Business & Investor Confidence
This past week we heard from Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke that the U.S. recovery would continue to be slow and uneven and that the unemployment rate would remain stubbornly high into 2012. "Of course, even as the Federal Reserve continues prudent planning for the ultimate withdrawal of extraordinary monetary policy accommodation, we also recognize that the economic outlook remains unusually uncertain," Bernanke stated. (More)

Global Brands II
In the fall of '07, my partners at Austin Ventures and I were still in the search mode to find a platform that we could acquire and grow. It was almost a year later when we zeroed in on the institutional financial sector, with a focus on asset management. In fairly short order, we acquired Asset International, The Trade, and Strategic Insight. (More)

Summer Competition
After months of turmoil in the Eurozone and the continuing environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the world was ready for some Summer Competition. Last weekend all the world turned to South Africa for the start of football's World Cup. The host South Africa played Mexico on Friday to a 1-1 tie to kick off the "beautiful game's" global tournament. At the outset we were also introduced to the vuvuzela. (More)

May Volatility
Two weeks ago in my posting, $1 Trillion Dollar Rescue Plan & a Changing of the Guard, I closed with: "This was clearly a historic week on the continent and in the United Kingdom. There is a new determination to deal with the structural issues that have left most of the countries with debt loads that the global bond markets can not support in the long run, and there is a new a resolve by these countries to put themselves on a course that will support sustainable long-term growth. The Obama administration will need to start addressing deficit reduction as well as we approach the November mid-term elections. Those of us in the private equity business will be closely watching the impact of government actions on recovering credit markets." (More)

$1 Trillion Dollar Rescue Plan & a Changing of the Guard
As we headed to JFK early on Monday morning for our BA flight to London, we learned that over the weekend the Eurozone leaders had fashioned a rescue plan that went well beyond Greece and assured the world that Spain and Portugal would not be the next dominoes to fall. Shortly thereafter both countries announced new austerity moves to further assure the world debt markets that they were serious about bringing down their debt levels as a percentage of GDP. (More)

Political Theatre & Deals
Last week Michigan Senator Carl Levin, Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Permanent Investigations, brought Goldman Sachs’ (GS) Chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein and a number of his colleagues to Washington, D.C. to hold a hearing on the fabled Abacus derivative deal. The cast from the Goldman side included Fabrice Tourre — Tourre is also known as “Fabulous Fab” in the press — who structured the transaction with input from John Paulson.  (More)

When PIIGS Fly...
We learned last week that air travel could be disrupted by volcanoes, as the Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted in Iceland and brought European air traffic to a halt. Thousands were stranded on both sides of the Atlantic. As we gradually work our way back to a normal schedule, we are learning that one of Iceland's other volcanoes, Katla, is overdue for an eruption. (More)

Eagles
Two years ago today I wrote in The Masters Tradition: “There is one weekend every spring that I clear my calendar from early afternoon until early evening, the weekend of the Masters. I find myself seduced by the beauty of the course, particularly Amen Corner, combined with the challenge it holds for the world’s best golfers and its unique traditions. There is something special at the end of this tournament when the prior year’s winner puts the Green Jacket on the new champion... (More)

Spring & the Eurozone
As we close out the first quarter of the new calendar and fiscal year, almost all businesses are finding that their year-over-year performance has improved significantly. The first quarter of '09 represented the depth of the Great Recession, when the world as we knew it unraveled before our eyes. When earnings are released for the first quarter of '10 we will see, without exception, improvements in all sectors of the business media, including those newspapers that survived the downturn. (More)

Finding the McAloo Tikki
This is a guest blog post by Jason Cassidy, Asset International’s Senior Vice President of Strategy and Development. Our Strategic Insight Global team recently published a detailed report on the rapidly growing middle class investor in emerging markets. The report describes the rapid growth in markets such as China and India and the need for asset managers looking to grow to find ways to enter these markets and to be sure to not underestimate the differences and potential obstacles these markets pose versus their home markets. (More)

Pound Sterling
With the concerns about the fiscal integrity of Greece and several other Eurozone members, the Euro has been under the most significant pressure since it was introduced as a common currency more than 8 years ago. There has been much speculation that it could fall to parity with the US dollar.  (More)

London, Winter Storms & Valuable Data
I spent the past week in London. While it was colder than normal, I missed the February blizzard that blanketed the northeast U.S. on Wednesday. Over the past several years, Mary Claire and I have managed to be in New York City for each of the major February snowstorms. This time she got to enjoy the winter wonderland without me. It was hard to gauge on this trip if the Labour Party was bouncing back in time for the spring election or if the Tories had peaked too early, and no one I spoke with seemed ready to make a prediction. (More)

The Field General
As we approach Super Sunday, most of us have had our teams bow out early. After a surprising win over the Patriots two years ago, the Giants did not even make the playoffs this year. Dallas won their first playoff game but exited the next week when they came up against Brett Favre and the Vikings. The Patriots are starting to show their age and the lack of top-quality draft picks, due to their three Super Bowl rings in the last decade, has not helped. (More)

Cool the Populist Rhetoric
The amount of populist rhetoric coming from both sides of the political aisle in the U.S. has been escalating over the past several weeks. Sarah Palin has been out on the talk show circuit promoting her book, Going Rogue, and has certainly continued her approach of appealing to her base's populist sentiment. Meanwhile, President Obama has once again renewed his attack on our banks and bankers in reaction to Senator-elect Scott Brown’s surprising victory in Massachusetts. (More)

Still the Right Position: A Second Term for Ben
With one week left in Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s first term, a sense of unease rattled the stock markets yesterday as several Democratic Senators (Boxer & Feingold) announced that they would not support President Obama’s nomination of Chairman Bernanke for a second term. I wrote "A Second Term for Ben" in late August and shortly thereafter the president nominated him for a second term. I stand by my original position: Chairman Bernanke has earned a second term. (More)

TARP Payback: Act II
As we closed out calendar year '09, our largest financial institutions were able to end a very difficult chapter of the Great Recession by paying back their TARP funds. These funds were paid back with interest and the federal government realizing an additional return through warrant coverage. This signified that our financial system was on the road to recovery. (More) (More)

The Godfather & Jobs
After a U.S. jobs report from the Labor Department showed modest gains in November, last Friday's report for December showed a loss of another 85,000 jobs. We also learned on Friday that the Eurozone's unemployment rate has now joined the U.S. at 10%+. These unemployment rates remain stubbornly high, in spite of the fact that both economies grew in the second half of '09. (More)

Looking Forward to a New Decade
As we reflect back on this year, I trust all of us are looking forward to better times in 2010. While no one is predicting a huge upswing in GDP, everyone does agree that the Great Recession is over and that this is a time of rebuilding for the global economy. (More)

One-Two Punch
I wrote several weeks ago regarding Kip McDaniel's foresight in his initial ai5000 cover story on the problems brewing in Dubai. Now we know that there were deep-seated debt problems that could only be abated by Abu Dhabi extending a $10B lifeline, with lots of strings attached. This month in the Winter Issue of ai5000, Asset International's founder Charles Ruffel opens with an editorial on the suit that California Attorney General Jerry Brown has initiated against State Street Bank. (More)

TARP Payback & Darling’s Bonus Tax
The recent news in New York has been positive for the institutional financial services sector. Two weeks ago Bank of America (BAC) surprised most analysts by announcing that they had worked out an agreement to pay back the $45B of TARP funds they needed to carry them through the Great Recession. Greg Curl, one of the internal candidates to take over from Ken Lewis as CEO, negotiated the arrangements with the government. Shortly after the announcement Bank of America sold new shares, which gave them the capital base they needed to pay back the Treasury. It is becoming clear that the government will get their desired return on the TARP funds, as they predicted. (More)

Thanksgiving '09: Act II
Last year as we prepared for Thanksgiving, the disturbing news reached us from Mumbai, India that a massacre of innocent individuals was taking place and it was focused on two very well-known international hotels, the Taj and the Oberoi, as well as the central train station and the Chabad House. The final human toll was in many ways incomprehensible and we know today that a Pakistan-based terrorist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, was responsible for the attack. (More)

Thanksgiving '09
This Thursday when we sit down to Thanksgiving dinner with our family and friends the majority of us will be thankful for surviving the Great Recession and seeing a very challenging year for the global economy come to an end. While we are cautious in our outlook for 2010, we know that the first and second quarters will show significant growth over ‘09, when we were still in free fall. (More)

Who Will Lead the Recovery?
It was reported late last week that the United Kingdom’s economy continued to contract in the third quarter. GDP was reported to be down by 0.4 percent vs. the 2nd quarter. (FT/The Lex Column October 24, 2009) This represented a record sixth consecutive quarter of contraction, the longest since World War II. It was down 5.2% from the year-earlier period. (WSJ October 24, 2009) This contrasted with the eurozone recovery, where many are forecasting GDP to improve by 0.9 percent, largely fueled by a stronger recovery in France and Germany. (More)

Guest Blog: Dealmakers Are Back
This is a guest blog post by Jason Cassidy, Asset International’s Senior Vice President of Strategy and Development. In the past few weeks we have seen the busiest IPO market all year with IPOs from high-growth companies like A123 Systems in the alternative energy sector and Shanda Games in the Chinese gaming sector. More recently, Blackstone Group announced it would take some of its investments public. Private equity and venture capital firms finally have a public exit alternative again. (More)

The Tobin Tax Proposal 2 Weeks Later: Still a Bad Idea; The Presidents Cup
I woke up Saturday morning in Blackhawk ready to focus on college football, The Presidents Cup in Harding Park and an afternoon round of golf on The Lakeside Course, where two weeks ago the LPGA held the CVS/pharmacy LPGA Challenge, which was won by Sophie Gustafson. While the morning fog was dense, I knew that the afternoon would yield a beautiful fall San Francisco/Bay Area day in the low ’70s. I brewed a special blend of morning coffee and moved to the Wall Street Journal Online. Within minutes I was greeted by the headline, Democrats Weigh Tax on Financial Transactions, by John D. McKinnon. (More)

Fall Harvest & Mad Men
Yesterday Mary Claire and I flew back to our Blackhawk home in northern California. Blackhawk sits in the East Bay at the base of Mt. Diablo, which provides the highest vista in the Bay Area. The weather in the East Bay is much closer to that in Napa and Sonoma Valleys than the weather in San Francisco. The cool morning air with gradual warming during the day, along with all the winery information I have received lately, reminded me that harvest is in full swing. (More)

The Tobin tax proposal: A Bad Idea
When I was in London several weeks ago, Lord Turner, chair of the Financial Services Authority, revived an old idea, the Tobin tax. The tax is named after the economist James Tobin, who in the early '70s proposed a tax on all currency transactions that took place across borders. He believed that this would cut down on currency speculation. (More)

Global Recovery
I returned to New York City late on Thursday evening from a week in China. My trip, as I wrote in Summer’s End, was built around SWIFT’s Sibos 2009 event in Hong Kong. It coincided with the one-year anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ filing for bankruptcy. As one looked around the exhibition hall in Hong Kong, it is clear that we are in a recovery. (More)

Guest Blog: Small Businesses Have Needs Too
This is a guest blog post by Jason Cassidy, Asset International’s Senior Vice President of Strategy and Development. The barber shop where I get my best insight on the economy, the local plumber who received many phone calls from my wife when I tried to remodel our bathroom myself, and the doctor who gets a lot of business from my 4 year old and 2 year old during cold and flu season are just 3 of the over 20 million small businesses in the U.S. with fewer than 20 employees, according to the US Census Bureau. At Asset International we have several categories of small businesses as customers. (More)

Summer's End
As we celebrate Labor Day in the Bay Area, it is clear that summer is coming to an end. I returned to Blackhawk from a week in London, where Gordon Brown and the Labour Party continue to surprise me by still surviving. It looks like Brown will make it until he must call for an election in the spring. We are evaluating several acquisitions for further expansion in London. (More)

Summer's End
As we celebrate Labor Day in the Bay Area, it is clear that summer is coming to an end. I returned to Blackhawk from a week in London, where Gordon Brown and the Labour Party continue to surprise me by still surviving. It looks like Brown will make it until he must call for an election in the spring. We are evaluating several acquisitions for further expansion in London. (More)

Guest Blog: Robert de Niro, Snoop Dogg and Chindonesia: Cross-Border Melting–Pot Movies and the Global Fund Industry
Read this guest blog post by Daniel Enskat, Strategic Insight’s Head of Global Consulting Senior Managing Director.
$250 billion in net flows to equity and fixed-income funds in the first half of 2009, the best performance for stocks in any quarter since the late 1990s and the 20th consecutive week of positive long-term mutual fund flows through mid-August 2009 helped draw investors cautiously back into investments. Especially emerging markets and Asia are described as having turned the corner to once again lead the way as a growth driver for the industry. Read the entire article...

A Second Term for Ben
In my last posting, "Goldman Sachs' Swagger," I received more feedback than usual and it was more mixed than usual, but I stand by my position that while the company's over performance has resulted in some arrogant behavior, the firm and its partners are not evil. One of the people I heard from was the famous journalist and columnist, Robert X. Cringely. (More)

Goldman Sachs' Swagger
In the July 26th issue of New York Magazine, Joe Hagan raised the question: is Goldman Sachs (GS) just extremely good at what it does or evil? This followed a July 2nd article in Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi entitled "Inside the Great American Bubble Machine." Taibbi clearly came down on the evil side and tied Goldman Sachs to creating and then exploiting bubbles like the Internet bubble and the housing bubble. This one was written with a genuinely conspiratorial tone. (More)

Recovery Part II
In my last posting, I wrote about what the B2B industry will look like as it emerges in '10 and '11 from the deep recession (B2B Media Business on the Recovery: A Sneak Preview). While I am certain that we are now in a recovery cycle, economists, pundits and others are still debating where we are with regard to the recession ending and the recovery beginning. (More)

B2B Media Business on the Recovery: A Sneak Preview
(This article was originally written for BtoB Media Business at BtoBonline.com.) We have been in the middle of the perfect storm since last September. Beginning with the demise of Lehman Brothers through February of this year, all of the markets were in free fall. The only other period that I can compare this to is after 9/11 in the fourth quarter of 2001, when the economies of the world ground to a halt and Herculean efforts were required to jump-start the world stock exchanges. While the wheels of commerce ground to a halt during both of these periods, this recession has been much deeper and cut a wider path of destruction. (More)

California Dreaming: The Sequel
We were originally planning to head to Blackhawk this week, but two very exciting transactions that we will announce shortly will keep us in New York City for the next two weeks. While we await the time when we can make these announcements, I thought I'd share some excellent diversions to tide everyone over as summer gets under way. (More)

Editorial Quality in a Google Aggregated World
Each of us in the media industry continues to review our models for content creation, particularly during this advertising recession. We often look toward the Google (GOOG) model of aggregated content from sources around the globe with envy and realize that they identified a model, with paid search, that allows them to monetize their significant audience with great efficiency. We also realize that their cost of content creation is not a significant expense line in their model. (More)

DeLeveraging into Summer
At the start of this long Memorial Day weekend, it is clear that with spring we saw some "green shoots" and sensed that we had most likely touched bottom in this deep recession in February or March. Confidence has slowly returned with regards to our financial system and the strongest banks are in the midst of negotiating with Treasury Secretary Geithner on when they can repay the TARP funds. (More)

Stress Test = Confidence
At this point it not clear to me whether Secretary Geithner or Larry Summers or someone else within the Obama administration came up the idea of a stress test for 19 large banks around the country to determine if the banks' balance sheets were strong enough to weather a continuing and deepening recession, but I am willing to give credit to the Obama team for finally demonstrating to everyone that the worst is behind us. (More)

Branding vs. Lead Generation
As we emerge from the long winter recession, once more the debate is underway about whether marketers should spend any of their budget on branding or focus entirely on lead generation. I, for one, believe that this is not an either/or decision. (More)

Distressed + Secondary Market = Opportunity
Before we turn to opportunities, I need to do a mea culpa on my pick of Louisville to go all the way after they trounced Arizona. They unexpectedly ran into the Motown favorite, Tom Izzo's Michigan State Spartans. Detroit needed some magic and the team from 90 miles away in Lansing answered the call. The idea of Louisville playing in an all-Big East final faded away and we found Michigan State facing North Carolina in the final. (More)

Springtime for TARP
The last week of winter was not kind to President Obama or Treasury Secretary Geithner. Critics’ voices got louder and insisted that the administration was not up to the task of restoring confidence in our financial markets and institutions. The late-night visit with Jay Leno by the President did not help and there started to be calls from some quarters to replace Tim Geithner with Larry Summers. (More)

EBOs vs LBOs
On Thursday March 12th in the Wall Street Journal, Peter Lattman wrote, "The LBO is dead. Long live the EBO" (WSJ, "Lacking Leverage, Firms Embrace EBOs"). In the article he quoted Scott Nuttall, a partner at KKR speaking at a private equity conference, "Opportunities abound right now. You don't need to use leverage to buy companies when they're trading at a 50% discount to their historic average multiples." (More)

March Madness
We have reached the point in ‘08 where we can look back and take stock on the full year and start to look forward to ‘09. Without question ‘08 has been the most challenging year for the world financial markets since the end of World War II. (More)

Transparency
The current financial crisis, which has resulted in the worst recession since World War II, will come to an end when confidence is restored in our global financial institutions. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner learned very quickly last week that the markets want more than a blueprint, they want a specific plan that will lead to the balance sheets of our largest money center banks being healthy and the subprime toxic assets isolated. He and his colleagues in the Obama administration need to come forward with a transparent plan that starts to restore confidence. (More)

London
This past Monday morning as I was preparing for my evening flight to London and reflecting on the exciting Super Bowl win by the Steelers on Sunday evening, I received an email notifying me that my Virgin Atlantic flight from JFK to London had been cancelled because of snow. London had just been hit by its worst snowstorm since the early '90s. (More)

The Gray Lady's Junk (NYT)
The historic inauguration of President Barack H. Obama last week has added some excitement to what is shaping up to be a very cold January for our financial markets. Although our problems will not be easy to solve, there is a sense of optimism that we can tackle our problems and that with resolve and leadership we can move forward. (More)

Playbook
The holiday season provided a nice interlude from the train wreck of a global economy that the fourth quarter of '08 unveiled. We spent the Christmas week in New York and then traveled to the Bay Area for the New Year. Unfortunately, we enter the New Year with all our problems still in place. (More)

Winding Down & Looking Forward
We have reached the point in ‘08 where we can look back and take stock on the full year and start to look forward to ‘09. Without question ‘08 has been the most challenging year for the world financial markets since the end of World War II. (More)

Mumbai
As we prepared for Thanksgiving last week on Wednesday afternoon, November 26th, the horrific news from Mumbai of a well-planned terrorist attack reached us and it dominated the news for the next 48 hours. (More)

Another Time at Bat
This past week Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson admitted that the plan he backed so vociferously just a short time ago, to buy toxic mortgage assets, was not going to work. With the recession deepening around the globe, world leaders continue to seek ways to turn around the global financial markets. (More)

Transitions of Another Kind
In April of this year, in a blog entry titled, Transitions, I focused on the analog to digital transition that media companies were faced with, and how difficult this would prove in a challenged economy. In many ways, I did not envision the challenges that September and October would present us. This is clearly the most difficult advertising environment that we have experienced since the fourth quarter of ‘01, after the tragic events of 9/11. (More)

A Family's & an Industry's Conundrum
As I indicated in California Dreaming, this recession is going to be deeper than we anticipated just a few short months ago. For the media industry, the advertising slowdown will not spare any categories, as marketers move quickly to cut their variable expenses. (More)

California Dreaming
With all the market volatility and less than three weeks left until the '08 Presidential Election, I have decided to move up my Thanksgiving wine column. I considered writing a column on Joe the Plumber, but his 15 minutes of fame will pass quickly. I sense that we all need some diversion from the wild swings in the global markets. (More)

Lessons Learned & a Prediction
The volatility in world markets remains, one week after the historic votes in the Senate and the House that authorized the rescue plan. It clearly will take time for the global markets to return to normal and it will also take some time for the Federal Reserve and the Treasury to use all the new tools at their disposal. (More)

The Second Time Around
On Monday, September 29th, with the whole world watching, the House of Representatives failed to pass the financial rescue plan. After several days of testimony the prior week from Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson and support from leaders of both parties, the House vote was short by 12 votes. The rescue plan was opposed by 95 Democrats and 133 Republicans. We should not be surprised that George Bush's capital is spent. (More)

Weekend Diversions vs. a Daily Lack of Confidence
This past weekend lived up to my expectations, with the U.S. Ryder Cup team pulling off a surprise upset of their European rivals. The U.S. captain Paul Azinger created a team, while European captain Nick Faldo seemed to remain aloof, and there appeared to be a lack of camaraderie on his side, in spite of his most controversial pick, Ian Poulter, winning 4 points, more than any other player. (More)

Autumn Crush II
When I wrote Autumn Crush on Saturday, I did not anticipate I would be writing the sequel on Wednesday, but so much has transpired over the past 48 hours that we are back with Autumn Crush II. We have learned that the team of Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke decided to let one of the independent investment banks go under and that Lehman Brothers was not going to be rescued. (More)

Autumn Crush
I have just returned from a week in London. Mary Claire joined me over the first weekend and we spent several days exploring our favorite London neighborhoods. Our most memorable dinner was at Gordon Ramsay’s Maze Grill, in Grosvenor Square. The steaks were wonderful and complimented by an excellent wine list. (More)

Leadership
At the end of my last blog, Drawing to a Close, I queried: "Any forecasts on the candidates vice presidential running mates?" I had several people suggest to me that Senator Obama would choose Senator Joseph Biden, particularly in light of the turmoil in Georgia. They were proven correct when several days later Obama announced his choice prior to the start of the Democratic convention in Denver. (More)

Drawing to a Close
With August drawing to a close as we enter the dog days of summer, we start to get ready for fall. The XXIX Olympic Games in Beijing are living up to their advance promise and NBC, in spite of this being the first Olympic Games with extensive live online coverage, is getting very good ratings. (More)

Free Markets
These may have been the most challenging 12 months for the global financial system since World War II. Who would have forecast that the subprime meltdown in the United States would lead to a global credit crunch or that The Bear would be brought to its knees and that the only alternative was a fire sale to JPMorgan Chase (JPM)? (More)

Beijing 08/08/08
In the fall of last year I wrote about doing business in China and the many trips I made to China during my time at Reed Business (B2B in China). As I watched the XXIX Olympics' masterful and beautifully choreographed opening-night ceremony on Friday evening, I thought back to many of my visits. (More)

New York State of Mind
On Tuesday evening, Major League Baseball staged its annual All-Star Game at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. Once again the American League All-Stars beat their National League counterparts, winning 4-3 in 15 innings and securing home field for the American League’s representative in the Fall Classic. The pre-game show with All Stars from the past brought back many memories. (More)

Stars Fall to Earth
As the Bear Market continues and forecasts begin to come down for fiscal year ‘08, we will start to see some stars fall to earth. Yesterday, EMC CEO and VMware (VMW) chairman Joe Tucci moved to oust VMware’s cofounder and CEO Diane Greene. (More)

A Bear Market
As stock markets around the globe continued their slump last week, the headlines proclaiming that we are in a bear market were omnipresent. The markets were all down very significantly from their October ‘07 highs. With oil and gold heading in the opposite direction and setting new daily highs, there was no denying that the bears were now in charge. (More)

Summer
I am sitting at my desk in my home office in Blackhawk. It is clear that spring has given way to summer across the United States, and today’s high temperature is forecast to reach 105 degrees. Outdoor activities such as golf will give way to air conditioning today. The summer of ‘08 should prove to be a memorable one, with premium gasoline touching $4.75 per gallon on the west coast and with the airlines canceling flights to deal with the surging fuel costs. (More)

Rivals
On Thursday evening the NBA finals open in Boston, with the Celtics facing the Lakers. These fabled franchises have met eleven times in the NBA finals, but this is the first time since 1987. Back in the '80s when they met three times in the finals, Larry Bird led the Celtics and Magic Johnson led the Lakers. Their personal rivalry started in the 1979 NCAA championship game, which was won by Magic and Michigan State. These two champions gave us the most intense rivalry of the '80s. (More)

The Fortune Jinx
Last week, as I flew west to Los Angeles, I settled in to catch up on my magazine reading. I had with me the most recent issues of BusinessWeek, Forbes, Fortune and Sports Illustrated. I am a longtime subscriber to all of them and still look forward to a block of uninterrupted time when I can read them cover to cover. I found the current issue of Fortune of particular interest, as it ranked the largest private equity firms and had an up-to-date profile on each of those that made the cut." (More)

The Middle Market
It was not that long ago that all the large, well-known private equity firms in the United States and Europe were focused on the largest deals they could find. I remember meeting with many of them as I was deciding on what I wanted to do in my next chapter after Reed Business, and the question for many of them was how large were the deals I wanted to do or how large an equity check they could write. (More)

Declaring Victory
Last week we saw several individuals and corporations declare victory. After Microsoft's (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer decided not to go hostile and not to raise his $31 bid for Yahoo (YHOO) beyond $33, he walked away and said that Microsoft’s current online strategy was fine and that it would just take longer to offer a real challenge to Google (GOOG) without Yahoo. (More)

Transitions
In the fall of '07 I wrote a column titled "Global Brands," where I stated, "As we transition to a digital world, managing our brands becomes ever more demanding....All of us in the B2B or B2C world tasked with transitioning to the digital world are looking for the Holy Grail, an umbrella brand that inspires confidence and trust and at the same time can support many vertical channels..." These challenges in the spring of '08 look even more daunting, with an economy that has stalled and a digital revolution that has accelerated. Clearly, '08 is turning out to be the most challenging year for our industry since '01-'02. (More)

The Masters Tradition
There is one weekend every spring that I clear my calendar from early afternoon until early evening, the weekend of the Masters. I find myself seduced by the beauty of the course, particularly Amen Corner, combined with the challenge it holds for the world's best golfers and its unique traditions. There is something special at the end of this tournament when the prior year's winner puts the Green Jacket on the new champion. (More)

The Bear, Jimmy & Jamie
Two weeks ago I wrote that while I start every week with an optimistic outlook that the worst of the credit crunch is behind us, I soon find myself disappointed by the "other shoe dropping.” Unfortunately, my fears were confirmed on that Friday, March 14th, when we learned that the venerable Bear Stearns (BSC) was suffering from a classic run on the bank and that many of its traditional trading partners were refusing to trade with them. (More)

The Rise & Fall
With the resignation of Eliot Spitzer two weeks ago, I started to reflect on why someone who has climbed the mountain would self-destruct in such a public manner. I decided that a professional could provide more insight than the news pundits and commentators, so I turned to a friend, Dr. Steven Berglas, who I recalled had written a book in the late '80s on this behavior, The Success Syndrome. What follows below is an interview I conducted with him. (More)

Credit Crunch & Moguls Battle
Since August the credit markets have been savaged by the subprime mortgage debacle. I start each week believing that the worst is behind us and that the moves by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and his counterparts around the world have calmed the markets and that most of the write-downs should have taken place, only to be surprised by the "other shoe dropping." (More)

The Dollar
While we are experiencing an early taste of spring in the Bay Area and New York City remains locked in winter, this week is proving very cold for the U.S. dollar. It has weakened against every major currency, but particularly against the Euro and the British Pound. (More)

Corporate Culture
As the battle intensifies between Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO), many writers continue to focus on the difference in corporate cultures between The Valley and Seattle. We also have some large Yahoo shareholders, like Bill Miller of Legg Mason, joining the Yahoo board in declaring that the $31 per share offer is inadequate. (More)

The Dust Settles
As we analyze the results from the Super Bowl and Super Tuesday, a common element to success emerges: Football teams and presidential campaigns must be built for the long term. (More)

Mobile
Normally January and February are not my favorite months, with cold and snow on the east coast and significant Pacific storms on the west, but I must admit that this year these months are packed with plenty of fascinating and significant events in business, politics and sports. (More)

Momentum
As we start the new year, the word that keeps coming up in politics and business is "momentum." Hillary lost it in Iowa but regained it in New Hampshire. McCain lost it six months ago when his campaign started to run out of money before he had run any ads, but he regained it in New Hampshire and hopes to keep it in Michigan and South Carolina. (More)

2008 Forecast
At this time of the year, all pundits try to provide insight into the New Year. I will join them with my own forecast for 2008. (More)

Cooling Down
As we enter the homestretch of '07, it is clear that we have survived the August and September credit crunch that the subprime mortgage market inflamed. It is also clear that Ben Bernanke and his counterparts in Europe provided the essential market liquidity when it was needed and that the rate cuts were effective in avoiding a very hard landing. (More)

Happy Thanksgiving!
I have reflected more and more of late on the distinction between the artisan and the artist. In most great media companies, the executive team and the talent who create content execute against a strategy that the leadership team has defined.. (More)

Confidence
As fall moves into winter we are seeing more turmoil and a lack of confidence in the leadership of our blue chip financial institutions. (More)

Renovation
Renovation of a home, product portfolio or oneself is never easy. It requires painstaking attention to detail, with little margin for error. (More)

Learning How to Win
The historic collapse of the New York Mets in September started me thinking about the responsibility coaches in sports and managers in business have for both winning and losing teams. (More)

B2B in China
NOTE: This column first appeared min’s b2b. During my last two years at Reed Business, I made 10 trips to China. I was very fortunate during this time to have an excellent partner in Hugo Shong, the Managing Director of IDG China and a general partner in IDG’s burgeoning venture capital business. If you want to do business in China, I strongly recommend the partnership approach–choosing the right partner is the key to success. (More)'

Global Brands
Tuesday the Federal Reserve lowered the federal funds rate, as I had predicted, by 1/2 a point. The discount rate also moved down by 1/2 a point, and shortly thereafter Bank of America announced that they were lowering their prime-lending rate by 1/2 a point. The global stock markets rallied on the news! (More)

Stop Looking in the Rearview Mirror
NOTE: This column first appeared min’s b2b this past week. It is mid-September and the football season is finally here. Sunday’s games showed us that the Patriots, led by their inscrutable coach (even more inscrutable these days than ever, with the spy scandal and the $500,000 personal fine from the NFL), Bill Belichick, will once again contend with the Colts for the AFC title. I recommend the late David Halberstam’s “The Education of a Coach,” which is about Belichick. It has some new insights and into what he has brought to New England and the NFL; all leaders can learn something from this book, though not as much from Belichick’s latest actions. (More)

Fall Innovation
Mary Claire often reminds me that September and October are the most wonderful months, from a weather perspective, regardless of where one is in the world. That certainly is the case in New York, where the US Open is in full swing and the crowds are enjoying gorgeous evenings to go along with outstanding tennis..... (More)

August Credit Turmoil
For those of us in the media business who focus on M&A and disappeared several weeks ago, our world was changed while we were enjoying our favorite recreational pursuits.... (More)

Dog Days
Here we are in the early "dog days" of August & New York City is starting to empty for the month. We seem to have taken on the European approach of everyone heading out of town for the month. Prior to leaving though, Rupert Murdoch won his prize, The Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones, once the Bancroft family realized that there was no alternative to his "bear hug" premium and he agreed to pay their various fees, which had become substantial... (More)

Private Equity in India
Mumbai, India 7/26/07—During my final year with Reed Business, I served as vice chairman, with a focus on establishing new joint ventures or subsidiaries in China, India and Russia. Our team found an excellent partner in Infomedia India LTD, which is listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange. (More)

CRM from the Expert, Thomas Keller
I was reminded over the past several days how important retaining customers is to a business' long term health & growth. (More)

Unlocking Shareholder Value
Many of the largest media companies, today, are portfolio plays that combine content with distribution. At one time this approach was very fashionable, particularly in the late 80's and '00. Time Warner (TWX) is the example that is often brought forward & its failed merger with AOL... (More)