Apple, the iPhone, and the Corporate World

Ahead of the annual Apple Expo trade show, held in September in Paris, I thought now would be a good time to reflect on the Mac platform’s potential in the corporate world in general, and financial services in particular, as the buzz around the iPhone keeps increasing.
Perceived primarily as a consumer product, the Mac’s traditional [...]

Cloud Computing Crashes at Amazon

On demand computing, under a variety of brand names, is a hot topic again in financial services, in part because city centre locations favoured by banks are running out of space and power for data centres. IBM, HP and Sun have offerings, but so do companies from outside financial services, such as Amazon. Slight problem [...]

Banking Becomes Boring. Better?

With banks having lost half a dozen years’ profits since last August you might believe headlines which suggest that they are prepared to scale back business.
Ah, but that does miss a key point. The banks may have lost, but the bankers didn’t lose past salary and bonus pay.
So while it is inspiring to read that [...]

Starbucks Latte 10x Price of Oil

In a bit of writing that could change the image of The Dismal Science, Economist Todd Buchholz in the WSJ notes that Americans seems to be living well despite headlines forecasting the next Great Depression (This is our version of looking back nostalgically to rough times – sort of like gaining Londoners longing for a [...]

Ups and Downs of the Wine Trade In London

“Champagne sales have slipped at the Wine Library, a shop on the fringe of the financial district, at a time when neighborhood businesses have little to toast,” reports the WSJ’s Letter from the City.
In another sign of the grim economics of downsizing, wine sales appear to be getting a boost as City types buy gifts [...]

Tyranny of the Greens?

WSJ economics writer Stephen Moore suggests environmentalism is a way to bully ordinary citizens, noting that San Francisco garbage collectors could levy fines up to $1,000 for recyclables mixed with garbage improperly.
Looks like America is catching up with the UK here. But he does have an interesting statistical twist noting that Daniel Benjamin, an economist, [...]

Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal is More Interesting

No Page 3 girls, but the Journal has become somewhat livelier under Rupert Murdoch. Word was he planned to cut the length of some of the long feature stories, which had occasionally verged on parodies of themselves.
But what I have enjoyed is the way some topics are covered two or three times in different sections [...]

Congress + Finance =Tradeoffs & Payoffs

Lawrence Lindsey, former advisor to the U.S. president for economic policy, either read the 700 pages of the Fannie-Freddie bailout or had a staff person do it – more than any member of Congress has done, he suspects.
In the Wall Street Journal he offers a devastating critique of what happens when Congress has its way. The [...]

Chicago Trading Firms Getting CVs from New York Traders

Chicago is definitely the Second City for most people working on Wall Street, as suggested by that famous New Yorker cover showing a native’s view of the world west of the Hudson as an alien wasteland.
But the Chicago Tribune says that the city’s futures markets have flourished, in part because they don’t do OTC trades [...]