to write over the weekend.  If only I had watched less football.  Fred nails it so read his post, but here are my thoughts.   General Motors is a disaster and we send the wrong message to everybody in this country and around the [...]

Pray for Newspapers

The WSJ reports that Tribune has retained Lazard to help restructure its debt and that Tribune may seek Chapter 11 Protection.  A month ago I met Bruce Toll (Toll Brothers) at a cocktail party.  Toll is the Chairman of Philadelphia Media Holdings and had helped lead the deal to buy the Philadelphia newspapers from McClatchy.  [...]

The Decline of the Goldman Sachs Brand

This weekend Wall Street Journal ran an interview with Robert Rubin yesterday in which he was surprisingly defensive about his role at Citigroup over the past decade. Here are some highlights:

He passes the buck to the executives throughout the interview claiming “they did not execute properly.”
His $115mm in compensation (before options!) over the past [...]

Credit Crisis for Dummies

Thanks to Fred Wilson, I was turned on to these great slides at Slideshare.
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These slides will help many people understand our current financial predicament.
Moreover, it’s very exciting to see people are bringing great innovations and creativity to presentations.  If you are an entrepreneur who presents material with dozens of slides, hundreds of bullet points, and [...]

Speak up on Sarbanes-Oxley

As part of our new progressive, inclusive new politics we can turn to former enemy turned relevant free-market intellectual  Newt Gingrich, who has a well-reasoned op-ed piece in today’s San Francisco Chronicle.  In it, he calls for repealing Sarbanes-Oxley.  This will help the broad economy and is essential for Internet innovation to continue.
One unfortunate result [...]

When Obama Wins

Roger, I’ve been thinking about your doomsday post that you published yesterday.
This is the worst seven weeks in America since Sept 11 to October 31st 2001.   Seven years ago that period was marked by an emotional state of fear that was totally unfamiliar to us. Remember riding the subway or airplanes in the aftermath?  We [...]

Global Market Performance in October

This is a brutal list of market performers put together by Floyd Norris who is really a smart thinker at the NYT.
Take a  look:
“Here are some October performances, through a few minutes ago. In each case, I took a major index from the country in question. All figures are in U.S. dollars.
U.S., down 26%
Canada. down [...]