PHILADELPHIA–The New York Yankees failed to end the World Series last night with a victory over the Philadelphia Phillies. For the superstitious among you, especially the Yankee fans, there’s an extraordinarily stupid “study” that says you should be extra fearful of a Phillies comeback in the series.
Since 1930, when the Yankees have taken home the Commissioner’s Trophy, the U.S. gross domestic product has grown an average of 5% in the following year. On those exceedingly rare occasions that the Phillies are the last team standing, things don’t go so well: In 1981, a year after the Phils’ first-ever championship after 97 years of futility, the economy grew a paltry 2.9% amidst sky-high interest rates and 7.5% unemployment. This year, the reigning champs have presided over what seems likely to be negative economic growth.
Here’s still more reason to root for the Bronx Bombers: The only other time these two teams have met in the Fall Classic, in 1950, the Yanks swept the Phils, leading to a prosperous 7.7% increase in GDP in 1951.
Sports
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Bear Stearns
The Bear Stearns Name Lives On…At Least On The Lacrosse Field!
By John CarneyA few weeks after it was revealed that Bear Stearns would be acquired by JP Morgan Chase, the Wall Street Journal’s Kelly Evans reported on the unwritten fate of Bear Stearns champion lacrosse team.
“Among the remaining questions hanging over Bear Stearns Cos. is this: What happens to its lacrosse team?” Evans wrote. “Bear Stearns players are trying to keep the team together even though the firm.”
Last year the Bear Stearns team defeated rival Lehman Brothers in triple overtime. It followed this with an upset victory over Credit Suisse to the inaugural Gotham Lacrosse tournament for the Wall Street league. Now Bear Stearns has been extinguished in the world of finance, while Lehman Brothers faces challenges that have forced it to go an extraordinary fund raising spree.
The first pages of the post-acquisition fate of the Bear Stearns team will be written tomorrow. For more details, follow the jump.
Craig Robinson has gone from trading bonds for Morgan Stanley to coaching basketball at Oregon State, widely considered to be one of the toughest jobs in college basketball. The job was offered to at least three other top coaches before Robinson finally agreed to leave his spot as head coach at Brown.
Robinson graduated from Princeton, where he was a basketball star, and got an MBA in finance from the business school at the University of Chicago. After a stint at playing professional basketball in Europe, Robinson was a bond trader at Continental Bank, Morgan Stanley Dean Whitter and Loop Capital Markets, a minority owned investment banking firm.
Turning around Oregon State’s team will be a challenge for Robinson, perhaps harder than a bond trader trying to dig his way out of a portfolio heavily invested in adjustable-rate mortgages. Robinson, however, comes from a family with grand ambitions. His brother-in-law is Barack Obama.
The Unlikely Candidate [SI.com]
As regular readers know, we’re big fans of celebrity stock picking. This afternoon’s little spark of sunshine comes from the news that former Raider and Heisman Trophy winner, Tim Brown, will have a stock-picking column on at TheStreet.com. True to form, he is picking stocks like a slightly addled sportscaster, highly impressed by a team that he thinks sounds confident going into the game. He even has a catch phrase: “Keep moving the chains!”
Booya, Tim. After the jump, we reveal Tim’s first pick.
We’re generally amused by the efforts of Fox Business to package anything and everything as a business story (“The Britney Economy!” “The Business of Blow Jobs! More Time Effective Than Using Your Hand = Bigger Profits For You!” and so on and so forth). Like, we laugh at the clips and want to shake these idiots. But today, for the very first time, after watching a segment on Rock-Paper-Scissors, and other “non-traditional” sports like pillow fighting, all I want to do is give someone at that network a hug, for RPS is my all-time favorite game/activity/pastime. I don’t even care that the anchor refers to it as a couch potato sport, though I would point out that FBN probably shouldn’t knock couch potato sports, since that is the only reason the 6,300-odd people tune in to the network. Kind of the business news equivalent of watching Nascar for the car wrecks, except they happen all the time here.
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Sports
Erin Burnett: “One of the fiercest rivalries in college sports, and let us tell you, we are not fair and balanced on this story.”
By Bess Levin
Eph you, purple cow. We always liked Trish better, anyway. (Nice use of the Fox tagline, though.)
College Gameday Goes DIII [CNBC.com]
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Compensation
Blowing Your Mind: Grossly Overpaid Bros Go To Bat For Equally Overcompensated Bro in Another Line Of Work
By Bess Levin
Thank god, the money managers have weighed in and decided: A-Rod was entirely justified in opting out of the final three seasons of his contract with the Yankees. According to Daniel Alpert, a partner at Westwood Capital, a boutique investment bank in New York that specializes in mortgage and related securities, “there’s nothing cold blooded about it.” And what’s Balestra Capital founder James L. Melcher’s take on the situation? “Not only do I have no problem with it, I’m cheering him.”
Can you imagine what would happen if these guys didn’t stick together? When you’re trying to rip people off, the moral support of your peers really counts for a lot. (Investors in) Absolute Capital know what we’re talking about.
Rodriguez Not Greedy by Standard of Wall St. [NYT]
Isn’t it nice to know that Stanley O’Neal didn’t have any trouble fitting in time to play golf while his firm was busy losing billions of dollars? Bespoke Investors notes that while the MER chief may be horrible at making money, he’s actually got the best handicap of all his peers, which can probably be attributed to the fact that he’s apparently a fan of the Jimmy Cayne style of management, wherein you play games instead of coming into the office, and has plenty of time to practice. Pretty cool that in the very near future, he’ll be able to stop faking sick whenever he wants to hit the links, seeing as how he’s probably going to be unemployed.
Stan O’neal Gets Better Under Pressure [Bespoke Investment Group]
The SEC implied yesterday afternoon that Dwight “Sean” Jones, former defensive lineman for the Raiders, Oilers, and Packers blocked regulators from examining the business records of his investment advisory firm, Amaroq. Jones allegedly evaded requests for information, and then told the SEC that the records were no longer available, because
(There’s nothing else to add, because this story is hilarious as is. But maybe just don’t give your money to football players-cum-money managers, with the exception of OJ Simpson. He got away with murder. Investing should be easy, by comparison.)
Former NFL Star Sacked By Feds [New York Post]
Umbro, the sponsor of six English Premiership teams and the majority of suburban gym classes in the 1980s and 1990s, reported steep declines in sales and profit, sending shares down 17% today in London. Pretax profit for the first half of FY07 dropped 45% on a 49% drop in sales over the same period last year. Umbro also makes England’s national team jersey, but with England currently blowing it in Euro 2008 qualifying, Umbro’s prospects continue to be bleak in 2008.
With the rise of competing sports apparel manufacturers like Under Armour and the penetration of the major shoe companies into the athletic apparel space, the real hit to Umbro is the decline of the brand’s use in suburban gym uniforms. Realizing that Umbros are often embarrassingly short, and see-through in most colors, suburban kids started concealing full-on views of their tighty-whiteys from sexually ambiguous gym teachers by making the switch to another pair of (ours were red) colored shorts in increasing numbers. While the creepiness of the mass bend-over that is a mysteriously timed “posture and spinal cord examination” has decreased, Umbro’s sales have suffered.
Besides, Under Armour constricts blood flow and accentuates your middle-school pythons, like that ad with that kid leading that chant on a school bus. That kid scares the crap out of us. We still like to imagine that without donning a ridiculously tight marketing gimmick the dude would have spaghetti arms that barely find their way out of a large white T-shirt with the kid’s name on it. Also, nothing says, “my dad is living vicariously through my Little League leading 11 doubles, unaware that his genes will render me relatively un-athletic after puberty” than the latest sports equipment.
Umbro is aiming for the bottom half of the net, attempting to be at least the number three soccer brand in every market in which it operates under its new strategic plan which is to sell more stuff.
Umbro’s profit drops, warns of tough sales [MarketWatch]
Now that Labor Day has passed, it’s officially time to think about real sports – college and pro football, NBA pre-season and baseball pennant races (baseball up until Labor Day is merely a way to pass time). Moving to the top of the worst division in baseball (which I say begrudgingly, being a Pittsburgh Pirates fan, if that’s been possible the last 13 losing seasons), is the Chicago Cubs, 1.5 games up on the Brewers, also barely over .500. When the Cubs blow it somehow, either in the regular or post-season, new owners will seek different losing strategies, from Dan Primack’s PE Week Wire:
A very interesting M&A battle could soon heat up on the North Side of Chicago. Various news reports say that if/when Sam Zell finishes buying Tribune Co., he will put the Cubbies up for sale. Two of the expected bidders are Madison Dearborn chief John Canning and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. A contrast in styles, to say the least…
We’ve heard the Cuban rumblings (which is even more annoying in that he’d probably buy the Pirates if they were smart enough to sell), but the John Canning rumors are relatively newer. Does it really matter?
By the way, does anyone know the current whereabouts of former Hewitt Associates employee and infamous Moises Alou interferer Steve Bartman? Is he still in the scintillating world of BPO consulting? Did he ever take the Florida asylum offered by Jeb Bush?
PE Week Wire
