September 2010 Archives

Damien Paletta:

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker scrapped a prepared speech he had planned to deliver at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago on Thursday, and instead delivered a blistering, off-the-cuff critique leveled at nearly every corner of the financial system.


Bloomberg News
Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker
Standing at a lectern with his hands in his pockets, Volcker moved unsparingly from banks to regulators to business schools to the Fed to money-market funds during his luncheon speech.

He praised the new financial overhaul law, but said the system remained at risk because it is subject to future “judgments” of individual regulators, who he said would be relentlessly lobbied by banks and politicians to soften the rules.

“This is a plea for structural changes in markets and market regulation,” he said at one point.

Here are his views on a variety of topics.

Michael Hraba:

What does it all mean? (that link is a funny Youtube clip, as a palette cleanser).

Depending on how this one goes, I think this is my second to last or last post *ever* haranguing on, or thinking this deeply about, Facebook. Blue in the Face makes one look crazy, especially if no one is listening... and beyond the simple fact that I may be wrong, and happily eat humble crow as I become more aware..... I do see some meaningful interaction on Facebook. It takes some time, and for me it took *opening* my network. This concept of a "closed" network seems bizarre to me, and it limited real, meaningful interaction, the likes of which I remember from IRC or topical boards.

At the time of posting 9,084,488 people "liked" the Oreo fanpage. In the above, .0005586 / .05586% liked (a little more than one twentieth of one percent or 1/20%) and .0003344 / .03344% commented, the second posting was .0001671 / .01671% liked and .0000216 / .00216% commented.

I think you get the point.... even the most successful brand pages are creating interaction and real community involvement that is such a small percentage of their supposed community, we have to ask how this actually works?

I understand it's a distribution channel, and you need to be available to guests and consumers that wish to interact with you on their own terms in their own comfort zones.... but numbers this small are almost impossible to fathom. The way people are prostelytized by brands, I, personally, would imagine interaction levels much higher... at least into whole percentage points. Is this Facebook's fault? Is this something greater involving the crisis of perception in social media?

Karl Case:

This financial crisis has made us all too aware that we live in a Catch-22 world: the performance of the housing market drives the economy, and the performance of the economy drives the housing market. But housing has perhaps never been a better bargain, and sooner or later buyers will regain faith, inventories will shrink to reasonable levels, prices will rise and we'll even start building again. The American dream is not dead -- it's just taking a well-deserved rest.

The television business, it seems, is learning what the predawn buyers at the fish market already know: starting the day earlier can be a competitive advantage.

Stations in Boston, New York, Washington and other cities are adding 4:30 a.m. newscasts this month, joining a backward march that started in earnest a few years ago. And those are not even the earliest. One station in New York, WPIX, will move up its start time to 4 a.m. on Sept. 20.

In catering to the earliest of the early risers, stations are reacting to the behavior patterns that are evident in the Nielsen ratings. Simply put, Americans are either staying awake later or waking up earlier -- and either way, they are keeping the television on.

In the past 15 years, the number of households that have a TV set on at 4:30 has doubled, to 16 percent this year from 8 percent in 1995. At 11:30 p.m., by comparison, when most local newscasts end, 44 percent of televisions are on, up 10 percent from the levels 15 years ago.