I found this compilation video of the top ten “own goals” in hockey. Since I posted earlier about Montreal’s own goal, I thought that I’d share this.
According to another blog, the Wollaston Theater is going to be purchased and renovated. If this is true, reopening the theater should really help bring back this neighborhood.
I decided to call them and see what I could find out. I spoke to Ron Geddes and was told that the Wollaston Theatre is “Under agreement to a group. It will be preserved and restored as a theater.”
The same blog has some additional pictures of the exterior here
I was pointed to all of this by Justin Fielding from Castparty Productions. Castparty was responsible for A Tale of Two Cinemas which discusses the Coolidge Corner and Wollaston Beach theaters.
There hasn’t been a lot of opportunities to laugh at the Canadiens in the last few years. The Bruins were winless against them last year, and lost to them in the post-season. The Bruins have beat them several times so far this year. I am experiencing some schadenfreude while watching this clip.
I never imagined that Berkshire Hathaway would be trading down 20 percent in a few days. Berkshire shareholders, at least the lunatics who go to Omaha, are supposed to be very long-term investors. I believe that this is a clear indication that everyone, including very conservative investors, is panicking.
I’d like to recommend that we take a page from Roosevelt’s book and take the entirety of next week off. The market needs a break.
A few things that should be on the agenda next week:
* Sort out and announce the full list of companies involved with the TARP program. Change securities laws as appropriate to allow banks to issue preferred shares.
* Take control and stabilize Citigroup
* Determine the liquidity requirements of automobile manufacturers and provide low-interest cash loans. A bankruptcy would be far costlier since the government would assume pension obligations.
* Implement temporary banking regulations to encourage lending and investment. Maybe we need to take some radical steps, like penalize banks that are hording cash, and this would be the time to do it.
* It could be time for industry leaders, such as Warren Buffett, to start providing fireside chats during primetime.
* President-elect Obama should nominate a Treasury Secretary, sooner rather than later, just to get that uncertainty out of the way.
There have been a number of stories from analysts and companies about how Open Source will thrive in recessionary times. Sun made that argument today.
“We are preconfigured for the downturn,” Schwartz said in an interview with Computerworld last month. He claimed that users will be more inclined to try open-source products such as MySQL, OpenSolaris and Sun’s GlassFish application server during a time of economic stress.
The basic argument is that because OSS is typically cheaper than their proprietary counterparts, that more companies will switch to open source (or choose open source over a proprietary solution.)
The argument is flawed because enterprise software tends to have very high switching costs. In other words, companies don’t tend to rip and replace systems to reduce their operating costs since it requires significant investment. I doubt that companies will want to invest, even to lower operating costs, in the middle of a recession.
Some enterprises will decide to purchase open source solutions, instead of a proprietary solution, to reduce their operating cost. However, since overall IT spending will decrease, it is difficult to ascertain the overall impact of this shift.
Many of the large Open Source vendors actually have mixed-source portfolios. Even if there is an surge in revenues form Open Source, these vendors should really be worried about renewals and sales of proprietary solutions.
I wrote about the Credit Fail and my personal experience with the broken credit card market. It looks like things are bad enough that Paulson is going to come in with his government-sponsored credit card with the 700B limit.
Hey, don’t forget that Visa’s IPO was a MAJOR windfall for the banks that held the company.
… the offering will generate a windfall for Visa’s thousands of member banks, which own the company. JPMorgan Chase is expected to reap about $1.25 billion, while Bank of America, National City, Citigroup, U.S. Bancorp and Wells Fargo are likely to receive several hundred million dollars each.
So essentially, Wall Street banks took Visa public and made a killing off of the shareholders (general public.) Now the government is going to take public funds and bail out Visa. And Mastercard.
American Express is ahead of the curve, they recently won approval to convert to a commercial bank. Essentially, this now gives them access to the Fed’s discount lending facilities. In normal market circumstances, this would be looked down upon as a “bailout”. It’s not like anyone is going to be willing to put a term deposit into AMEX when they are simultaneously borrowing money from the discount window.
This industry is desperately in need of better management. With every single member of the current oligopoly in financial distress, it would make a great time to start up a financially-stable creditcard company.
Tracey and I saw a “For Sale” sign on our local theater the other day. After digging around, I found this brief documentary about the place. Apparently the owner passed away in April. The fear is that it will be turned into condominiums, or something similar.