May 2008

Yahoo! is an acronym, it stands for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle." How apt a description of the questionable handling of Microsoft's offer by Yahoo! chief executive Jerry Yang and company. Yahoo! bailed when Microsoft wouldn't meet its demand to increase the bid to $37 a share, saying the offer undervalued Yahoo! Here's what gets me. Being an accounting geek, I like digging ... read more

The doom and gloomers are out in force, but don't be fooled by their blinkered concretism when it comes to the health of the US economy. Listen I'm a realist, I'm no Pollyanna, I know there's acute pain out there and that this economy may be in the weeds for a few years now. We won't know whether the recent 0.6% GDP quarterly growth rate gets adjusted downward for a few months from now, so we ... read more

*Ratings of Bear Stearns were listed as investment grade on the day the firm collapsed. *Asset-backed securities loaded with subprime loans were uniformly given triple-A ratings up until late last summer, despite the fact that the housing market had already started turning south months before. Then last fall, the credit rating agencies knocked down within weeks to junk status almost half of ... read more

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn has assembled his dream team of a new slate of directors to replace Yahoo's entire board, after Jerry Yang and his cadre at the Internet giant punted on Microsoft's sweet offer to buy the company. But a dream team of new directors won't be enough. Icahn faces an uphill battle doing what he thinks needs to be done by knocking some sense into Yahoo! at the ... read more

Could Yahoo! survive as a stand alone company, much less a web portal? Getting the answer to this question now on the lips of  Wall Street traders, and likely billionaire Carl Icahn who has sunk tens of millions of dollars into Yahoo!, shows how weak Yahoo!'s business is as it appears to be striving to go it alone and instead tries to strike an ad partnership with Google. Microsoft now ... read more