Eubie's notes

Wired: Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street — In the mid-’80s, Wall Street turned to the quants—brainy financial engineers—to invent new ways to boost profits. Their methods for minting money worked brilliantly… until one of them devastated the global economy.

Calculated Risk: Fed: Delinquency Rates Increased Sharply in Q4 — Commercial real estate delinquencies are rising rapidly, and are at the highest rate since Q2 ’94 (as delinquency rates declined following the S&L crisis).

WSJ: Employers Hit Salaried Staff With Furloughs

WSJ: Defaults by Franchisees Soar as the Recession Deepens — Some franchise brands had loan default rates of more than 40%.

WSJ: So, You Want to Be an Entrepreneur — We spoke with entrepreneurship researchers, academics and psychologists to come up with a list of questions you should ask yourself before making a big leap.

NY Times: The Index Funds Win Again — A new study provides evidence to invest in simple, plain-vanilla index funds, whose low fees often lead to better net returns.

Using information from a federal lawsuit and additional reporting, the Charlotte Business Journal has taken a detailed look at that one bet — called a credit-default swap, which is similar to an insurance policy. The broad sweep of entanglements in that $10 million deal opens a window into the complex world of exotic Wall Street finance, illustrating what has happened in the national and world economies on a much larger scale.

ReadWriteWeb: Stimulus Spend Data Coming via Feeds

ReadWriteWeb: The Next Node on the Net: Your Car!

Bloomberg: Bond Trading Highest Since ‘07 as Credit Freeze Thaws

Corporate bond trading is accelerating after the recession pushed investment-grade yields to 9.3 percent in October, the highest in 17 years, according to data compiled by Merrill Lynch & Co. Investors are betting yields are high enough to compensate for defaults that Moody’s Investors Service forecast will rise to 16.4 percent by November, the highest since the Great Depression and about three times the current rate.

One thing I’m enjoying about geocaching is the cleverness of those making the treasures for the rest of us to find. This one is a good example. Here’s what I was looking for:

And here’s how it was prepared for geocaching:

from Dshort.com

WSJ: The Day the Muzak Died: Remembering a Soundtrack to Life — I can remember the precise moment when Muzak first pierced my awareness, letting in the notion of an adult universe in which the cool and the uncool do perpetual battle.

WSJ: Parents Give Up Facebook for Lent — As Lent approaches, some parents are mulling a choice they’d have once seen as preposterous: A Facebook fast — not for their teens but for themselves.

Calculated Risk: U.S. Vehicle Miles Driven Off 3.6% in 2008

Chris Brogan: How Not to Market on Twitter and Build Blog Posts Like Building Blocks

Atlanta Business Chronicle: Carter: No comparison between Great Depression and today

“There is no comparison to the Great Depression and where we are now,” he said. “The Great Depression was much more severe. Right now, we have 7 percent unemployment. In the Great Depression, it was four times that. Back then, there was no money.”

All Things Digital: Google’s Plan To Save Newspapers: Make Them Look Better

All Things Digital’s conclusion: I think that the best place for newspapers to start is by cutting costs and generating more revenue. But maybe I’m missing something. Would a better-designed New York Times site make you more likely to, say, pay for a subscription to the New York Times? Let me know.

WSJ: Local Web-Ad Market Cools Down — Growth in the local-ad market is expected to shrink, challenging the ad and media-buying shops that rely on the local Internet market.

Time: 25 Best Blogs 2009 – TIME

BoingBoing: NYPD’s enforcement of non-existent subway photo-ban costing taxpayers a fortune in lawsuits

Business First of Columbus: Fed exec: Recession rewriting rules of recovery

Michael Hyatt: 7 Ways to Keep Your Spirit Up in a Down Economy

WSJ: Ode to Joystick: Downloading Titles Without Leaving the Sofa — Just as sales of music, movies and television shows have gone online, videogame sales are now headed onto the Internet, too.

Washington Post: Economy Strains Under Weight of Unsold Items — The unsold cars and trucks piling up at dealerships and assembly lines as consumers cut back and auto companies scramble for federal aid are just one sign of a major problem hurting the economy and only likely to get worse.

All Things Digital: MySpace’s Google Gravy Train Set to Stop Next Year

Midway through next year, Google’s $900 million, 3.5-year search advertising deal with News Corp. and MySpace expires. What are the odds that Rupert Murdoch’s social network gets anything close to that with a new contract?

Very, very low.

TechCrunch:Survey Of Insular Social Media Elite Says: Twitter Is Better Than Facebook For Businesses — Half the reason I like this is the headline

TechCrunch:CardPricer Finds There Is More Money Selling Baseball Card Data Than Selling Baseball Cards

TechCrunch:Tech Layoffs Surge to 300,000

Update from TechCrunch: Facebook Backtracks Under Community Pressure, Goes Back To Old ToS (For Now) and Wired:Let’s Learn From Facebook’s Terms-of-Service Flap — Facebook’s recent policy change regarding control over photos, notes and other data shared by its members sparks a major controversy. But it also renews debate over data ownership within online communities. Who owns your shared photos?

Michael Hyatt: 25 Things I Hate About Facebook

I was ready to deactivate my Facebook account last week. Then I heard Chris Brogan at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change Conference. He put forth a model that I really liked.

To paraphrase, he said that your blog is your “homebase.” This is where you ultimately direct people. On the other hand, services like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. are “outposts.” The purpose of an outpost is to connect with people that otherwise wouldn’t find your homebase.

Rexblog: This may be the hippest recession ever

AP: Charlotte in same predicament as Wall Street — the city is losing thousands of jobs and an unquantifiable amount of prestige. Residents who invested heavily in the banks have seen their wealth dissipate and lifestyles change radically. Last fall when the stocks of Bank of America and Wachovia were taking their first drops people it was almost an open discussion on what great buys these looked like. The stocks kept falling though.

WSJ: GM to Offer Two Choices: Bankruptcy or More Aid — Would GM reorganizing through bankruptcy be as scary as GM wants us to believe?

NY Times: Novelties: Bringing Wind Turbines to Ordinary Rooftops

MarketWatch: S&P heads to first quarter ever of negative earnings — “This is the worst; after the sixth quarter of negative growth, it will be the first quarter ever of negative earnings,” said Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst, at Standard & Poor’s.

TechCrunch: As The Economy Sours, LinkedIn’s Popularity Grows

NY Times: Ailing Banks May Require More Aid to Keep Solvent — But without a cure for the problem of bad assets, the credit crisis that is dragging down the economy will linger, as banks cannot resume the ample lending needed to restart the wheels of commerce. The answer, say the economists and experts, is a larger, more direct government role than in the Treasury Department’s plan outlined this week.

TechCrunch: Laugh All You Want, But The Microsoft Store Could Be Great and All Things Digital: Department of Déjà Vu: Last Microsoft Retail Store Foray Was a Bust

WSJ: Jenny’s Famous Number Lives On — the number in Tommy Tutone’s famous tune still lives.