Media and the Web


My friend and former colleague Arnon Mishkin has an excellent white paper on why it's so difficult for content providers to make money on the web. As newspapers die all around us, it's not clear what (if any) business model can sustain large newsrooms and staffs.

Capital Owns Both Parties.

A senior strategist at one of the major Wall Street investment banks once said to me, in 2004, that it didn't matter to the financial services industry who won the presidential election; capital owned both parties and both parties would essentially do its bidding. He didn't say this boastfully.  He said it as a matter of fact.  This view is well argued here.

A Failure of Securitization?

Paul Krugman argues that securitization has proven to be a failure and a dishonest one at that. Specifically, he says:

But the wizards were frauds, whether they knew it or not, and their magic turned out to be no more than a collection of cheap stage tricks. Above all, the key promise of securitization — that it would make the financial system more robust by spreading risk more widely — turned out to be a lie. Banks used securitization to increase their risk, not reduce it, and in the process they made the economy more, not less, vulnerable to financial disruption. 

Read the whole thing.

What A Game.


The World Baseball Classic produced a spectacular final game. Japan emerged victorious, 5-3 in ten innings, after South Korea tied it up at 3-3 in the bottom of the ninth. MLB TV, which launched this winter and provided great coverage of the WBC, is off to a great start.