Alice “Snowball” Schroeder last month wrote a piece on Bloomberg called “Wall Street makes it hard to earn a legal living”. While IP has always discussed the obvious conflicts of interest for all the market’s agents, and the sell side in particular, Alicemisses a turn in the road somewhere – falls down the rabbit hole? – and turns this article into quite the generalization. The issue of conflicts of interests deserved a better effort.
They took questions from Columbia grad students and the event was broadcast live by CNBC. It has an eerie feel to it – with the whole “must keep spirits high” approach. That said, both men think in the long term (15+ years) and it’s always interesting to be reminded of some basic concepts.
Part 2 of the excerpts from our Q4 2008 report. In Part 1, we introduced and exemplified the theme of the structural fragility of incentive systems via two texts, “Own Goal” and “Dolus Bonus”. In this text, we present the core of our reflection on the subject in order to highlight the importance of raising our moral critical standards.
Read more about IP report excerpts, vol. 4: Moral diligence (part 2)
Post 1 of 2 posts with excerpts from one of our most-commented reports. We look back at a highly unusual year – a period of seemingly definitive change which proved, definitively, that some things never change. 2008 was one of those years that tested our mettle and reaffirmed old principles, the most cherished of which is our moral diligence. We kick off with two introductory texts, “Own Goal” and “Dolus Bonus”.
Read more about IP report excerpts, vol. 4: Moral diligence (part 1)
The Wall Street Journal has a nice piece today on Google’s option repricing bonanza now that the stock is back to the US$ 500′s. Not a second too soon, not a bit exaggerated.
Some of us attended the 2009 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. It has become a “curiosity show”; questions from the audience (selected by draws) are generally off-topic and the best one was by an 11 year old boy (this has become a family event). During the meeting, we decided to experiment with live meeting “tweets”, so [...]
“The CEO of a public-owned company is no more its owner than the CEO’s chauffeur is the owner of the executive limousine”. George P. Schwartz