Finance Geek

It is fashionable at year’s end to engage in reflection on the calendar just past, but a year’s worth of contemplation is just not enough for today’s circumstances. That is not to say that 2011 was uneventful, far from it. However, if we review the evolution of the banking system, especially in the past three years, I believe its trajectory becomes quite clear.For over a year, beginning in March 2009, the financial system looked to be on its way to full recovery. Bank profits had returned, debt charge-offs and delinquencies mercifully peaked, and the wholesale money markets…

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! As 2011 comes to a close, we’re taking a look back at how we covered some of the biggest news stories of the year. Arguably the most talked about story over the course of the past twelve months was the passing of Steve Jobs at the much [...]

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! While it may not have been the best year for investors, 2011 was a pretty good year for America’s top executives, many of whom took home rich pay packages and perks. Each month, Michelle Leder of Footnoted.com joins the Daily Ticker to discuss the salacious details her [...]

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JERUSALEM-How do you revive Jerusalem, the poorest city in Israel, overshadowed by religious tensions, throttled by traffic, and with a dwindling workforce?
Some mayors might be discouraged, but not Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat. In my meeting with him on Monday, he exuded confidence, with plans to revive the city through tourism and biotechnology.
Barkat, Jerusalem’s mayor since 2008 after five years as opposition leader of the city council, came to politics through philanthropy, specifically an effort to revive Jerusalem’s schools. He made his fortune as a high tech entrepreneur…

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! As 2011 comes to a close, we’re taking a look back at how we covered some of the biggest news stories of the year, including U.S. politics. Washington was on the brink of a shutdown several times this year, as Democrats and Republicans jockeyed over raising the [...]

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Last week, Congress and President Obama extended the 2011 payroll tax holiday into the first two months of 2012. It is not yet clear how the holiday, which shaves two percentage points off workers’ Social Security tax rates, has affected consumer demand and the overall economy. But, it is all too clear that the holiday’s diversion of general revenue from the Social Security trust fund has undermined historical practices and distorted federal budgetary priorities.
Throughout its history, Social Security has been treated as separate from the rest of the budget. With few…

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! As 2011 comes to a close, the world is looking ahead to 2012 with a mixture of hope and trepidation. Despite the Mayan prophecy, “the world won’t end in 2012, but at times it will feel as if it is about to,” writes Daniel Franklin, editor of [...]

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! 2011 was the year of market uncertainty. Investors flocked to safe haven investments like gold, U.S. treasuries and the U.S. Dollar as volatility rocked global markets and the European sovereign debt crisis unnerved investors who dumped stocks and jumped ship. Quite frankly, 2011 left a sour taste [...]

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! As 2011 comes to a close, we’re taking a look back at how we covered some of the biggest news stories of the year. Below are links to our coverage of Occupy Wall Street and related issues. What started in September with a small, seemingly random group [...]

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here Dan Franklin, editor of “The World in 2012,” does not mince words: “There is a danger going into 2012 on both sides of the Atlantic that policymakers are going to make things a lot worse.” Many experts and pundits throw out predictions at the end of ever [...]

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! Gerald Celente, publisher of The Trends Journal and founder/director of the Trends Research Institute, has made many bold predictions before, but his latest prognostication is a dark omen for the financial markets. Speaking in a deadpan tone and without blinking an eye, he tells Aaron Task in [...]

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There are moments when our political system, whose essential job is to mediate conflicts in broadly acceptable and desirable ways, is simply not up to the task. It fails. This may be one of those moments. What we learned in 2011 is that the frustrating and confusing budget debate may never reach a workable conclusion. It may continue indefinitely until it’s abruptly ended by a severe economic or financial crisis that wrenches control from elected leaders.
We are shifting from “giveaway politics” to “takeaway politics.” Since World War II, presidents and Congresses…

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Regular readers will know that I’m a strong believer in open standards.  I think they provide the best platform for innovation and are the best protection against monopolists.  Hence I would love it if the open web prevailed, and the rising power of gatekeepers like Apple, Amazon, Facebook and even Google annoys me as a consumer and worries me as an investor.

The future of the web has been the topic of much debate since Forrester CEO George Colony predicted the end of the web and an era of the ‘app internet’ in his talk at Le Web earlier this month.  Fred Wilson, Mark Suster and others came out in defence of the web, but it seems to me that the commentary has been largely one sided.  Perhaps that is unsurprising given that as VCs and bloggers most of us have benefited hugely in the past from the open web and stand to continue to benefit into the future.

However, even though the open web is better, it won’t necessarily prevail.  In a great post last September Joe Hewitt set out why.

Firstly, at the most basic level the web is just a collection of protocols and languages.  It has no unique characteristics that assure it a permanent place in our information architectures:

The HTML, CSS, and JavaScript triumvirate are just another platform, like Windows and Android and iOS

Secondly, there are plausible non-web visions of the future:

I can easily see a world in which Web usage falls to insignificant levels compared to Android, iOS, and Windows …. The Web will be just another app that you use when you want to find some information, like Wikipedia, but it will no longer be your primary window. The Web will no longer be the place for social networks, games, forums, photo sharing, music players, video players, word processors, calendaring, or anything interactive. Newspapers and blogs will be replaced by Facebook and Twitter and you will access them only through native apps. HTTP will live on as the data backbone used by native applications, but it will no longer serve those applications through HTML.

An alternative non-open web vision of the future is one in which access to services is controlled by an oligopoly consisting of Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook.

I don’t come with any solutions, but rather with a request that we all remain open to a full consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of the open web, and of alternative models – there can be no sacred cows.  That way we will have a better chance of preserving what is really important – and that is open and even access to content and distribution for consumers, and by extension for startups.

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! As 2011 comes to a close, we’re taking a look back at some of our most important interviews of the year from President Bill Clinton to House Speaker John Boehner to the CEO of Starbucks Howard Schultz and “The Donald.” Below are links to our episodes with [...]

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! This year marks the 10th anniversary of Yahoo!’s Year in Review. It puts a spotlight on the top stories and trends of the year based Yahoo!’s network of nearly 700 million monthly unique visitors and billions of consumer searches. The top search term on Yahoo! for 2011 [...]

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