Interesting business writing - on Mercedes, Rodney Mullen, prediction models, Lego & Cicada

There's been a few excellent business related pieces I've seen lately with stories that I saw just yesterday included one from Yahoo Autos (I know, who would have figured?) and two from Wired Magazine.

The Yahoo story was by Neal Pollack (who wrote the book Alternadad) with "How the pied piper of Mercedes plays the automotive media" and a pretty rollicking and entertaining read on what could perhaps be described as boondoggle "experience" events, in this case for automotive media. Related to the whole rollicking and entertaining notion, it was fascinating reading about the orchestrator of the junket, Mercedes' U.S. director of communications, Geoff Day.

The Wired pieces I found of note were  "Silicon Valley Has Lost Its Way. Can Skateboarding Legend Rodney Mullen Help It?" by Brendan Koerner and "The Man Who Knows Whether Any Startup Will Live or Die" by Klint Finley. The story on Mullen was a fascinating read by the author of the sensational book The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking and that from Finley was on predicting business success or failure out of models created by Thomas Thurston, who I mid-last year wrote about and linked to his piece "Christensen Vs. Lepore: A Matter Of Fact" for TechCrunch.

Two other recent business related pieces I found excellent and haven't written on yet were "How Lego Became the Apple of Toys" for Fast Company by Jonathan Ringen and "Cicada: Solving the Web's Deepest Mystery" by David Kushner for Rolling Stone, with this last one perhaps less business-centric than the other stories, but just a compelling and pretty trippy read.

The Divide by Matt Taibbi

The Divide by Matt Taibbi is a thorough and well-written book that definitely deals with income inequality, but beyond this is about how in America today we have laws that are supposed to apply to all, but completely different sets of consequences for breaking them depending on income level.

The book appears to have come out of, or at least is related to, Taibbi's 2011 Rolling Stone piece "Wall Street Isn't Winning – It's Cheating" and is richly packed with examples and details how white-color financial crime by the wealthy rarely leads to the arrest and prosecution of individuals, but punishment for nuisance offenses and other crimes perpetrated by the poor are often pursued zealously by the police, courts and government. Taibbi makes the point that neither the harsh nor lenient approach wrong, just that they shouldn't simultaneously exist depending on income class.

In terms of why white-color crime so infrequently leads to jail time for individuals, and more often to no-admission-of-fault settlements with financial institutions, Taibbi offers a number of different reasons why. More than anything else, it seems that it comes down to prosecutors wanting easy cases to win and that financial crime can often be both complex and made out to be even more complex by legions of defense attorneys arguing technicalities and reasons for exclusion from prosecution. Additionally, the courts have frequently used the argument that to punish too severely either a guilty company or individuals within those companies could have a detrimental impact on markets and jobs, with the courts citing “industry experts” as being those arguing against criminal charges within the same industry. The examples from Taibbi are fairly brutal in the fraud committed, ranging from Barclay’s giving $112M in bonuses to nine Lehman Brothers executives while they were negotiating a $5B profit on the sale of Lehman assets to Barclay’s, to financial titans employing thug-like tactics in their attempts to destroy a company they had shorted and would profit greatly from it going under.

Taibbi writes in the book of how if white-color financial crime can often be complicated to prosecute and at times difficult to pinpoint the guilty individuals to blame, the crimes of the poor can be much easier to see and prosecute, or to just accuse someone of the crimes and then make their lives difficult. It’s noted that over the past 20 years, violent crime has dropped heavily, poverty has risen, and prison populations have skyrocketed, the result of aggressive policing methods against the poor, basically spreading a huge net and seeing what sticks in it, based on the idea that the poor are probably doing something wrong anyways. From nuisance arrests for things like loitering or obstructing traffic (basically standing on a sidewalk) to the zealous pursuit of welfare frauds and illegal immigrants, it does appear to be a wide scale denigration of the poor and application of the Bill of Rights as being on a class basis rather than applied to all.

Similar to how Taibbi writes that it’s not wrong to have either lenient or strict standards of justice, just wrong to have both depending on income level, he writes that it’s not that welfare fraud shouldn’t be policed and not that illegal immigrants shouldn't have consequences from being here illegally, but rather it’s a question of how we treat those that may be guilty and what rights we give to them. The assumption of guilt and zealous pursuit of the perhaps guilty poor matched up against the too-complicated-of-a-tale to find guilt with the wealthy is where the concept of The Divide comes in. Along these same lines, the point is made that people on one side of the divide in general have no idea how bad it is on the other side.

Taibbi closes the book with a touch of optimism about the prosecution of financial crimes at the same time that New York City's stop-and-frisk laws are being challenged in courts, but even with that, it’s definitely a sobering and well-told story of two different ways treating people based on class.

Writing on NSA & CIA activities and people impacted - by Reitman, Apuzzo & Goldman

Two fascinating stories recent stories fell under the topic of government secrets and the lives impacted by them. "Snowden and Greenwald: The Men Who Leaked the Secrets" was by Janet Reitman for Rolling Stone and a great in-depth profile on both Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald. I posted a few months ago on Greenwald's forthcoming media venture backed by Pierre Omidyar and there's really interesting detail in this Reitman piece.

The second piece of excellent writing to mention here was "Missing American in Iran was on an unapproved mission" by Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman for the Associated Press. The story an almost unbelievable, but meticulously reported account (which the AP several times held off on printing at government request) about Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent who went missing in Iran back in 2007. Levinson was long said by the U.S. government to have been in Iran as a private citizen, but actually working for the CIA on a contract basis. CIA leaders were denying this fact to Congress, and may not even have been aware they were lying as Levinson's work was arranged by CIA analysts rather than field agents, a violation of known Agency protocol.

It's an amazing and somewhat sobering story and definitely feels related to the actions taken by Snowden and Greenwald as written about in the Rolling Stone piece.

Profile pieces - Scheiber on Warren, Junod on Clooney & Eells on Cyrus

Three great profile pieces recently were on quite the wide variety of subjects, none of whom I've previously linked to pieces about.

For the Nov 25 issue of New Republic was "Hillary's Nightmare? A Democratic Party That Realizes Its Soul Lies With Elizabeth Warren" by Noam Scheiber. Really interesting stuff about someone who may not have much yet in the way of foreign policy experience, but who definitely cares about the increasingly important issue of income inequality.

The December issue of Esquire has another well-done celebrity profile by Tom Junod with his "George Clooney's Rules for Living" that follows up on past features on Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon (with my having posted earlier this year on them).

The last profile piece to mention here was from the October Rolling Stone with "Miley Cyrus on Why She Loves Weed, Went Wild at the VMAs and Much More" by Josh Eells. It's highly entertaining immersive writing that may or may not make a reader like Cyrus if they didn't before, but I'd say shows that she's very much aware of herself and her image.

Money Writing from Businessweek, Bloomberg & Time

Several piece of writing on money I've come across lately that were interesting by themselves... with two downright fascinating when viewed in relation to one another.

From the Nov 28 issue of Time Magazine came the feature Below The Line on living in poverty. Written by Barbara Kiviat, it's a solid piece that looks at the 46 million Americans living on less than an annual income of $22,314 for a family of four. A lot of interesting content there... including how different external events (sickness, injury, car breakdown) can be cataclysmic financially for those barely making ends meet.

A different story on what feels like the opposite end of the financial spectrum was Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion Undisclosed to Congress from Bloomberg. Very much made me think of my blog post from a month ago on Boomerang by Michael Lewis as well as Wall Street Isn't Winning – It's Cheating by Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone.

Also on money, but not in the same curl your stomach vein were two short pieces from the Nov 21 issue of Businessweek. All Those Stock Buybacks: A Bullish Sign? is on the trend of companies feeling valuations low and buying their own stock and James Altucher, Wall Street's Keeper of the Pain on the venture capitalist and author (of both books and his self-titled blog).

Boomerang by Michael Lewis & Matt Taibbi on Occupy Wall Street

Have come across some excellent writing lately on money and markets. Form of the works have been in a quote, a magazine piece and the Michael Lewis book Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World.

If Lewis's 2010 book The Big Short (which I reviewed here) looked at the recent financial meltdown at a corporate level in relation to things like Credit Default Swaps and CDOs, this new effort looks at financial train wrecks with a much larger country level. It's a riveting and fast read and separated into five sections (with my thoughts on each)...

Iceland - "Hey, let's all become heavily leveraged investment bankers assuming the markets will rise forever. What could go wrong?"

Greece - "I want services provided by the government, but see no reason to do things like pay my taxes since the government doesn't seem to mind me not paying."

Ireland - A bit like Iceland, but financial insanity through real estate development.

Germany - The adult in the room... needing to decide how much pain to take on themselves to try to rescue the irresponsible kids (or PIGS).

United States - Perhaps the most interesting simply because it's local (including Lewis writing on Vallejo and San Jose here in the Bay Area). Covers the concept of country level financial problems (like underfunded pension obligations) simply getting pushed down to the cities. Ramifications of this... bad.

Lewis has quite the talent for creating easy reading on complex topics and with Boomerang, writes an excellent (and frightening) book on bad money decisions run amok.

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On the same subject of money, greed and decisions made at a high level impacting the common folk was a piece for Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi. "Wall Street Isn't Winning – It's Cheating" is a look at Occupy Wall Street and offers a harsh indictment of the financial system and how it's structurally set up to reward the bankers who run it. Very well written and thoughtful story.

Finally, it's only a quote, but in the same vein as the Lewis book and Taibbi article was that below from Businessweek by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (author of The Black Swan about outside of normal financial events)...

"We're not living in capitalism. We're not living in Socialism. We're living in some wierd economic situation with the banks controlling more than their share. It's like we're serving them rather than them serving us."