A Businessman's View

This past week there were articles all over the Internet about "The China Incident." If you have been so distracted by the unfortunate disaster in Haiti that you didn't see it, Google has threatened to pull its operations out of China because an attempt to hack it and 30 other companies occurred. Worse, Google says it has evidence pointing to the Chinese government as the source of the intrusions. The scary part is that although initial reports implied that the hackers were looking for information on Chinese dissidents, it now seems that they were after intellectual property. This raised an interesting question: what if they installed a Trojan horse into Google's source code without stealing anything? How would you know what happened? I spent 20 years in application development, and I know firsthand that the more complex systems can easily be in excess of 1,000,000 lines of code in size. If someone inserted 100 - even 1,000 - lines of new code as a backdoor, is...

I don't have a witty introduction to this week's topic. It's not that I couldn't think of one (though it would be tough at this point in the morning since the caffeine hasn't yet circulated through my bloodstream). The topic, however, needs to be discussed in stark contrast to my usual lighthearted modus operandi . A few days ago, it was reported that the top 4 cigarette makers (representing a 90% stake of the market) have been trying to "backdoor" their way out of paying penalties on past profits because of their knowledge of nicotine addiction, complicity in its marketing, and downright conspiracy to addict the general public to a product they control so that they can continue to reap the financial benefits. We're not talking about a few dollars here. In the article, the numbers that were bandied about were $280 billion of the past profits plus an addition $14 billion to run a campaign to help people quit smoking. This isn't chump change ...

If you think this week's post is about the last President of the United States, you're wrong. Instead, it's about the esteemed 23rd letter of the alphabet: "W." In English, we pronounce it "double-yoo," where "yoo" is the 21st letter of the alphabet, "U." But in France, it is pronounced "double-vee," using the letter "V" to more accurately describe the shape of the character. "Double V" shapes are not unknown to those who work in the finance industry. The shape to which I am referring is the shape of the graph that the DJIA makes when you look at it over a long period of time. (And for those of you who are day traders, John Magee's gospel on the subject of graph, or technical, analysis said and proved that short term graphs really aren't worth the time to watch them if you're looking for patterns.) Essentially, the situation ends up like this: Stocks take a huge dive from near highs. At...

"He who dies with the most toys wins!" - unknown I remember hearing that expression as a young man and thinking that it was silly but still made a lot of sense. Thinking back to that now, I can justify my agreement by saying how men are "goal oriented" and other such drivel, but in the end it was basically a vocalization of my own selfishness and greed. One has to wonder if that is / was the motto for the financial services companies. In recent days news articles have been published in the New York Times and elsewhere about reprehensible behavior at both Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Essentially, they were promoting Credit Default Swaps as good investments when they were secretly betting against those same investments since they knew the truth of the matter: they weren't worth the paper they were printed on. When I read these articles, I was aghast. How could any company maliciously trick another when they are the ones to which many others look at the ...