Ruthless Gravity

I’ve been playing with the idea of electric cars in my head for a while now. Why do we need a 100% electric car? If someone (most likely Toyota) could come up with a hybrid electric car that could get maybe 50-100 miles out of the batteries before switching to gas, we could dramatically cut greenhouse emissions and oil demand. This would cover the majority of people’s daily commute (the average is about 16 miles to work). At night, you plug it in and the next day it gets you to work, the grocery store, and back home. We would also need clean sources of energy powering houses or else the car would still be powered by fossil fuels.

I haven’t disappeared. Work has picked up and I’m unable to devote the amount of time necessary to make quality observations and write decent analysis. Hopefully things will be back to business as usual by mid next week.

…not if your an American company and a prime takeover target for a foreign competitor. Anheuser-Busch just became the next example in the long list that will develop from the weak dollar. Foreign companies looking for US assets are going to have a field day thanks to our current economic woes decreasing valuations and the surging euro/pound sterling to dollar exchange rates. Good luck to those that oppose this deal on national champion grounds….you stand a snowballs chance in hell of blocking this if the shareholders are willing to take the cash and run. The person to watch is Warren Buffet. Berkshire Hathaway owns approximately 5% of BUD.

This has been the day every Apple fanboy has been looking forward to, the launch of the new iPhone 3G. Woohoo! I was excited and potential prepared to slap down the cash to pick up this new piece of slick technoporn (thank you, Economic Stimulus Act of 2008)

And then it was revealed:

It looks sleek but did it build upon the first iPhone enough to warrent extending my AT&T contract?

Resoundingly, No! 3G and GPS are great but there was no talk on fixing the major issues with the first iPhone:

• MMS - how do you sell a phone this day and age without MMS support. I didn’t see or hear anything about this coming out of WWDC
• Camera - if its the same camera then its a major oversight on Apple’s behalf. Part of the initial appeal of the iPhone was having 8gb of space to snap photos on. I didn’t realize that the camera was going to be soo poor.
• WiFi Sync - it has WiFi, why do I still need to plug it in?
• Ringer volume - this is a software fix. Can we please separate the music volume from the ringer volume. A better speaker that you could actually hear would be a welcomed addition as well.
• Copy/Paste - another software fix.

If you dont own an iPhone, then this is a great deal. If you do already own one, how is this a product that warrents increasing your data charge $10 a month and re-signing for another two years with AT&T? Halving the time it takes to load Google Reader or Twitter does not have me jumping at the bits to go put down the cash for one of these. Just my opinion.

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen recently from lazy journalism is regarding the symptom as the problem. One of my favorite books, The McKinsey Mind, covers this in detail. The two iterations of this I’ve seen the most of over the past week are:
Gas Prices
With gas approaching $150 a barrel, CNBC, MSNBC, Fox, CNN, and Bloomberg constantly have financial pundits on air spouting off about what is causing the run up in prices. Generally, most analyst state that increased demand with limited supply combined with speculation are responsible. End of analysis and the anchor usually says something about how evil speculators are (Lou Dobbs, I’m looking at you). Well, investors don’t speculate just to be speculating. The problem is not speculation but the underlying causes that have led investors to speculate in oil. I’m not going to get into what those are, but if you search around the Interwebs you can find out.

The Democratic Primary
I set out to not write about politics on here and I plan to continue that pledge. Yesterday in the NYTimes, Mark Penn penned an op-ed blaming the superdelegates for switching sides as the reason that Hillary Clinton lost the race. Well, those superdelegates must’ve had an underlying reason to switch sides. Just another attempt at lazy analysis and skewed history.

Lehman is in trouble. What else is new?

Lehman is one of the most storied franchises in the field of finance. From its humble beginnings as a cotton trading firm to its meteoritic rise under the leadership of Richard Fuld, Lehman has been through more crises than one can possibly imagine. This is the same firm that literally almost tore itself apart with infighting between the bankers and traders. A firm that almost went belly up after LTCM. The firm that suffered through 9/11 bringing down their corporate headquarters at ground zero.

If anything has been determined by Lehman’s woes since going public in 1994, it is a sense of rallying around the franchise and its leaders when experiencing adversity. My time at LEH back in 2005 in the middle of the run up in the housing market was one of the best experiences of my life. I still remember the mantra my CAO would recite whenever giving a pep talk to us:

My God
My Country
Lehman

Lehman today faces its most overwhelming challenge. Think what you will of Bear Sterns, Lehman was a more crucial player in the run up in the housing market than any other investment bank. The mortgage desk in S&T was the hottest place to be for the past few years. The real estate private equity division might’ve overpaid for Archstone-Smith (more on that in another post). Bear Sterns opened the door to failure of banks that rely too heavily on their bond departments to carry the earnings quarter to quarter. Nobody in their right mind would claim to understand exactly what is on the books and what its worth. Greenlight Capital is leading a public rebellion that aims to force the bank into failing.

My personal opinion is that Lehman will make it through as they always do. There will be pains and it might cost a couple of high level people their jobs.

Today, Sam posted a video of John Doerr giving a presentation on mercenaries versus missionaries in the field of entrepreneurship. You can view his video by clicking here.

I’ve decided to post another Doerr video on the topic of investing in green technology. Kleiner Perkins has been out in front with the creation of a $500 million “Green Growth Fund”. With $125+ oil trading on the NyMex, we are going to need innovative solutions if we are going to solve our energy issues.

Billy Mays has now offically gone from pushing OxyClean to solving our nation’s healthcare crisis.

Twitter is becoming synonymous with crashing. It’s only a matter of time before Twitter becomes a verb with a negative meaning.

ie, “Our site received a spike in traffic and twittered the damn server.”

Caught this video on Feld’s Thoughts. Great inspirational video for those that aspire.