The Curious Capitalist

Finland's 15-minute billionaire is still prospering

Justin Fox — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:58:26 +0000

When I saw the headline on my RSS reader it brought back all sorts of tech-bubble memories: F-Secure Pays €27.5 Million For French Storage Startup Steek, it read. Continued the TechCrunch Europe post: Finnish computer security provider F-Secure has acquired venture-backed French startup Steek for €27.5M in cash with the possibility of a further performance-based payment [...]

Goldman Sachs, vampire squid

Justin Fox — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 21:40:05 +0000

Thanks to the persistence and assistance of commenter audiospaceship, I finally read the samizdat version of Matt Taibbi's Goldman Sachs screed. (Rolling Stone only posted excerpts, and while I may still go out and buy a print copy, I wouldn't be able to link to it.) I generally liked it, and I actually learned a [...]

Credit ratings agencies: the problem that hasn't gone away, as much as we've tried to ignore it

Barbara Kiviat — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:55:06 +0000

Okay, so maybe that's not entirely fair. The SEC has signed off on some new rules and proposed some additional ones to try to temper conflict of interest at the companies that told us all those new-fangled mortgage-related securities were unlikely to ever go bad. Oops! And now SEC head Mary Schapiro is talking about [...]

Sarah Palin takes on the water-cannon threat

Justin Fox — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:45:33 +0000

Ezra Klein writes, regarding Sarah Palin's cap-and-trade op-ed in today's Washington Post, that its failure to mention "global warming" or "climate change" makes it "a bit like an op-ed that attacks firefighters for pointing pressurized water cannon(s) at everything but never mentions fires." I'm not absolutely sure the analogy is fair, but this did sound [...]

Goldman Sachs has had an excellent financial crisis

Justin Fox — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:55:32 +0000

Goldman Sachs reported earnings this morning, and it reported lots of them—$3.44 billion in the quarter ending June 26. That's well more than the $2.33 billion Goldman's made in the comparable quarter in 2007, back before the world started falling apart. In other words, Goldman may be emerging from this crisis in a better position [...]

Was the Washington Post's only sin that it apologized?

Justin Fox — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:25:50 +0000

Stan Collender writes a rousing defense of the Washington Post plan—since abandoned in the face of criticism/controversy—to charge for access to "intimate dinners" at publisher Katharine Weymouth's house: The only thing the Washington Post really did that was wrong is that it apologized. Other news outlets have been doing things like the Post was planning to do [...]

Behold the power of the potato

Barbara Kiviat — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:54:50 +0000

Historians have long sung the praises of the potato when talking about the boom in population and urbanization we saw in the 18th and 19th centuries. Potatoes are packed with vitamins and minerals—including, importantly, vitamin C—and can be grown on less land with less labor than wheat, barley and oats. When the potato showed up [...]

The dangers of reading The Hobbit just before bedtime

Justin Fox — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:13:19 +0000

I read most of The Hobbit last night. I'd been reading it in very small chunks to Curious Capitalist Jr. over the past few months. He's perfectly capable of reading it himself, but didn't seem to want to, so I started reading it to him. Yesterday we dropped CC Jr. off at summer camp, so [...]

Will the new GM escape the curse of the old?

Justin Fox — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:04:02 +0000

There have been two main theories of why things went so wrong at General Motors. One is that the company is run by a bunch of ingrown retreads with no sense of where the automotive business was headed. The other is that the company's management has been so burdened by commitments (to pensions, to retiree [...]

The death of asset allocation, and its replacement with another potentially bad idea

Justin Fox — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:28:14 +0000

Writes Tom Lauricella in a fascinating article in today's WSJ: Asset allocation, a bedrock of investing for decades, appeared to fail miserably in 2008. The conviction shared by most investors -- that they should spread their money across myriad asset classes to minimize losses -- was shaken as nearly all markets tumbled in unison. The main reason [...]