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What Makes a Bank Too Big to Fail?

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Portfolio - By Felix Salmon - Jan. 28 (Opinion) - The first thing worth saying here is that too big to fail (TBTF) has nothing to do with counterparty risk or credit default swaps or other such arcana of this particular financial crisis. Instead, it's all about the sheer size of a bank's balance sheet -- its assets and liabilities. And when a balance sheet gets up into the hundreds of billions of dollars, or even into the trillions of dollars, you get big problems on both sides when that bank runs into trouble.

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The WSJ Rewrites History

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Portfolio - By Felix Salmon - Jan. 26 (Opinion) - it seems that the WSJ, instead of simply writing a new story when new information comes to light, goes back and edits its old ones. As a result, it's impossible to get any kind of historical record of what the WSJ reported when. I'm not a fan of this practice at all. It's not transparent, and it's yet another reason (beside the subscription firewall) not to link to WSJ.com.

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Why NBC News Should've Known Better

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Portfolio - By Jeff Bercovici - Dec. 02 (Investigative Report) - In January 2000, Salon broke the news that the Office of National Drug Control Policy, under McCaffrey's leadership, was quietly paying television networks to weave explicit anti-drug messages into some of their most popular shows. (It was a little more complicated than that -- rather than giving the networks cash, ONDCP was giving them back airtime it had already purchased at a discount, allowing them to resell it at a higher rate. But that was the gist.) After a period of defending/minimizing its actions, ONDCP dropped the controversial program a year later.

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Reasons to Bail Out GM

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Portfolio - By Felix Salmon - Nov. 13 (Opinion) - It might be cheaper than the alternative of letting GM fail and throwing its employees, and its suppliers' employees, and its dealerships' employees, and so on and so forth, onto the unemployment rolls at a time when it's harder to find a new job than it has been in a very long time.

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The End of Wall Street's Boom

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Portfolio - By Michael Lewis - Nov. 11 (Special Report) - ... I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents’ world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces?

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The End of Wall Street's Boom - National Business News - Print - Portfolio.com

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Portfolio - By Michael Lewis - Nov. 11 (Special Report) - To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue. I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance. When I sat down to write my account of the experience in 1989—Liar’s Poker, it was called—it was in the spirit of a young man who thought he was getting out while the getting was good. I was merely scribbling down a message on my way out and stuffing it into a bottle for those who would pass through these parts in the far distant future. Unless some insider got all of this down on paper, I figured, no future human would believe that it happened.

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Galleries Go to China

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Portfolio - By Carol Kino - Jul. 30 (Special Report) - Western auction houses have been making a killing off China. Within the last two years, Chinese artists have become fixtures of the New York and London contemporary-art sales. In 2003, Hong Kong overtook Paris to become the world's third-largest auction market, behind London and New York. And despite fears of a crash, that market is still growing: In spring, Sotheby's series of Hong Kong sales achieved $227.5 million, its highest total ever for the region, while Christie's took in $310.7 million--a 58 percent increase over the same series in 2007.

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Widespread Panic

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Portfolio - By Megan Barnett - Jul. 11 (Special Report) - This week was a maelstrom of fear across the board. The Dow Jones industrials officially hit bear market territory, Iranian missile tests helped drive the price of oil to another record high, rumors and anxiety sent shares of Lehman Brothers so low that its name is nearly synonymous with Bear Stearns, and the two most important players in the mortgage market, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, appeared to be on the brink of becoming obsolete.

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Rush Limbaugh's New Radio Contract

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Portfolio - By Sophia Banay - Jul. 10 (Special Report) - Jeff Haley, chief executive of the Radio Advertising Bureau.... says (surely with fingers and toes crossed, and eyes fixated on heaven) that podcasts and streaming internet broadcasts will likely be incorporated into Limbaugh's new contract, as Clear Channel and its ilk struggle to capture and retain tech-savvy listeners, bored with the standard radio box. And as that evolution takes place and the medium modernizes, "it's only natural that these strong franchises," like Limbaugh's, "will expand"...

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The Romenesko Empire

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Portfolio - By Howell Raines - Jun. 16 (Special Report) - With typical Midwestern modesty, he says he didn't set out to create a media-economics monitoring service but rather a national "community of journalists" for "people like me who are obsessed with newspapers." That his site has become a high-tech tom-tom for angst-ridden members of a dying tribe was merely a side effect.

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Countrywide's Many 'Friends'

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 06:50:03 -0700

Portfolio - By Daniel Golden - Jun. 13 (Special Report) - Two U.S. senators, two former Cabinet members, and a former ambassador to the United Nations received loans from Countrywide Financial through a little-known program that waived points, lender fees, and company borrowing rules for prominent people.

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Countrywide Loan Scandal - Portfolio.com

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Portfolio - By Daniel Golden - Jun. 12 (Special Report) - Two U.S. senators, two former Cabinet members, and a former ambassador to the United Nations received loans from Countrywide Financial through a little-known program that waived points, lender fees, and company borrowing rules for prominent people.

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New Media's Influence on Politics

Mon, 12 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Portfolio - By Howell Raines - May. 12 (Opinion) - throughout the fall, the press will dutifully publicize one of the great fictions: Our presidential candidates...actually lack the persuasive skills to get their own supporters to withdraw the "independent" commercials the candidates supposedly detest....the press secretly admires and enables attack politics as long as it's...brutally unidealistic...That's why the handmade journalism on the blogs has so much authority, despite the fact that it's a hydrophobic parody of my generation's political journalism.

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Pentagon's Accounting Mess

Sat, 03 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Portfolio - By Scott Paltrow - May. 03 (Special Report) - The basic defense budget for 2007 was $439.3 billion, up 48 percent from 2001, excluding the vast additional sums appropriated for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to federal regulators and current and former Pentagon officials, the accounting process is so obsolete and error prone that it's virtually impossible to tell where much of this money ends up. While the department's brass has made a few patchwork improvements, billions are still unaccounted for. The problem is so deeply rooted that, 18 years after Congress required major federal agencies to be audited, the Pentagon still can't be. (

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Radiohead Figures Out How To Sell 99-cent Song for $4.95 to 2,250 People

Sat, 03 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Portfolio - By Kevin Maney - May. 03 (Opinion) - The contest certainly is another interesting experiment by Radiohead in how to sell music in the Internet Age. The band posted five "stems" of the song on iTunes -- one each for bass, drum, guitar, keyboards and voice. Each cost 99 cents. Buy all five and mix them together using music software like Garageband or Cakewalk, and you hear the actual track as Radiohead intended it. Total cost $4.95. But of course, the appeal is that you can then take those stems, add your own effects, other instruments, voices, whatever, mix them all together, and create an entirely new version of the song.

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Howell Raines on Rupert Murdoch

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Portfolio - By Howell Raines - Apr. 12 (Opinion) - Murdoch allowed that Escapes was all right as an attempt to thwart the Journal's targeting of young professional women, a key readership group for the Times. Then he added some advice about how to conduct a newspaper war: "You ought to hit them where they live," he said of the Journal. "Go after hard business news and beat them on their strength." I can't shake the memory because it seems obvious to me that Murdoch now plans to do to the Times what he was advising me to do to the Journal. He will spend whatever it takes to undermine the Times' standing as America's leading general-interest newspaper.

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Murdoch's Role in Yahoo Fight

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Portfolio - By Jeff Bercovici - Apr. 12 (Special Report) - ...when Murdoch took control of New York magazine, muscling out founder Clay Felker in a move that drew national attention. Felker, who owned about 10 percent of New York's parent company, considered Murdoch a friend and ally, and appealed to him for help when his board starting leaning on him to improve profits. Recognizing opportunity, Murdoch instead went behind Felker's back and bought up more than half the company's shares. Felker, one of the magazine industry's towering figures, soon resigned.

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It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Portfolio - By Jesse Eisinger - Mar. 17 (Opinion) - We have reached escape velocity and launched into the No-Consequences Economy. To pause for a moment of overgeneralization: America used to be about exceptionalism and optimism, a place where anybody could try anything and make it work. Across the business and political spectrum, it's now about entitlement, where everyone deserves a shot but no one gets blamed for screwing it up. Stuff happens, as Donald Rumsfeld said, referring to another affair with no consequences for the architects.

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Grassroots Support? Or Astroturf?

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Portfolio - By Sam Gustin - Feb. 27 (News Report) - Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury said that the company paid some people to arrive early and hold places in the queue for local Comcast employees who wanted to attend the hearing. Some of those placeholders, however, did more than wait in line: They filled many of the seats at the meeting, according to eyewitnesses. As a result, scores of Comcast critics and other members of the public were denied entry because the room filled up well before the beginning of the hearing.

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A.Q. Khan: Why He Went Nuclear

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 08:54:08 -0800

Portfolio - By Douglas Frantz, Catherine Collins - Nov. 28 (Special Report) - A.Q. Khan emerged as the father of the so-called Islamic bomb and mastermind of Pakistan's nuclear-weapons program. He established a private network for smuggling bomb-building technology and equipment to Pakistan, and then he reversed the flow and sold the same lethal secrets to Iran, North Korea, Libya, and, international investigators suspect, at least one still-unknown customer.

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Amazon Doubles Up On First Quarter Profit

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 09:55:08 -0700

Portfolio - By Liz Gunnison - Apr. 25 (News Report) - Home > News & Markets > Top 5 > Amazon Doubles 1st Quarter Profit EMAIL PRINT RSS TEXT SIZE: Amazon Doubles Up On First Quarter Profit by Liz Gunnison Apr 24 2007 The online retailer glided into sweet earnings territory and saw its shares soar in after-hours trading. Gadgets The Vanishing Point Invisible by Peter Hyman When it comes to sound systems, refrigerators, and even air conditioners, invisibility is the new luxury. Read More The Tech Observer VC-Sclerosis Kevin Maney by Kevin Maney Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, perhaps the most influential venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, is setting up a $360 million fund in China. That's watershed news for the VC industry, and another sign that Northern California will eventually lose its stature as the epicenter of high-tech industry and innovation. It may take awhile, but the trend is clear. Read more Latest: * Add a Comment * Read Comments Join the Conversation * Add a Comment Amazon.Com, Inc. (AMZN) Industry: Technology Summary: The Company operates retail websites and offers programs that enable third parties to sell products on its websites. It also operates other websites that enable search and navigation and a movie database. Primary executive: Jeffrey P. Bezos, Founder/CEO/Chairman of the Board/President/Director View Full Profile Powered by rapid growth in electronics sales, Amazon's profit doubled in the first quarter, handily exceeding analysts' estimates. After the market closed, the company announced that its net income rose to $111 million, or 26 cents a share, from $51 million, or 12 cents a share, a year earlier. Analysts had predicted a net income of 16 cents a share on sales of $2.93 billion, according to Bloomberg News.

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