According to AdAge, General Motors spent $3.4 billion on advertising in 2003. What’s the thinking behind this? Is it a proven return on investment or an old habit? Perhaps they should cut back while they get back in the black.
The company is blaming its annual expenditures of $5.6 billion on healthcare for current and retired employees for much of its financial ills.
An update on two stocks mentioned by NewMexiKen earlier this year:
Apple is around $38 today. It split some time back, so a share bought for $64.56 on January 11 (the day it announced the iShuffle and Mini Mac) would be worth about $76 today, or up 18%.
Google is at $280. It opened at $85 last August when the company went public. If you made an investment in the original offering, you would have tripled your money and then some.
The chief economist for the Mortgage Bankers Assn. is worried enough about the torrid housing market to get out of it.
“I’m going to rent for a while,” said Douglas Duncan, who expects “significant reversals” in regions that have enjoyed strong home price appreciation, including Washington, D.C., Florida and California. He plans to sell his suburban Washington home, which has tripled in value since he bought it a dozen years ago, and move into an apartment.
Duncan is among a multitude of experts and consumers across the country debating the possibility of a housing bubble — a condition where prices have risen so far out of hand that they eventually crash.
A rather interesting column from Joseph Nocera: Google This: Is Microsoft Still a Bully? He begins:
Not long ago, I went to Washington for a dinner given by a friend. She wanted to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the end of the Microsoft antitrust trial, which she had covered for a news agency and I had covered for Fortune magazine.
In all, about 10 of us made it to the dinner, and it wasn’t long before we were regaling one another about the “good old days” of the trial – laughing at the way Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson used to roll his eyes at Microsoft’s witnesses, and recalling how the superlawyer David Boies, whose daily skewering of Microsoft gave the trial most of its entertainment value, would put straws in his jacket pocket when he went out drinking with us so he could keep track of how many drinks he had.
Maybe I’m just easily amazed by information technology, but NewMexiKen is fascinated to find that when I write a check (albeit very few anymore) I can view an image of the check online as soon as it clears.
And speaking of finances — there is no apparent correlation between the local sales tax rate and the amount Comcast charges me each month. They’re charging too little. Out of idle curiosity I called, but they were clueless. Only thing I can figure is because food is now sales tax free in New Mexico, Comcast doesn’t have to charge us sales tax for the Food Channel.
Chart from The New York Times. Found at Pandagon.net.
Andrew Tobias has some scary thoughts: Are We Lagging Technologically? Here’s his concluding words:
And what are we to make of the notion that our kids go to school 180 days a year, while our competition’s kids go to school 240 days a year? Can this bode well for our relative prosperity 20 and 40 years from now?
Or of the more recent Tom Friedman column in which he quoted Bill Gates — “American high schools are obsolete . . . [E]ven when they are working exactly as designed, they cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.” Friedman translated Gates’s comments this way: “If we don’t fix American education, I will not be able to hire your kids.”? And he noted that “neither Tom DeLay [nor] Bill Frist called a late-night session of Congress — or even a daytime one — to discuss what Mr. Gates was saying. They were too busy pandering to those Americans who don’t even believe in evolution.”
Which perhaps brings me to the last bad sign of late — according to an NBC news poll, about 65% of us do not believe in evolution.
Have I mentioned frequently enough that any equity portfolio should include international index funds as well as domestic?
It’s a cell phone tower.
Here’s the story from The New York Times.
Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center paid more than $1.3 million over the last year for the services of a radiologist who said he worked an average of 20 hours a day, seven days a week, during one recent six-month stretch, records show.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 3000 for the first time just 14 years ago today (1991).
The Dow’s all time high was 11722.98 on January 14, 2000.
The day’s declines were the worst daily falls of the year, in percentage terms, for all three market gauges. And after three consecutive selloffs, the market slump was the worst weekly decline since August. For the year to date, the Dow is down 6.5 percent, the S.&P. 500, down 5.7 percent, and Nasdaq, down 12.3 percent.
As forecast here at NewMexiKen on January 31:
NewMexiKen adjusted my mutual funds today, moving from conservative to more adventuresome investments. Trust me, stock values of all kinds will crash soon.
Not sure exactly why, but I liked the Coffee story relayed by Andrew Tobias. It’s well told, and that may be enough.
You might find it interesting, too.
intrigues me. Two weeks ago I returned three DVDs to Netflix (mine go to Denver) from my daughter’s mailbox in northern Virginia. The very next day Netflix sent me the usual emails saying each had arrived! It had not been 24 hours since I put the little red flag up. (Congratulations U.S. Postal Service for your part in this.)
This week the video I returned from Albuquerque this past Saturday seems to have gotten lost in Sunday’s Denver blizzard. I’m wondering if there isn’t a mail truck stuck in the snow somewhere up around Raton Pass.
Last weekend’s films by the way were Closer and Vera Drake. Excellent, excellent acting in both. (Three Academy award nominations between them.) The Motorcycle Diaries is sitting here waiting for my attention and Finding Neverland is on its way to me.
Wal-Mart has embarked on a partnership with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and is committing $35 million over the next decade to purchase one acre of what it calls “priority wildlife habitat” for every acre it has developed for company use. The Arizona-Utah purchase is one of six projects Wal-Mart is seeding initially.
After centuries of cowering helplessly as their owners bash them every morning, alarm clocks are starting to run away.
“Clocky,” invented by a grad student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, is round and furry and has wheels. It takes off in search of a hiding place as soon as you hit the snooze button.
That you have to get out of bed to hunt it down after it rolls off the nightstand is considered good news by slugabeds like its creator, Gauri Nanda.
“I’ve hit the snooze button for, like, two hours,” the 25-year-old said.
NewMexiKen’s auto insurance premium for the next six months is 17% less than it has been.
I suppose they figure, what with $2.50-a-gallon for gasoline, I won’t be driving as much.
From the Financial Times:
All of this suggests that tipping exists for psychological rather than economic reasons. The display of wealth, status and power, the seeking of social approval, conformity, a (forlorn) hope for future, better service, and guilt over inequitable relationships are all theories put forward to explain why we tip.
Some findings:
[T]he research again finds that regular customers do not vary tips in accordance with service quality. Also, diners themselves admit that how much they tip is not affected by whether they visit an establishment often or never again. …
In one study, waitresses’ tips increased by 17 per cent if they wore flowers in their hair. …
Another of Lynn’s studies involved the server drawing a happy face on the bill. On average this increased a waitress’s tip by 18 per cent, but decreased a waiter’s by 9 per cent.
Link via Marginal Revolution via Kottke.
General Motors Corp. has pulled its advertising from the Los Angeles Times over what it called factual errors and misrepresentations in the newspaper, a spokesman for the automaker said Thursday. …
Times auto critic Dan Neil Wednesday published a critical column about the company’s brand strategy and called on GM to “dump” Chairman and Chief Executive Rick Wagoner.
Reuters via the Los Angeles Times.
Kudos to Continental Airlines for still making the effort to provide real food. True, it’s just a sandwich, chips and a candy, but much appreciated none-the-less.
In fact, NewMexiKen recommends Continental if you have a choice.
(I received no compensation for this endorsement. Alas.)
“Prices paid by consumers rose by 0.4 percent in February, in large part because energy costs have gone up, according to Labor Department statistics released today.”
The Fed raised interest rates today — the seventh time in the past year. It’s because they fear inflation they say. Hey clowns, get out of your limousines and buy some gasoline and you’ll figure out inflation isn’t exactly the result of an overheated economy. It’s the result of $56 a barrel oil.
And remember, inflation (at least moderate inflation) is the debtors friend.
TiVo stock closed at $3.83 Monday. It closed at $6.70 yesterday. That’s up 75%.
It’s back off to $5.75 at the moment. Still.
(Their deal with Comcast was the catalyst.)
“We don’t enjoy sitting on $43 billion of cash equivalents that are earning paltry returns,” writes Warren Buffett, Berkshire’s chairman. “Instead, we yearn to buy more fractional interests similar to those we now own or – better still – more large businesses outright. We will do either, however, only when purchases can be made at prices that offer us the prospect of a reasonable return on our investment.”
As quoted in Five Years Later and Still Floating, an op-ed piece in The New York Times.
Percentage change since March 2002 in total U.S. corporate profits, as valued in dollars: 39 [Silvercrest Asset Management Group (N.Y.C.)]
Percentage change as valued in euros: -8
