Four bits of, uhm, news from yesterday.
Footnoted.org Bought Out. First, word came of a buyout proposal from footnoted.org, the well-known website where Michelle Leder reports on executive pay and perks often buried away in their financial disclosures. Apparently, footnoted has been purchased by Microsoft’s public relations firm. Under the terms of the deal Michelle will enjoy many of the perks she formerly reported on.
“In addition to…an undisclosed cache of cash, I was able to secure unlimited access to Waggener Edstrom’s corporate jet for the rest of my life, office space in Olympic Tower and the requisite tax gross-up,” Leder says.

Our Favorite Yalie Is Not Hungry. Up in New Haven, the student body is having trouble adjusting to some drastic changes in the food service menu. One Yale student, however, is taking the changes in stride. “I should have no problem providing for myself because I’m a fully licensed agronomist and a master of ancient Tibetan irrigation techniques,” Aleksey Vayner told the Yale Herald. The paper goes on to reports that “Vayner also stated that the act of writing a ‘gendered perspective on the Holocaust’ gives him a unique mental preparation for facing the privations ahead.”
CEO Bill of Rights. Meanwhile, over at Motley Fool, they’ve discovered a government reform campaign that even DealBreaker might get behind: sticking up for the rights of those CEOs.
“We’re proud to announce that we’ve been working tirelessly with key members of the U.S. Congress to draft H.R. 401, The CEO Bill of Rights Act of 2007. This is important and necessary legislation because America’s CEOs are under attack. Our corporate leaders — all in, making a precious few hundred times the average worker today — are being labeled greedy, self-dealing scoundrels. And who stands up on their behalf?” the Fools ask.
We just wish that they hadn’t announced this yesterday. People are totally going to think it’s a joke.
The New ‘Katie Couric’ Rule. Finally, the SEC announced on Friday that it was expanding the proposed ‘Katie Couric’ rule which would require companies to disclose their top three earners. More disclosure equal more knowledge for markets, right? So why not expand it to the top 100.
“From readers of People Magazine to those who are now assembling their fantasy baseball league rosters, regular Americans will appreciate the ready access they’ll have to this new data,” SEC spokeswoman April Fuhrust says in a press release.
“It will show compensation levels not only for Wall Street traders but also movie stars, professional athletes and network anchors,” she says.
SEC economist “Anita Moore-Profit” explains the metrics the SEC used to settle on the 100 number. “It’s a round number. Something people can remember,” Moore-Profit said.
The full SEC press release after the jump.
Breaking news: Footnoted.org sold! [Footnoted.org]
University-wide YSFP cancelled starting Fall ’07 [Yale Herald]

The Motley Fool Pushes CEO Bill of Rights Legislation [fool.com]
SEC’s April Fuhrst attempts lighten regulation [Financial Times on MSNBC]

Continue reading »

Your favorite “Wall Street Tabloid” gets mentioned in the most recent issue of GQ. Apparently we’re Karen from The Office’s favorite blog.


Are You A Pam Guy or Karen Guy? [LifeInTheOffice]

We do most of our reading of the financial press online. Which means we occasionally miss little gems like the TradeKing advertisement above. Fortunately, CopyRanter picked up on it for us. He also suggests some alternative ad copy:

• I got more Liquidity than a Golden Shower Gang Bang.
• I got bigger Gaps than a 90-year-old Hooker.
• I got more Volume than a 16-year-old Peter North.

…and THAT’S why they call him SilverFox11 [CopyRanter]

We have a rule against dating people who are too clever or funny. We like to be the bright ones who make everyone smile and laugh. We want to date someone good looking and wealthy enough to buy the drinks while we tell the funny stories. That’s how we feel about business columnists too, which is why we almost couldn’t bring ourselves to read Mark Gilbert’s updating of the old jokes defining various political systems according to how they deal with your “two cows.” He’s gone and applied it to various aspects of modern finance. So we hate him. And we swear we’d be this funny too, if we were just writing one column a week.
Here are a few of our favorites. Feel free to contribute your own “two cow” jokes in the comments section below.

Leveraged Buyouts
You have two cows. You come home from the fields one day to find Henry Kravis chatting to your spouse at the dining-room table. Two days later, you have no spouse, no farm, and no table. Two guys the size of sumo wrestlers have saddled up the cows and are riding them around the farmyard.

Hedge Funds
You have two cows. A guy in an open-necked shirt drives up in his Bentley and offers to take care of them for you in return for a year’s supply of steak and 50 percent of their milk. They won’t be allowed to leave his compound for two years.
Six months later, you have half a cow, producing sour milk. “You have to be willing to lose rump today to get rib-eye tomorrow,” the hedge-fund guy mumbles through a mouthful of sirloin and champagne.

Pension-Fund Management
You have two cows. How boring is that? You pay a month’s supply of milk to a consultant, who advises you to sell one cow and buy two aardvarks instead. The aardvarks die. The consultant charges you four months of your (now reduced) milk supply and advises you to sell half of your remaining cow and buy a wombat. The wombat dies. The consultant charges eight months of milk for a copy of his new report, “Two-Cow Strategies for Alleviating the Impending Pensions Crisis.”

Russian Energy
You have two cows. Comrade, those cows are an environmental hazard. We suggest you hand one of them over to us.

Credit-Default Swaps
You have two cows. You buy insurance against them dying, and tuck the contracts into the middle of that tottering pile of documentation on your desk. One dark night, Henry Kravis sneaks off with your cows. By the time you track down the paperwork, your now worthless contracts have expired.

Interest-Rate Swaps
You have two cows. You pledge one of them to me as collateral in a swap for some of my pigs. I pledge the cow to my neighbor as collateral in a swap for some of his sheep. He pledges the cow to his cousin as collateral in a swap for some of his cousin’s goats. Better pray the livestock market doesn’t crash and we have to try and round up that cow.

If Hedge Funds Kept Cows, Your Milk Would Go Sour [Bloomberg]

Copyranter has uncovered this advertisement for “My M&Ms for Business”–a service where you can get the coated chocolate candies personalized with messages. The “clean out your desk” and “poison pill” messages are pretty good, but we’re sure you can do better. Here’s the website where you can design your own. The messages have to be pretty short to fit on an M&M. But whoever sends in a screenshot of the best M&M message will receive a volume from DealBreaker’s increasingly extensive library of business books.
M&M’s “for business” hard to swallow. [Copyranter]

A very short film about a melancholic investment banker reflecting on his life.