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According to reports, Obama has picked Timothy Geithner, 47, to head up the Treasury Department at one of the most crucial times in its history. Geithner, who will replace current Secretary Hank Paulson, is the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank where he won praise for his early efforts to regulate the booming credit derivatives market, which is attributed with causing the current financial crisis. "If the brave new world of finance is daunting, the man in charge of it is not," a 2007 profile in the New York Times read. "With a boyish charm and a dry sense of humor, Mr. Geithner has taken advantage of the current calm waters of the financial markets to take an active stance, rallying Wall Street to peel apart the market of credit derivatives to try to understand its potential risks." His reputation on Wall Street is strong and the stock market rallied today after word of his appointment got out. Like several Obama picks, Geithner is a Clinton administration vet, having served in the Treasury Department under Larry Summers.
How close is funnyman Al Franken to the Senate? According to his campaign, his deficit against Norm Coleman is down to less than 100 votes. The state has so far recounted 51.1 percent of the votes, and Franken’s team is including in that calculation some 800 contested ballots that it believes will easily be resolved. A lawyer for Franken adds that “there are more Democratic areas with votes left to be counted than Republican.”
So what’s in store for Citigroup, which lost half of its value this week and is worth 10 percent of its 2006 value? According to The Guardian, CEO Vikram Pandit has made clear to senior executives that in today’s emergency meetings “everything is on the table.” Possibilities include a merger with another banking group, a sale of the company, and a fire sale of assets and divisions. Executives have already begun drawing up plans for the sale of Smith Barney, the global credit card unit, and the transaction services unit. Citi’s shares today were down to $3.54. If they fail to rise above $5 before the year’s end, big mutual funds and other institutional investors will be forced to sell their holdings, as rules prohibit them from investing clients’ money in such cheap stocks. Such a move would likely a cause a total collapse of share prices.
A dispatch from The New York Times-Wall Street Journal war: According to Bloomberg, the recession is likely to increase competition for advertising revenue between the two papers, and the Journal is setting its sights on the Times’ clients. The Journal’s expansion of general news coverage and a new lifestyle magazine have attracted desirable luxury advertisers to the paper. Saks Inc. recently began advertising in the Journal, after buying in the Times since 1924. Dolce & Gabbana’s and Louis Vuitton’s parent companies also started advertising in the Journal. The Times, meanwhile, is expanding financial news coverage and Bill Keller can name more than 25 business stories where the Times beat the Journal this year. As of September, the Journal’s circulation had risen 2.4 percent to 1.4 million from the previous year, while the Times’ fell 5.5 percent to 858,985.
Obama’s Cabinet—Daschle at HHS, Napolitano at Homeland Security, Holder at Justice, Clinton at State—is so well known, that it may come as a surprise to learn that none of these appointment have been officially announced. Obama’s tight control of his campaign “has all but dissolved in the leak-centric world of Washington,” The Washington Post reports. According to one lobbyist, “There is nothing they can do about it—vetting and FBI background checks require a lot of calls, and that leads to leaks.” Despite the loose control, “Democrats mindful of former president Bill Clinton's plodding 1992 transition are pleased with the rapid pace.”
How’s Mayor Bloomberg’s third-term election bid looking? Not too hot according to a new poll from Marist University. Bloomberg led likely rival Anthony Weiner 51 to 37, but Marist pollster Lee Miringoff said “51 percent is about as slim as a majority as you can have at this point.” Weiner and other potential rival, Bill Thompson, have been railing against Bloomberg’s revoking of New York City’s term limits. Bloomberg’s approval rating also fell to a three-year low of 59 percent.
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it only resulted in paid leave for some Verizon Wireless employees. In a press release last night, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam announced that employees had "accessed and viewed" Barack Obama's personal cellphone account, which was inactive. The accessed device was a regular flip-phone, so no emails or other data was involved. According to the release, those "employees with legitimate business needs for access will be returned to their positions," while others will join the ranks of the recently unemployed. "We apologize to President-Elect Obama and will work to keep the trust our customers place in us every day," McAdam said in a statement.
Reporters from Politico to The New York Daily News—which splashed the news on its front page with “Hill’s the One”—are all being told the same thing by unnamed Obama “aides.” Hillary is “on track” to becoming Obama’s secretary of state, the investigation into Bill’s fundraising has passed their smell test, and the appointment will be announced “after Thanksgiving.” So Obama continues to assemble his “team of rivals,” the Clinton saga takes an interesting twist and turn, and “No Drama Obama” has invited a little excitement into his administration. The New York Times reports that Hillary confidants are confirming her selection.
Sad news for fans of good TV: Eli Stone, Pushing Daisies, and Dirty Sexy Money "have effectively been canceled." Michael Ausiello at Entertainment Weekly rang the death knell for these ABC shows this morning. Their 13-episode production orders will be completed, but it’s unclear if they will air. Pushing Daisies creator Bryan Fuller said, "I'm so very proud of this show and grateful for everyone's hard work in bringing it to life … We would love to continue telling this season's arcs in a comic book format, just to tie up all the loose strings—and believe me, there are plenty."
Been wondering what those new boxes popping up on Google’s results page are? In an effort to make their search engine more interactive, Google has launched WikiSearch, and, so far, the reactions are mixed. Googlers can now read and write comments on search results, and customize results by reordering and deleting links. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch comments that Google search was "one of the few things on the Internet that isn't [broken]" but finds the new layout "a mess of arrows and troll comments." Google will track their users’ preferences in order to improve the product.
The former lord in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, proprietor of the Telegraph group in London and The Jerusalem Post, among many other titles, has applied to President Bush via the Department of Justice in Washington for his 6½-year sentence for fraud to be commuted. In March, Black began serving time in the low-security section of the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex in central Florida, after being convicted of obstructing justice and defrauding shareholders of his former newspaper company, Hollinger International Inc. Now he is hoping he will enjoy the commutation extended to Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, found guilty of lying to a grand jury.
The nominations for the Bad Sex in Fiction award, mounted by the Literary Review in London, that honors writers who write embarrassing sex scenes, this year includes John Updike, Isabel Fonseca, Paulo Coelho, Simon Sebag Montefiore, and Tony Blair’s former press secretary Alastair Campbell. They will have to try hard to beat last year’s winner, Norman Mailer, who won the award, which is in the shape of a foot, from beyond the grave with a particularly silly scene in his novel The Castle in the Forest. An example of Campbell’s excruciating prose? “He wasn’t sure where his penis was in relation to where he wanted it to be, but when her hand curled around it once more, and she pulled him towards her, it felt right. Then, as her hand joined the other on his neck and she started making more purring noises, now with little squeals punctuating them, he was pretty sure he was losing his virginity,” Campbell writes. And Montefiore, from his new novel, the Soviet saga Sashenka: “He pulled down her brassiere, cupping her breasts, sighing in bliss. ‘The blue veins are divine,’ he whispered.” Past winners include Tom Wolfe.
The global trends report for 2025, published every four years by “the finest US intelligence analysts,” the National Intelligence Council, predicts global warming will lengthen Canada’s and Russia’s food growing seasons, food shortages may destabilize Asia and South Africa, and Al Qaeda could crumble. However, the dollar is likely to lose its dominance as a currency, and America will dwindle as a superpower as the government turns to solving domestic problems rather than global ones. The hegemony the US has enjoyed since the end of the Soviet Union will come to an end. On the up and up: China. “On present trends China will have the world’s second largest economy by 2025, and could well be the largest importer of natural resources and the biggest polluter. It will be a leading military power, with a considerable navy to protect the sea lanes that deliver its raw materials, and at the same time wield hi-tech asymmetric tools,” The Guardian reports.
Former Senator Fred Thompson is leaving the national stage to resume his acting career. Famous for his television role in Law & Order, he had flirted with becoming head of the Republican National Committee. But he has told his former finance chairman, B.C. “Scooter” Clippard, that he is returning to acting. “He seriously considered [the RNC post], but he called and said that it was not in the cards,” Clippard said. “He has some wonderful opportunities back in the television market that probably financially far outweigh being chair of the RNC.” Although Thompson’s presidential bid didn’t pan out, he did at least get to play one on TV: Ulysses S. Grant in the 2007 TV movie Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
An investigation by ARTnews into sculptures attributed to the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí reveals that things are rarely what they seem. “There’s confusion in the Dalí sculpture market,” says Joan Manuel Sevillano Campalans, manager of the Dalí Foundation in Figueres, which manages Dalí’s estate. “There’s confusion about the provenance, about the definitions used; confusion in the use of Dalí’s brand, his image, and his name; over how involved Dalí really was in the creation of the different works; and over the numbers and sizes of the editions…We are worried that collectors often aren’t fully aware of what they are buying.” There are at least two ongoing criminal investigations, linked to dealers in Dalí sculptures in Russia and Germany. You can’t help thinking that Dalí, a great lover of pranks and mischief, would have enjoyed the mayhem he left in his wake.
Roger Ailes, 68, the former Republican strategist for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush who founded Fox News and Fox Business News, has signed with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for another five years. “Financial terms of the agreement weren’t immediately disclosed,” reports THR.com, “but Ailes’s current salary is $5 million a year, not including bonuses and other compensation that earned him $19 million in 2008 and $10.9 million in 2007, according to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission documents.” Asked why he signed, Ailes replied, “I just enjoy the work, and I don’t have any hobbies, so what the hell am I going to do?” “I look forward to carrying out Mr. Murdoch’s legendary vision in the future,” he added.
On Thursday, pop star Ashlee Simpson-Wentz and singer husband Pete Wentz became parents for the first time. The bouncing baby boy’s name is…Bronx Mowgli Wentz. Naming a child after a New York borough and Kipling’s Jungle Book character is distinctive even compared to the strangest of celebrity baby names. And just check out those initials. The Disney-loving duo married in May.
So how’d that $20 million party at the new Atlantis hotel in Dubai go last night? Its fireworks display could be seen from outer space, Kylie Minogue performed, and Nobu Matsuhisa cooked. Samantha Ronson (referred to, by Bloomberg, as Lindsay Lohan’s “DJ friend”) mixed 1980s pop music, and Michael Jordan, Janet Jackson, and Mischa Barton rubbed shoulders with Middle Eastern oil titans. The Atlantis boasts a 1,500 rooms, a dolphin bay, a water park, and, at $42,000 a night, quite possibly the world’s most expensive suite. And yet, despite its excesses, might the party have signaled the end of an era? The state-owned company that paid for half of the party is in need of capital restructuring, according to a Citigroup report. According to Bloomberg, “The ‘Dubai dream’ may be over as lower oil prices will leave smaller fiscal surpluses among its crude-exporting neighbors to invest in the emirate.”
Ciccone M.L. v. Ritchie G.S. was all over in 54 seconds. Madonna and her husband, Guy Ritchie, director of the cockney gangster movie Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, agreed a divorce in London this morning. The “decree nisi” was granted for “irreconcilable differences” in a low-key affair, and the couple did not attend the verdict. Simon Bethel, from white-shoe law firm Mills & Reeve, said the pair may have requested to “circumvent the normal divorce process” to limit press attention. She will keep her fortune of about $450 million, he his of a mere $45 million. “The couple will share custody of their sons, eight-year-old Rocco and three-year-old adopted David, who will divide their time between New York with their mother and London with their father. Madonna’s 12-year-old daughter Lourdes, from a previous relationship, will live in America with her mother,” reports The Telegraph.
The absence of democracy in communist China is leading to direct action as anxious workers, fired in the wake of the worldwide economic meltdown, are taking to the streets to protest. As John M. Glionna of The Los Angeles Times reports from Beijing, “Chinese economists say that rising wages throughout China have led many laborers to expect better working conditions and residents to demand a more accountable government.” “There is no channel to allow people to express their will. They lack the right to speak, the right to organize and unionize to represent their interest, therefore they can only use an irrational way by demonstrating or rioting to solve problems,” said Hu Xingdou, an economics professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology. So far the Chinese authorities have been wary of crushing the “irrational” protests.
On the same day a federal judge ruled that five suspected terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay should be released for lack of evidence, Michael Mukasey, Bush’s attorney general, collapsed while giving a speech to the Federalist Society in Washington. Mukasey had been speaking for about 20 minutes about the Bush administration’s success in the fight against terrorism when he lost consciousness and was rushed to George Washington University Hospital. A statement by the Justice Department today said the former New York judge had not suffered a stroke or heart problems and that he was given a clean bill of health by doctors. He was released from the hospital this afternoon. Meanwhile, an Op-Ed in The Wall Street Journal by Mukasey urges Congress to pass clear rules about who should and who should not be termed an “enemy combatant” when the enemy is not a state but a transnational organization like Al Qaeda.
Two foreign policy heavyweights weigh in with some advice for Barack Obama—and Hillary Clinton—in today’s Washington Post: Fix the Arab-Israeli dispute soonest. “Immediate attention to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute would help cement the goodwill that Obama’s election engendered,” write Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski in a co-written Op-Ed. Resolution would allow Middle Eastern governments to support the United States in solving regional problems without alienating their publics, stigmatize Hamas and Hezbollah, and put Iran on the defensive. “The key element in any new initiative,” they write, “would be for the U.S. president to declare publicly what, in the view of this country, the basic parameters of a fair and enduring peace ought to be. These should contain four principal elements: 1967 borders, with minor, reciprocal and agreed-upon modifications; compensation in lieu of the right of return for Palestinian refugees; Jerusalem as real home to two capitals; and a nonmilitarized Palestinian state.”
Les Cahiers du Cinema, the influential, highfalutin magazine for Parisian intellectuals that made American moviemakers the toast of all France in the 1950s, has pronounced: The best movie ever made is Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. No surprise there, perhaps, because the cod biopic of a press magnate monster based on the life of William Randolph Hearst regularly tops the lists. But at number two is the quiet and underrated masterpiece, and the sole movie made by the British character actor Charles Laughton, The Night of the Hunter. It tied for second with Jean Renoir’s World War I satire The Rules of the Game. The Americans flooded the list with every great director from John Ford to Ernst Lubitsch. Full list below.
Looking for a bargain? How about $74,100 for a share of Berkshire Hathaway? That’s the cheapest stock in Warren Buffett’s company has cost since 2003, down 51 percent since an all-time high of $151,650 in December. And there is even speculation that Berkshire might lose its AAA credit rating. So has Buffett lost his touch? Not quite. “Everything you’re seeing that affects other companies is eventually going to catch up with Berkshire,” says the man who wrote a book called Even Buffett Isn't Perfect. “We’re buying Berkshire like crazy,” said a hedge-fund manager, who called the idea that Berkshire faces similar risks to AIG “insane.”
It’s not often that a pollster admits an error. They deal in such slender differences in figures and pride themselves on keen interpretation. So it is rare and surprising to hear John Zogby, head of the eponymous pollsters, admitting, “This was not Zogby International’s finest hour. “Something, somehow, fell through the cracks,” notwithstanding a defiant denial of culpability on his website the day before. In dispute is a survey complete for Ziegler about how much Obama voters knew about politics, a contribution to a Ziegler documentary movie about how the press swung the presidential election. In brief, Zogby extrapolated how voters came to back Obama based on slender evidence –interviews with just 10 Obama voters. The Wall Street Journal’s numbers guy dissects Zogby’s shaky reasoning.
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