Click here to read about what they are doing in the spring at Wharton.

Okay, what school is this, Wharton that is?  Hint, it is usually in the top ten B Schools.

Why should you care-take a read about what they are paying grads to work for hedge funds.

These grads are expecting $100K and even $300K plus starting salaries. Do you suppose there is a difference in their curriculum, work ethics, etc?

So how come they are expecting such high starting salaries?  Perhaps we can discuss this in class.

Marvin Olasky weighs in with this article.  He points out that Halberstam was old journalism in which an icon spoke of what was/is happening.  Now with blogs, everyone can be a journalist, where will this take us-to a new empowerment or just more fractional polarizing squabbling?

Michael Young is the Editor of a newspaper in Lebanon. Remember what I said about reading opinions outside the US. His article on Halberstam suggests the same as Olasky’s, the world has changed and perhaps the passing of Halberstam, is yet another signpost along that journey.

Boeing  now declares itself to be a technology company.  The 787 Dreamliner will be assembled around the world and brought in by 747s.  The plane will cost a cool $150M so cost control is important. This is yet another article illustrating globalization and managing costs, something we study in several cost courses. One can also see the growing necessity of universal international accounting standards which we have discussed in Intermediate  accounting.

And so we come to the end of another semester.  Most of you are, thanks to years and years of multiple choice enforced testing, focused only on your grade on the next test. This of course is a mistake.  You are looking down, look up.  X years from now no one is going to ask what grade you made in Economics 2356. They will however judge you on your

Ability to connect with the business environment

Ability to get to the point

Ability to make a presentation

I am amazed at how many of you blithely say that you don’t have time to do, well, any better than you are doing, on a presentaiton.  Here we have had all semester to prepare. ON the job it will simply be expected. Oh well, I warned you.

I have seen two effective presentations. With one to two classes left in the semester, I hope to see at least two more.  The effective ones were highlighted wtih a good use of points, a summary of the story or  book, and then a discussion of why this was important. I mentioned several points about presentations on my post before spring break.

In the fourth installment of Star Wars, actually the second release, Skywalker is sent for tutoring by Yoda.  Weary of Skywalker’s half hearted attempts, Yoda finally says

There is no Try, Skywaker, There is Only Do……

David Halberstam was killed in a car crash this week at age 73.  While it has been said that many live through history without understanding the changes around them, Halberstam certainly labored to chronicle them. His The Best and The Brightest is still the classic on how the US went wrong in Viet Nam.  His one work that I am most familiar with is the landmark The Fiftys.  PBS made this into a multi part series for television.  It is a revealing look at how the real seeds of change for the latter half of the century were laid in that ‘quiet’ Eisenhower era. I know watching the series made me think about that era, that I lived through as a very young child, in a whole new perspective.

We never know what will happen to us.  And on this day Halberstam was still going, making speeches and on his way to do an interview for his latest book.  And then, kaput, in a single thoughtless instant, some fool no doubt talking on a cell phone and attempting to drive, whatever, certainly not paying attention to driving, the car Halberstam was in was t boned in an intersection.  Like Patton, all that war and then killed in a car wreck.

Check it out, Halberstam was an author of statuture for the last fifty years.

Maria Bartiromo says it is the most powerful group of business folk in the world, and she’s right.

This article is a good example of the movies and book on your review list.  The article concerns Mike Milken’s Global Investment Conference.  This tenth annual event has gathered the most powerful hedge fund managers in the business.  Now consider the cast of characters.

This is the Mike Milken that used to run Drexel Burnham’s junk bond desk.  That would be the junk bond empire that allowed Boone Pickens et al to terrorize oil companies into green mailing them to go away.

That would be the Mike Milken that foolishly rejected a misdemeanor charge and ended up going to jail for two felonies, courtesy of the federal prosecutor at the time, one Rudy Guliani, later NYC mayor and now Presidential candidate. By the way, they are good friends now.

The details of Milken are in Den of Theives and the movie Wall Street was based on that story.

The KKR RJR Nabisco deal mentioned in the story is the plotline for Barbarians at the Gates.

Milken made some $500 M personally his last year at Drexel, gee, guess who is back at the center of the investment world. 

George Will tends to multiple syllables to make his point but is usually a good read.  Here he reviews a book that asks whether we are not being naive in assuming that because a few Chinese are enjoying capitalism, eveyrone will enjoy it.  As the writer remarks, visitors return from China remarking on the absence of flies, not the absence of freedom.  Will makes the point that the next Olympics will be in Bejing, the most important since the 1936 games in Berlin.  Indeed, just because they drink Starbucks coffee and munch on  a Big Mac, are they really going to demand more freedom.  Unless the Chinese citizens starts demanding it, the Chinese government is not likely to start granting it.

At the end of Men in Black, the young lady remarks that Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith certainly have unusual jobs. Here is a story on truning the hobby into a business.  And isn’t that what we all want to do?  Yep, it is time share for exotic car drivers.  I know I would sign up!  This idea has extended to airplanes with Netjets and yachts with The Moorings.  And of course time share with condos has been around for a while. This idea with exotic cars actually makes a lot of sense to me as they are not daily drivers anyway, if you could drive on protected course, so much the better.

Okay, any creative ideas on new businesses out there?  HOw would you use teh CVP techniques we learned in class to insure a profit?

Reading articles written outside the United State gives one a new perspective.  The Guardian  is a British publication.  This is an article written by a French (from France, not teaching French) professor teaching in England.  He wonders how could anyone say France is socialist and then lists the left wing candidates as coming from the Communist and Troytsky partices, as well as the imperative of a 35 hour work week and fee everything, naw, sounds capitalist to me. 

Notice how he uses rhetoric and totally ignores the very success of Eastern Europe that imperils the very noticon of ‘free health care, education, etc.’  THere is no fre lunch Philippe, but then this guy is a political scientist, not an economist or capitalist.

Reobert Samuelson  looks beyond the usual inflation numbers.  Well  oil is up and so we tried to substitue ethanol for oil which pushed corn prices way up.  With corn up producers found it hard to feed cattle and poultry so that production is down. But demand did not go away so prices for meat and poultry are up. But according to the government, if you don’t eat or drive your car, that core inflation stuff, there is no inflation. But the trade deficit is pushing the dollar down which is pushing gold up.  Did you get all that? 

Check out this column, a good read.