• Executive Fascinated By Electrician’s Lunch
    Posted by on June 4th, 2007 at 1:59 pm

    The Onion reports on Chuck Prince:

    While waiting for an elevator en route to a lunch meeting at Central Park’s Tavern on the Green restaurant Monday, Citibank CEO Chuck Prince said he became “spellbound” by the meal being consumed by an electrician working in the area.
    “First, he opened some sort of tiny, metal, barn-looking object, and then he took out and ate one of those sandwich things, you know, the kind with bologna and two slices of mushy white bread,” said Prince, who was equally amazed that the electrician’s snack-cake dessert wasn’t set ablaze before consumption. “I had heard of this sort of meal before, but never actually seen it. My goodness, his thermos contained soup!”
    Prince added that he was even more stunned when he realized that the electrician must have prepared his meal at home.

  • Biomet Trades Over $44
    Posted by on June 4th, 2007 at 10:42 am

    For a company that makes spinal implants, you’d think Biomet‘s (BMET) board would have a backbone. Apparently not.
    The good news is that shares of BMET are now trading above private equity’s $44 offer price. I hope this means the market expects a higher bid. Shareholders will vote on the offer this Friday.

  • Canadian Dollar Close to Parity of U.S.
    Posted by on June 4th, 2007 at 10:41 am

    This is embarrassing. The U.S. dollar is in such bad shape, it just hit a 30-year low against the Canadian dollar. Who knew Canada even had its own currency? Apparently, it does and if this keeps up, it’ll soon reach parity. That means you could exchange one Canadian dollar for one real dollar.
    Sheesh, sometimes I think our monetary policy is being run by a bunch of 13th graders….
    image476.png

  • Sign of a Top?
    Posted by on June 4th, 2007 at 8:32 am

    There’s a shortage of butlers.
    Egad! I’ll have to pour my own sherry. No!

  • News from Last Week
    Posted by on June 4th, 2007 at 8:07 am

    I forgot to mention this last week, but one of our Buy List stocks, Fiserv (FISV), rose nearly 10% in last week’s trading.
    The company agreed to sell its Fiserv Investment Support Services business in two separate transactions. The stock was also upgraded by Cowen & Co. Shares of FISV are up 12.32% this year.
    Also, Donaldson (DCI) got hit despite a good earnings report. I’m still trying to figure this one out. At one point on Wednesday, DCI was down 9%.
    Earnings came in at 49 cents a share, four cents ahead of estimates. Sales came in at $484 million which also Wall Street’s estimate of $462 million. The company sees full-year EPS of $1.73 to $1.80.

  • Job Openings at the Federal Reserve
    Posted by on June 4th, 2007 at 7:35 am

    If you’re in the job market, here are the openings at the Federal Reserve Board. They’re looking for everything from economists to IT folks and lawyers, even law enforcement.
    Also, here’s the Web site of Renaissance Technologies. Kinda plain. I guess the best sign of being big and powerful is not caring what your Web site looks like.

  • “One of the most interesting and unnoticed developments of recent decades has been the tendency of big enterprise to socialize itself”
    Posted by on June 3rd, 2007 at 1:27 am

    Nick Schulz writes on “The Greening of Capitalism.” He finds this quote from John Maynard Keynes:

    A point arrives in the growth of a big institution…at which the owners of the capital, i.e. the shareholders, are almost entirely dissociated from the management, with the result that the direct personal interest of the latter in the making of great profit becomes quite secondary. When this stage is reached, the general stability and reputation of the institution are more considered by the management than the maximum of profit for the shareholders. The shareholders must be satisfied by conventionally adequate dividends; but once this is secured, the direct interest of the management often consists in avoiding criticism from the public and from the customers of the concern….They are, as time goes on, socializing themselves.

  • The Earl of Baltimore
    Posted by on June 1st, 2007 at 5:30 pm

    Now that the week is over, I thought you might enjoy this — the great Earl Weaver in top form. I have to warn you, the language is…Earl Weaver-esque.

    Here’s the funny part. On the scoreboard, you can see that there’s one out in the top of the first. Yep, the game had just started.
    By the way, Weaver was right. He’s now in the Hall of Fame.

  • Today’s Jobs Report
    Posted by on June 1st, 2007 at 2:09 pm

    The government reported that 157,000 jobs were created last month. That’s good, not great, but good. The unemployment rate stayed at 4.5%.
    The problem I have is that many Americans have left the job market. The number of employed people as a percent of the civilian population is still not very high.
    Allow me to chartify:
    image475.png
    Warning: The line is bumpy because it’s not seasonally-adjusted. You can see that we’re better than where we were, but far from our best.
    If the same percent of the population were employed today as we had seven years ago, that would mean 3.2 million more jobs.

  • Bancrofts to Meet With Murdoch
    Posted by on June 1st, 2007 at 11:39 am

    Maybe they changed their minds, but the Bancrofts are going to meet with Rupert Murdoch and, we can assume, listen to his bid for Dow Jones (DJ). John Carney* at DealBreaker picked up this quote:

    “If they meet, they sell,” said a Dow Jones employee familiar with the thinking of the Bancrofts.

    They’re also considering other potential bids. I really hope Murdoch wins out if for no other reason to see extra-voting-power shares lose.
    *I also stole John’s HAL 9000 image below. It’s what bloggers do.