February 2012
5 posts
Three Card Monte
Across New York, state and local governments are borrowing $750 million this year to finance their contributions to the state pension system, and are likely to borrow at least $1 billion more over the next year. The number of municipalities and public institutions using this new borrowing mechanism to pay off their annual pension bills has tripled in a year. The eagerness to borrow demonstrates...
Warren Buffett Gives Us Another Great Quote on...
It’s time for the Warren Buffett National Tour to start heading out of the station. Every year, a few weeks before the release of the Berkshire annual report, Buffett gives Fortune an article (or a preview of his shareholder letter). Then the eagerly awaited annual report gets loaded to the Berkshire website. Finally, after the Opening Weekend as I like to call it, Warren goes into full...
It's not a class war, it's a meritocracy war
Merit is a fine principle. But the most painful revelation of the debate on high pay may be this: many Britons are not convinced that they live in a functioning meritocracy. Are the bosses bluffing? Assuming that voters are not suicidally casual about who holds Britain’s biggest jobs, their desire to slash bosses’ pay leads to one conclusion: the public does not believe that executives are as...
the digital transformation of news is going...
In the fourth quarter, we launched iPhone news apps in 15 TV markets that have been downloaded by 260,000 users and generate 1.5 million page views per month in those markets.
This little tidbit came out on Gannett’s Q4 Earnings Call. Talking about the death of old school media is a little passé at this point. But I would like to point out that if all 260,000 users downloaded...
Insurance Rates Are Probably Going Up
In fact, the events in Thailand, on the heels of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami as well as a significant New Zealand earthquake, has insurance companies thinking about doing business differently. Some have cut back on their business-interruption coverage for natural disasters. And they are expecting commercial buyers to provide them with more information. “Underwriters are now realizing...