May 2008

"I am writing this letter to explain my unfortunate set of circumstances that have caused me to become delinquent on my mortgage. I have done everything in my power to make ends meet but unfortunately I have fallen short and would like you to consider working with me to modify my loan. My number one goal is to keep my home that I have lived in for sixteen years, remodeled with my own sweat ... 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

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

*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

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