Obama's views on religion and politics

A somewhat long speech (40 minutes) but good to see how he doesn't try to polarize and divide, but tries to engage the issue head on in a reconciliatory manner:

International Philosophy

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan. My question is, what on earth was Beckenbauer doing? Fancy footwork by the Greeks! ;)

More Than Ever, It Pays to Be the Top Executive - Mergers, Acquisitions, Venture Capital, Hedge Funds -- DealBook - New York Times

The Dealbook link and the NY Times link.

The money quote from the Dealbook article:

But all the attention on chief executives as business superstars raises new questions. In a report published last year, Moody’s Investors Service said it would start taking into account the difference in pay within an executive team in its bond ratings.

“It raises issues of key-person risk and of whether the C.E.O. has too much authority,” Mark Watson, managing director of the corporate governance group at Moody’s, told The Times. “We are rating the company, not the person. A bus might come by and knock the person over.”

Emphasis mine. Well, I guess the intuition is compensation is probably an indicator of relative power wielded by the CEO vs number 3 executive. If it is a good indicator, and Moody's starts factoring that into their credit assessments, then it may encourage self-regulation. However, what's to stop the escalation of pay for number 2 and number 3 to keep up with the Joneses or just to work around the system?

New look Google Finance buggy

Apparently the front page of Google Finance is introducing a "recent quotes" section. However, ABN Amro shows up with a market cap of a quadrillion very large negative number!

Best and Worst WiFi Hotels 2007

The best and the worst Wifi Hotels 2007. You'd think with the prices that you pay to stay at some of these hotels, they'd throw in WiFi for free i.e. include their infrastructure costs into the room rates. Take my stay at the InterContinental The Barclay in NYC for example, free WiFi in the lobby, but pay if you want it in your room. Why stinge just because the Marriott across the road is doing likewise? Is there a study somewhere that shows a greater uptake of rooms with free WiFi for business travellers?

Private-Equity Firms Stock Up On Seasoned Executive Talent

Private-Equity Firms Stock Up On Seasoned Executive Talent

When you're looking at the luminaries of the likes of David Calhoun, Jack Welch and Lou Gerstner being the advisors or the executives-in-residence (that's the understatement of the year!) on board of these PE firms, is it any wonder that such huge buyouts are occurring every other day?

First Things First

Some house-keeping is in order here:

• This blog needs a more elegant design.
  
• I need to get my feeds organized - Some of these RSS feeds have too much noise!
  
• I also need to experiment with some feed aggregators to remove duplicate entries.