Being Happy

Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so. - John Stuart Mill

Kessler on the Future of the Investment Banks

As always, Andy Kessler gets it, he called the last bubble and I think with his experience in Silicon Valley and on the Street his musings are pretty accurate. Goldman is going to do something, they beat subprime for all intensive purposes. Great "future headline" stuff. Do you by some GS, or maybe C is at a low?

Cut:
Andy Kessler: WSJ: What's Next for the Banks

My view is that firms that successfully combine banking and investment banking will walk away with the prize, by being able to offer a full range of services to clients -- short-term loans against assets or receivables as well as bonds and equity for long-term projects, the kind of underwriting and trading that requires large amounts of capital. The inevitable consolidation that should have occurred after Glass-Steagall (the 1933 law that separated banks and investment banks) was repealed in 1999 had been on hold while everyone chased easy profits. But now the shakeout is here.

Goldman Sachs will own a bank, maybe even Citigroup (Goldman's $85 billion market capitalization might be able to swallow Citi's $125 billion value) and strip it down to what it needs. JP Morgan should reunite the House of Morgan by merging with Morgan Stanley, and become a full-service powerhouse. But JP Morgan could buy Merrill or Lehman or Bear Stearns instead. Bank of America will merge with who's left. But don't count out others who have done well with capital. Fortress Investment Group, despite a rocky IPO a year ago, has a powerful real estate arm that could own loan origination and servicing and enough assets to buy its way into the banking or investment banking business. Same for the Blackstone Group.

Capital flows a lot more fluidly around the globe these days. Expect consolidation to start now. The real winners on Wall Street will be the ones with huge stockpiles of capital who listen to the market, and who are fleet of foot enough to smell out and deploy their capital creating instruments that global growth companies need, rather than false profits from eating their own sausage.

The Big Five?: Goldman CitiSachs, House of Morgan, Bear of America, Fortress Lehman Lynch and Blackstone Suisse.

Let Freedom Ring Around the World

I Have a Dream, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Each MLK Day I like to take the time to read Dr. King's speech. I think it's pretty extraordinary. I also like to take the time to consider what Dr. King would be campaigning for today were he alive. While I think there are so many domestic issues he might choose to influence I think he would look around the world, then look back at where we have come in the U.S. in the past 40 or so years. I think he might hope that some of the freedom that has undeniably rung from the slopes of Cali to the molehills of Mississippi might ring in the jungles of Africa to the sands of Saudi.

525,600 minuets

Rent - Broadway - Theater - New York Times

As I read this headline instantaly the number of minutes in a year come to me, though I think cups of coffee are a better way to count a year gone by. Rent will close on Broadway.

Nine hundred thirty thousand, one hundred eighty minutes.

That’s how you measure the total running time “Rent” will have played on Broadway when, as the producers said on Tuesday, it closes after its evening performance on June 1, making it the seventh-longest-running Broadway show in history.

But the length of its run is not nearly as significant as the kind of show it was. An East Village rock version of Puccini’s opera “La Bohème,” “Rent” brought a youthful energy — and young theatergoers — to Broadway, to a degree not seen since “Hair.” It also brought with it a real-life story so affecting that it would have overwhelmed the musical itself had the substance of the musical not been so intertwined with the story of its creation.

Double Double Torrent Trouble

The Swedes Come Down Hard On The Pirate Bay

Pirate Bay is a website that serves up "torrents." If you know what a torrent is you get it. If you don't, you probably should. Supposedly, bitTorrent traffic (the protocol, like web traffic, or IM traffic) make up nearly 50% of all Internet data transfer? bitTorrent is why Chinatown can bring you the freshest movies for 5 bucks a DVD. Copyrights just ain't what they used to be with the web, we all know that, but so much more influential to all of this is bitTorrent.

So the media companies drive the government to crack down on the infringement and go after the guys serving up the "torrents" which are used by would be pirates to connect to peers and get their new release or the entire discography of Billy Joel. But to me, it's like the drug problem, go after the pushers all you like, but at the end of the day, Johnny is going to get his fix somehow. Big media might need to change the way it thinks about content control, distribution, and how advertising needs to change.

Curious? www.utorrent.com and then to www.mininova.org

Scott Van Pelt's Commencement Speach

2007 Winter Commencement: Scott Van Pelt transcript

Scott Van Pelt of ESPN fame had a bunch to share with the December 07 Wisconsin grads. I think he does a great job of first identifying with the grads and then sharing a great message about the application of our greatest, and most scarce resource, time.

Inspirational Leadership

Obama’s Iowa speech: The Difference btw. A Tactician and A Leader « FoundRead

Found and Read looks at the Obama and Clinton Iowa speeches from the perspective of leadership. Reading the analysis of Hillary the tactician and Obama the Inspirer.

Article: Don't Sweat the Small Stuff

Brazilian Lessons for 2008 - New York Times

After a December hiatus from the blogger I think this Cohen piece is a nice way to ring in the New Year as he details all the little things that can irritate you and then shove them away by looking at the Brazilian prosperity. I think I'll have to head down that way to see what he is talking about.

Happy New Year!