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Recession
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print is dead
recession
Size Zeros Richies Can Barely Squeeze Into a 2 These Days
Surely you didn't think we missed the top story in the NYT Sunday Styles: "It's Not So Easy Being Less Rich." As you know, the economic crunch is affecting everyone, and some people's net worth is going from $8 million a year to just $2 mil. The upsdie? Skinny rich bitches who have long had it both ways are actually gaining weight from all the stress.More »
economics
The Rich: Recession's Whiniest Victims
What with the nation struggling under soaring gas prices, foreclosures, and general tedious suffering, The New York Times' Sunday Styles section naturally wants to know how Manhattan's filthy rich are coping with the recession. "NANCY CHEMTOB, a divorce lawyer in Manhattan, has found that her days have become crammed seeing clients, all worried about how an economic downturn will affect their marriages.But Ms. Chemtob’s clients are concerned all the same, she said, because their incomes have shrunk, say, to $2 million a year from $8 million, and they know that their 2008 bonus checks are likely to be much less impressive. One of her clients recently confessed that his net worth had decreased to $8 million from more than $20 million, and he thinks that his wife will leave him. He has hidden their fall in fortune by taking on debt to pay for her extravagant clothes and vacations." More »
showbiz kids
'Wall Street' Meets 'The Firm': Filmmaker Banker's Terrible Email Pitch
Hey, Sanjay Sanghoee, the hedge funder who's raising money from hedge funds to make a movie about a heroic hedge funder, has apparently been trying this nonsense since college. A former business school peer of Sanjay's just emailed us to inform us that back at Columbia, Mr. Sanghoee "was the founder, president and sole member of the Film Financing Club." He's been sending these fund-seeking mass emails for years. Former b-school associates received this one just a few weeks ago, as the banking crisis threatened the money Sanghoee had raised to date. If his screenplays are half as captivating as his pitch emails, it'll be a hell of a picture. More »
american dream
Bankers, Lara Flynn Boyle Put on Show to Save Wall Street
It's worthwhile sometimes to stop and think about the real victims of today's tanking American economy. Like Sanjay Sanghoee, a hedge-funder who's running into trouble financing the film version of his corporate intrigue novel. The novel, Merger, is your standard tale of "an Indian corporate titan who begins a hostile takeover of a satellite company that transmits information from the C.I.A." Obviously, it'd make a great little indie film. So Sanghoee, none of whose Law & Order spec scripts were ever accepted, raised millions in private money from his hedge fund friends. They loved the book, and the pitch, and the fact that it was a movie made by a banker about bankers. But then, the mortgage crisis! Suddenly, not even a verbal agreement from Lara Flynn Boyle "to take a supporting role as a sultry henchwoman" was enough to keep the checks rolling in. More »
breaking
Microsoft to Yahoo: Shit or Get Off the Pot
"Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) continue to play the cat-and-mouse game out in the open, even on the weekend: MSFT has send a letter to Yahoo board, and has set a three-week deadline for Yahoo to accept its current $31 a share offer or Microsoft will take its case to Yahoo shareholders. This could also mean a lower offer from Microsoft in case of a proxy war." More »
the chart
Ben Bernanke tells Congress that the US economy may slip into recession. But the media is way ahead of the Fed Chairman. Media hysteria about the impending recession is even more intense than it was after the stockmarket bubble burst in 2000. Chart represents number of headlines each month including the word "recession" in major publications in the Nexis news database.
Recession Fever
Ben Bernanke tells Congress that the US economy may slip into recession. But the media is way ahead of the Fed Chairman. Media hysteria about the impending recession is even more intense than it was after the stockmarket bubble burst in 2000. Chart represents number of headlines each month including the word "recession" in major publications in the Nexis news database.
oh no
How to Explain a Recession
One reason for the evergreen popularity of those "explaining the coming financial collapse for dummies" pieces is that 99% of journalists—even on the business beat!—don't know a damn thing about money and finance, and writing these pieces is a convenient way to get paid to try to figure it out. New York weighs in wth "An Idiot's Guide to Financial Crises", the casual version of the New York Times' Can't Grasp Credit Crisis? Join the Club. New York's take is more personal: apparently a recession means that Adam Sternbergh will lose his job! Considerably more alarming: the recession is already causing the prices of cheeseburgers and bagels to skyrocket. [NYM, NYM]
end times
Was this week a peek at a terrible future? A dreadful harbinger of things to come? Will all the weeks be like this from now on? Yeah, news-wise, it was slow, which is deadly for a blog like this, but it shouldn't have been slow. Two gubernatorial sex scandals! A heated election! A collapsing economy! Shouldn't it be crazy here? Maybe we're all too depressed to write about it! Look at Drudge. The image above has been on top of his site all day. He's talking about the presidential race, but everyone feels like that crying smiley face this week. Right? Let's take a look at the tape:
More »
Hell Week: Is Everything Falling Apart?
Was this week a peek at a terrible future? A dreadful harbinger of things to come? Will all the weeks be like this from now on? Yeah, news-wise, it was slow, which is deadly for a blog like this, but it shouldn't have been slow. Two gubernatorial sex scandals! A heated election! A collapsing economy! Shouldn't it be crazy here? Maybe we're all too depressed to write about it! Look at Drudge. The image above has been on top of his site all day. He's talking about the presidential race, but everyone feels like that crying smiley face this week. Right? Let's take a look at the tape:
More »
mad money
In Defense Of Jim Cramer
"Bear Stearns is not in trouble!" Jim Cramer, CNBC's bug-eyed "Mad Money" host who is to finance what Carrot Top is to comedy, shouted last Tuesday. "Don't move your money from Bear! That's just being silly." The immediate reaction to seeing his advice in the wake of Bear's collapse is: what an idiot. But really, his advice was not bad! Cramer—a famously bad prognosticator—noted that Bear would, at worst, be taken over, meaning those who had money with the firm would have their investments guaranteed by a more deep-pocketed buyer. Which is exactly what happened when JPMorgan bought Bear over the weekend. Note that he was not speaking about Bear's stock price [last Tuesday: over $60. Now: toilet paper]. What have we learned? Only Wild Jim Cramer can stop the collapse of the American economy. Click to watch the crazy savant's ill-fated harangue. [via WJNO]
the poors
Yahoo! Publishes Recipes For Tomorrow's Laid-Off Employee
Yahoo! Food helps you adjust to the coming recession with this "dressed up" Ramen "recipe," a truly sad collection of words to end up in a sentence together. Next week: how to make a rucksack and the fine art of pencil sales! This will certainly come in handy for anywhere from hundreds to thousands of people in the next couple weeks. [Yahoo]
Andrew Cuomo, gradually moving up in the world from "not his father" to "not Eliot Spitzer", has subpoenaed Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Deutsche Bank in his crusading subprime mortgage investigation. And now Merrill Lynch is predicting "an almost unremittingly gloomy forecast for the US economy next year." It's all your fault, deadbeat consumers! You made them lend to you! [NYT, Telegraph]
1. "Workers walk through the main business district in Jakarta, Indonesia, Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2007. Rising global oil prices may dent Indonesia's economic growth and boost inflation next year, a central bank official said Wednesday. (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)" 2. "Huaorani Indigenous protest outside the Energy and Oil Ministry in Quito, Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2007, against oil extraction in their lands located in the country's Amazon. (AP Photo/Dolores Ochoa)" 3. "Traders Michael Arenson, left, and Mark Frank react in the Standard & Poor's 500 futures pit at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2007. The Federal Reserve, confronted with surging oil prices and a slumping housing market, cut a key interest rate by a quarter-point in an effort to stimulate economic activity and keep the country from dipping into a recession. It was the Fed's second rate reduction this year. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)"
