Finance Geek

Just as night follows day, the aftermath of the 2008 crash has regulators scrambling to prevent the last crisis.Today, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) outlined a proposed new regulatory regime for the over-the-counter de

More…

QUAD CITIES — Davenport publisher Lee Enterprises, which owns the Courier, reported a third quarter loss of $24.5 million in its earnings report released this morning.

More…

Bailout architects have argued that the government is likely to get most of its money back. But it’s becoming clear that taxpayers can kiss a chunk of that money goodbye.

More…

From The Business Insider, July 30, 2009:Should we have re-elected Jimmy Carter in 1980 for his stewardship
of the US economy?  Of course not.  Should Ben Bernanke be reappointed
as Chairman of the Federal Reserve for his stewardship of the ba

More…

Flash Trading has gone from a non-issue to one of great controversy over the last month.  Worried that it gives the big brokerage firms an unfair advantage over the little guy, New York Senator Chuck Schumer is asking the Securities and Exchange Comm

More…

There’s been a lot of stories lately about high-frequency trading, which has been characterized by some as just the latest Wall Street scam designed to rip-off the individual investors. Adam Sussman, director of research at

More…

Image via CrunchBase

At DFJ Esprit some of our biggest successes have come from cash out deals where the founders have taken some money off the table at the same time as we have invested to fund growth.  It worked very well for us at BuyAt and more recently at WAYN I believe it has had a positive impact on the dynamics around the board table and the prospects for the business. 

Not all VCs think cash out deals are a good idea though, with many believing that if entrepreneurs take money out of the business they might lose motivation, and that it is much wiser ‘hold their feet to the fire’.

At the weekend I came across the following quote from an interview with Zuckerberg explaining why he is allowing employees to sell some of their shares to one of Facebook’s investors.  It sums up the argument nicely:

One of your investors is buying shares from employees—letting them cash out early. I’ve heard you were not crazy about this. Is that true?
No, I’m really happy that people have a chance to do this. Back in the early days I had the chance during one of our funding rounds to get a bit of liquidity. It meant that in making decisions about Facebook I didn’t have to worry about the short term. I could just work on making Facebook as good as possible, and optimize it for 10 to 20 years out. To the extent that other people have the chance to do that now, it would be a healthy thing.

Perhaps this isn’t surprising because as I wrote last year the guys at Founders Fund, one of the early investors in Facebook have a similar opinion.

More…

To bridge budget gaps this year, several states are levying large taxes on high-income earners and raising sales taxes. But a taxpayer group sees flaws.

More…

Even before Wednesday’s big slide in crude, it’s been a tough few weeks for major oil companies. From ConocoPhillips to BP to Chevron to Amerada Hess, second-quarter earnings season has not be kind to big oil. Given oil prices were at or near record level

More…

Few figures in American life have suffered as publicly as Elizabeth Edwards, a cancer survivor whose son was killed in a car accident, the betrayed wife of presidential candidate John Edwards. Like a classic Greek heroine, she has only one flaw: she is too trusting. This week, she was duped into a endorsing a flawed bankruptcy study that was transparently intended to support a single-payer health care plan.
In testimony before a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, Mrs. Edwards declared, “Medical debt is, of course, a symptom of larger problems in our health care system-and the…

More…

Washington: The administration has fulfilled a promise to cut spending by trimming $100 million from the 2009 budget. That’s right — $100 million with an “m,” an imponderably small slice of this year’s expenditures.
Back in April, the White House stressed that President Obama, during his first Cabinet meeting, “made clear that relentlessly cutting out waste was part and parcel of their mission to make the investments necessary for recovery and long-term stability.” Department heads were “to identify at least $100 million in additional cuts to their…

More…

The great Canadian economist Reuven Brenner has likened macroeconomic calculations to dangerous mythmaking that sustains “the illusion that prosperity is necessarily linked with territory, national units, and government spending in general.” Truer words have rarely been written, particularly when we consider how very much our economic health is related to productivity outside our borders.
Simplified, with the only closed economy being the world economy, our productivity accrues to individuals outside the United States, and foreign productivity similarly accrues to our own economic…

More…

DES MOINES (AP) — New figures show that Iowa remains No. 2 in the nation in wind power.

More…

After rallying nearly 50% this year, crude prices hit a major speed bump this week as the dollar has firmed up and inventories have risen.Oil prices were “well overpriced” in the $70s and will continue to weaken in the weeks and months ahead, sa

More…

The official details of the Microsoft-Yahoo deal aren’t much different than the leaks I reported last night.The companies will combine forces in search, with Yahoo taking responsibility for sales and Microsoft taking responsibility for technology. The de

More…