Digital Archive....

"All we need is 250 votes..." Seth's Blog This is cruel marketing. If you're like me, you've gotten dozens of emails over the last week about a promotion that Chase and Living Social are running in which they're promising local businesses that work within their community a chance to win a grant for $250,000. The emails almost always have the line, All we need is a vote from 250 kind friends and supporters like you. Here's why it's doubly dangerous. First, clearly the organization doesn't actually get a grant in exchange for only getting 250 online votes. Hey, 250 online votes won't even get you a pack of chewing gum these days. No, all the votes do is make you eligible to apply for the grant. And yet the organization, perhaps a worthy one, is now spamming thousands of people offering this sliver of hope, all in rush to get 250 votes, even though the chances that anything will happen are perilously close to z...

Who Wants Big Banks? The Baseline Scenario By James Kwak Thirty years ago, Merton Miller, one of the giants of modern finance, was at a banking conference when a banker said he couldn't raise more capital by selling stock because that would be too expensive: his stock was selling for only 50 percent of book value. Merton responded , "Book values have nothing to do with the cost of equity capital. That's just the market's way of saying: We gave those guys a dollar, and they managed to turn it into 50 cents."* Now that's what a growing number of sophisticated investors are saying about today's banking behemoths, especially JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley. As Christine Harper reported in Bloomberg , stock in all of these banks is trading at or considerably below book value, while more focused competitors such as Wells Fargo and U.S. Bancorp trade for well above book value. A b...

Stiglitz: Bank Practices Have Weakened Our Economy The Big Picture Joseph Stiglitz, former World Bank chief economist and author of the 'Price of Inequality' told CNBC, "The scandal that has broken out in the UK (Libor) illustrates one of the main themes, that a lot of inequality especially income at the top doesn't come from people really making our economy work better," Fri 29 Jun 12 | 05:00 AM ET Sent with Reeder  (verzonden vanaf tablet)