blogads for the opinion makers

WSJ:

But these bailouts are hugely risky — as reflected in the high cost of insuring government debt. Credit Derivatives Research’s government-risk index, which measures credit-default swap premiums on seven large sovereign borrowers including the U.S., U.K. and Japan, continued to rise this year even as the VIX fell. It currently stands at 75 compared to a pre-boom level of around 3 and implies a VIX in the 60s, according to CDR.

Though the Fed has been buying hundreds of billions in Treasuries and corporate bonds to keep a lid on rates, the government’s skyrocketing debt sales to fund the deficit, the gradual erosion of the foreign appetite for US debt and the fear that the Fed’s bond buying will itself eventually fuel inflation, make it inevitable that 30-year t-bond yields, currently at 4%, will be far higher in coming months and years.

Geography of jobs.

Swine flu map.

Having screwed around with Yahoo Pipes and other RSS tools and found them never quite doing exactly what we needed, we’ve built a new tool to robustly combine and permutate feeds. If you’re interested in helping us test the tool, drop me a line.

For all his pursuits, Hilton keeps his goal simple: Media domination.

On a recent trip to New York, we stopped through Brooks Brothers on 44th and Madison, where I bought suits while I worked on Wall Street in the 80s.

Brooks Brothers, once Wall Street’s bustling official dressing room, was a silk-strewn and worsted-wool-festooned desert.

Of course, two seconds of thinking made it obvious that no sane banker is today spending $80 on a hank of silk to wrap around his neck when in doubt about his job prospects. A simple rope will do.

And who wants to spend $1600 on a suit, below, and then find himself only wearing said suit to Starbucks to sip coffee and browse TheLadders? A track suit will suffice.

Suits are useless as anything other than social devices traditionally deployed to signal that the wearer is not a manual laborer, that the wearer is a cut or three above the hoi polloi. White collar and all that, don’t ya know.

But now, of course, a suit is worn predominantly by folks who made a bunch of lousy bets with other people’s money or who are now living large on the public dole.

When the economy comes back, will the suit return too? Not if banking loses its aura as an esteemed dynamo of capitalist innovation. You don’t find a soul wearing a suit at SXSW, where the creative class — programmers, designers, writers and ad execs — gather to hobnob every March. Suits may soon the way of the top hat, the cummerbund and 3% ten year US T-notes.

Newspapers plummeting versus last March:

USA TODAY — 2,113,725 – (-7.46%)
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL — 2,082,189 — 0.61%
THE NEW YORK TIMES — 1,039,031 — (-3.55%)
LOS ANGELES TIMES — 723,181 — (-6.55%)
THE WASHINGTON POST — 665,383 — (-1.16%)

DAILY NEWS (NEW YORK) — 602,857 — (-14.26%)
NEW YORK POST — 558,140 — (-20.55%)
CHICAGO TRIBUNE — 501,202 — (-7.47%)
HOUSTON CHRONICLE — 425,138 — (-13.96%)
THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC — 389,701 — (-5.72%)

THE DENVER POST (02/28/2009 to 03/31/2009) — 371,728 — N/A
NEWSDAY — 368,194 — (-3.01%)
THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS — 331,907 — (-9.88%)
STAR-TRIBUNE, MINNEAPOLIS — 320,076 — (-0.71%)
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES — 312,141 — (-0.04%)

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE — 312,118 — (-15.72%)
THE BOSTON GLOBE — 302,638 — (-13.68%)
THE PLAIN DEALER, CLEVELAND — 291,630 — (-11.70%)
DETROIT FREE PRESS — 290,730 — (-5.90%)
THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER — 288,298 — (-13.72%)

THE STAR-LEDGER, NEWARK, N.J. — 287,082 — (-16.82%)
ST. PETERSBURG (FLA.) TIMES — 283,093 — (-10.42%)
THE OREGONIAN, PORTLAND — 268,512 — (-11.76%)
THE ATLANTA JOURNAL CONSTITUTION — 261,828 — (-19.91%)
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE — 261,253 — (-9.53%)

I didn’t want to miss Microsoft’s report last week. CNN reported: “Microsoft’s Online Services division, which includes the online portal MSN and its Internet advertising sales, lost $575 million in the quarter, and sales in the division were down 14% from the same quarter a year earlier. Microsoft said the loss in its ad sales division was due to the significant decline of average rates in display advertising.”

“Marketing services revenues from Yahoo owned and operated sites slipped 10% to $872 million in the first quarter from $966 million last year, driven by a 3% decline in search advertising revenue and a 13% drop in display advertising revenue.”

There’s been a lot of what the Hungarians call “hooo-ha” over Mark Penn’s recent WSJ article about the burgeoning army of salaried bloggers in the US.

The lede sets the tone: “In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters.”

But the data just doesn’t line up with Penn’s assertion. First, we’re told that “20 million Americans” blog. Later, we’re told that “bloggers who do it for a living successfully are 2% of bloggers overall.” That would be 40k bloggers. But somehow this number inflates to 452,000 people who “use blogging as their primary source of income.” Then we hear that “Most bloggers for hire … do it for about 35 months, and make a few hundred dollars.”

The final statement is correct. The rest is what we Americans call hooey.

AP reports: “While most of the erosion was concentrated in the Times Co.’s newspapers, its Internet ad revenue also sagged by 8 percent, or $3.6 million.”

The online advertising pie is still growing slightly even in the recession, but the number of publishers with forks is growing much faster.

Someone asked about our logo.

Here’s a distilled version of its origin. Boy was our first logo ugly.

Luckily, we had a contest and got reader feedback.

Whew!

It’s worth reading “The Quite Coup” in this week’s Atlantic Magazine.

In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again). In each of those cases, global investors, afraid that the country or its financial sector wouldn’t be able to pay off mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending. And in each case, that fear became self-fulfilling, as banks that couldn’t roll over their debt did, in fact, become unable to pay. This is precisely what drove Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy on September 15, causing all sources of funding to the U.S. financial sector to dry up overnight. Just as in emerging-market crises, the weakness in the banking system has quickly rippled out into the rest of the economy, causing a severe economic contraction and hardship for millions of people.

But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.

This graph tells the whole story:

WSJ reports:

State and local sales taxes, among the largest sources of revenue for municipalities, fell 6.1% in the fourth quarter of last year, as consumers bought fewer clothes, ate out less and canceled vacations. Revenue from personal income taxes was down 1.1% in the fourth quarter; corporate income taxes dropped 15.5%, reflecting weaker profits.

The declines have continued through the beginning of this year. In the first two months of 2009, the 41 states that have reported tax revenue saw total receipts decline 12.8%, versus the same period a year ago.

Last week Tina Merrill joined us a COO in our Carrboro NC office.

Our US staff has grown steadily since 2002 to the current 17, so we’re all very excited to draw on Tina’s great energy, organizational skills and business insights.

Tina spent the last 3 years working as Finance Director for the Southern Rural Development Initiative. Before that, Tina founded and ran Citizen Canine, a luxury dog care business, in Oakland CA. Tina graduated from what is formally known the Stanford Graduate School for Business after a stint in the energy industry. (Her employer there had been acquired by Enron, so Tina can share some horrifying tales from inside the E-beast.) Rounding out her checkered past, Tina graduated from Harvard with a BA in economics.

The Palm.

Waiting for Godot with Nathan Lane and John Goodman.

Gotta take an hour to plow through these graphs.