Pregnant CEO tests glass ceiling

For all these gender garbage, and speculation whether she can handle the job, what she will do next, and those indignant that she is called to question - there is a simple benchmark to be used - Yahoo's share price and dividends. 

99% of what is on CNN, CNBC and media is all noise.

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Letters: To break glass ceiling, also dispel dad stereotype


Updated 19m ago



USA TODAY's article "Pregnant CEO tests glass ceiling" adds to the problem it attempts to address. It says "women are still assumed to be the main caretakers of children" ("Pregnant Yahoo CEO ignites maternity debate"). I'm a part-time male physician who served as the primary caretaker for my two daughters. During my subsequent divorce from their mother, I was directly asked, "How can you take care of the girls while you are working?"



Araya Diaz, Getty Images, for TechCrunch

Mayer: "My maternity leave will be a few weeks long, and I'll work throughout it," she says.
Enlarge


Araya Diaz, Getty Images, for TechCrunch

Mayer: "My maternity leave will be a few weeks long, and I'll work throughout it," she says.

Sponsored Links

Until people, and articles such as this one, stop assuming that women are the main caretakers of children, they cannot expect women to break the glass ceiling in the workplace.

Mark Shumate; Roswell, Ga.

Modify workplace environment

Since Yahoo's new CEO Marissa Mayer, who recently announced she was pregnant, wants to stay in the "rhythm of things," it will be interesting to watch exactly what rhythm she feels as the baby develops and once the baby arrives.

I wish her success in helping establish work rhythms to better suit family life along with technical leadership and vision at Yahoo. Too often, we let work dominate our entire culture.

She has a unique opportunity to help show a better way, instead of simply conforming to current concepts.

Mary Collier; Beavercreek, Ohio

USATODAY OPINION


Letters to the editor

USA TODAY receives about 300 letters each day. Most arrive via e-mail, but we also receive submissions by postal mail and fax. We publish about 35 letters each week.

We often select comments that respond directly to USA TODAY articles or opinion pieces. Letters that are concise and make one or two good points have the best chance of being selected, as do letters that reflect the vibrant debate around the nation on a particular subject.

We aim to make the letters platform a place where readers, not just writers representing institutions or interest groups, have their say.
How to submit letters

Pregnancy will hinder CEO

New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer went from poster child for breaking the final glass ceiling to being the poster child for why most women earn less than men.

There's no way a six-months pregnant woman can have the energy to work 10 to 14 hours per day, including many weekends, which is expected of a CEO at a top company.

Once her child is born, Mayer will have an easy decision to make. She is wealthy and has proved she is smart enough to become a Silicon Valley CEO. Why would she see a reason to turn her baby over to child care? Out the Yahoo door she will go and never look back.

Bob Munson; Newbury Park, Calif.

Questioning of Mayer disappointing

I was shocked that in 2012, USA TODAY published an article about a "heated debate" over whether a woman was capable of working after having a baby. Maybe we should all stay home, make cookies and watch reruns of Father Knows Best. What's next, questioning a woman's right to vote? A disappointing article to say the least. I say yahoo for Marissa Mayer and boo for USA TODAY.

Cynthia Galle; Madison, Conn.

Prospective Singapore students for new Yale campus angry at “contradictions”

So Samantha H feels lied to because her parents wanted her to join a university that would encourage freedom of expression. What a pity - a very intelligent woman who needs to rely on her parents to make her life decisions.

In any case, Yale came to Singapore with eyes opened. Singapore is a business city and its success is premised on stability. Liberal Arts and dreamy students trying to create a democratic utopia don't have a place here. If these people think Singapore is bad, try Saudi Arabia, US's best friend.

Prospective Singapore students for new Yale campus angry at “contradictions”
Mariam Yuan | 22 July 2012 | 0 Comments



Yale University in Singapore facing massive criticism over new campus.

SINGAPORE: These recent high school students were excited about potentially studying at Yale University’s new Singapore campus. Now, however, they are angry and frustrated at the American university’s decision to crackdown on protests on campus.

“I just feel we have been lied to,” said British-Singaporean Samantha H., who told Bikyamasr.com that her parents would rather see her study in the UK as a result. “They don’t want me at a university that seems to care more about the money involved than students’ rights and freedom of expression,” she added.

For many, the idea that students at Yale University would be barred from holding any sort of protest on campus, is a deal breaker. They argued that when the school announced it would open in the city, eagerness awaited. But now, that optimism has turned to antagonism, and calls for the school to remain away.

“I just wish Yale would go away because we all were thinking it would be a way to start developing our society into a progressive one that allows protests and dissent,” argued Thomas Yang, who will enter his first year of university at Northwestern University’s Qatar campus in the fall. He had wanted to attend Yale in Singapore, but decided against it because “they are not maintaining what makes the university great. It’s students do not seem the most important.”

New students will academic freedom but won’t be able to stage protests on campus, Yale officials have said recently as the controversy continues to hit on nerves.

Human rights organizations have lashed out at the Connecticut-based school, calling on the university to maintain its academic and campus integrity, which allows students to hold demonstrations on campus.

“Yale entered its partnership with the National University of Singapore in full awareness that national laws concerning freedom of expression would place constraints on the civic and political behavior of students and faculty,” Yale University President Richard Levin said in a statement issued last Thursday.

Levin said academic freedom and open inquiry on campus would be protected, as would the freedom to publish in academic literature. But students and faculty would have to observe national laws “as do students and faculty in Yale programs from London to Beijing.”

But it has done little to dispel the animosity the school is facing in a country that has promised to open up its streets for political demonstrations in recent years.

Students remain frustrated, but will be unlikely to derail a large number of prospective students from taking to the new classrooms.

BM

M Ravi plans to issue Letter of Demand to Law Society

If he has bipolar disorder, it is no joke. But his actions does make me inclined to feel he isn't really sound.



SINGAPORE: Lawyer M Ravi said he intends to issue a Letter of Demand to the Law Society on Monday.

He said he wants to claim damages, which he said could run into "several hundred thousands of dollars, or even millions".

He also wants the Society to apologise, following the actions of its representative, Mr Wong Siew Hong, who submitted a doctor's letter to the High Court on July 16, stating that Mr Ravi is unfit to practise law.

Mr Ravi said this on Sunday, after a gathering at Speakers' Corner.

At the gathering, attended by about 25 people, Mr Ravi performed Indian dances, in between speeches.

- CNA/cc

Why Smart People Fail to Beat the Market

The reason why these guys won't beat the market is because mentally, they think they can't do it. They find all ways to convince themselves that it is impossible to beat the market, including quoting Issac Newton.

Even in the face of evidence, they try their best to massage data based on risk adjustment.

On the other hand, authors like those of the "Little Book of Beating the Market" grossly portray a real life unrepeatable 20% outperformance of the market.

What a world this place is....



Rick Ferri, Contributor

 I cover low-cost index fund and ETF investing.
ETFs |  3/12/2012 @ 8:51AM |9,309 views
Why Smart People Fail to Beat the Market


There are only two ways to beat the stock market in the long-term, net of expenses: one, trade on superior information; two, be lucky. I tend to believe that getting lucky has a much higher probability of working than finding superior information.

Finding superior information is very difficult. It either requires access that other people don’t have, or the ability to analyze public data better than the vast majority of investors. It’s widely known that most mutual fund managers underperform the market, even with the deep and talented pool of analysts they have access too. Once in a while they’ll get it right, but it’s not often enough to make up their cost.

Princeton professor and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman helps explain why people think they’ll guess right more often than wrong in his new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.  The human brain is incapable of creating new information − it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. To compensate for the unknown, our brains attempt to piece together the best possible story based on what we do know. Sometimes this story is accurate and sometimes not. When we’re right, we think it’s because we’re smart, and when we’re wrong, we think it’s because we didn’t have enough information and there was nothing we could do about it.

Author and money manager Larry Swedroe summarizes why we have a strong desire to believe we’re right all the time in his recent Journal of Indexes article, On Magical Thinking and Investing. He cites excellent behavioral finance sources to explain why investors keep trying to out-guess the markets when the deck is so clearly stacked against them. Swedroe labels the need or desire to be an above-average investor as the “Lake Wobegon effect,” named for the popular radio series set in the mythical town of Lake Wobegon, where all the men are strong, the women are good-looking and the children are above-average.

My argument isn’t to make the claim that the market cannot be beaten with analysis. I would never say that. It’s easy to find mutual fund managers who have beaten the market in the past. It’s much harder to determine if a particular manager was lucky or skillful at doing it.

Eugene F. Fama and Kenneth R. French looked into this issue in their working paper titled, Luck versus Skill in the Cross Section of Mutual Fund Returns. Their study focused on U.S. equity mutual fund managers from 1984 to 2006. It’s no surprise that they found that in aggregate, actively-managed U.S. equity mutual funds performed close to the market before costs and below the market after costs. The big question they were trying answer was did the winning managers have skill or were they just lucky?

To answer this question, Fama and French compared the distribution of fund returns to a distribution of simulated portfolio returns formed with randomly selected stocks. Using a bootstrapping technique, they created thousands of simulated U.S. equity portfolios that selected stocks randomly. The range of actual mutual fund returns was then compared to the range of bootstrapped returns. The overlay was very close, which means most actual fund returns were a result of random stock selection and not skill.

There were, however, a handful of funds whose managers outperformed the bootstrapping method after adjusting for costs and risks. These so-called outliers may possess skill, if only they could be identified. Unfortunately, knowing that a manager had skill ex post doesn’t help investors much, because we need to place our bets ex ante, and it’s not possible to determine which managers will possess skill in the future. We only know that some will.

What if we forget about mutual funds and choose a few good stocks ourselves? We often hear that individual investors have an advantage over large institutional investors because we’re able to act more quickly than the institutions and buy stocks that are too small for them to bother with. Do these apparent advantages increase the odds that we can beat the market with a well-crafted portfolio of individual stocks?

Years ago, I enjoyed following the Wall Street Journal’s “Dartboard” contest. This challenge was inspired by Burton Malkiel’s book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street. The Princeton Professor wrote in his book that “a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s financial pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by experts.”

Here is how the contest worked. The journal’s editors would periodically ask four leading Wall Street investment analysts to submit their single best stock pick. These four picks were matched to four stocks randomly selected by throwing darts at the stock pages of the paper. The eight picks were then printed in the Dartboard column for all to see. Six months later the results were printed.

 More than 100 contests took place over the years. They were followed closely by both efficient market believers and non-believers. When the darts won, efficient market people cheered and pointed to the utter uselessness of trying to beat the market. When the pros won, the non-believers hailed the Wall Street analysts. Their skill was proof that stock picking reins superior.

Truth be told, neither method outperformed the market. The raw data did point to the experts as the overall victory, but this was before adjusting for risk. In addition, just the announcement of a new set of picks caused those stocks to jump on the very first day they were traded. People wanted to believe that the experts were expert. The darts had no such guru status and the stocks they landed on had no jump in price.

Enter an academic to provide impartiality to the Dartboard results. Professor Bing Liang of Case Western Reserve University published a paper in the January 1999 edition of Journal of Business titled “Price Pressure: Evidence from the ‘Dartboard’ Column.” He discounted the jump in the experts’ stock picks on the first day because this return wasn’t possible to earn unless an investor had inside information before the WSJ published the picks. He also adjusted the stock picks for the higher risk the experts were taking. Liang’s conclusion was that, “On average, investors following the experts’ recommendations lost 3.8% on a risk‐adjusted basis over a 6‐month holding period.”

There has been, and always will be, a minority set of investors who beat the market. The question is whether their good fortune is a result of luck or skill? The academic data suggests that most outperformance is a result of good luck.

Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis once observed that, “The secret of success in business is knowing something no one else knows.” Like Onassis, we know there are people in the world that have access to superior information and will make money because of it. We just don’t know who they are, and it may not matter even if we did. Onassis wouldn’t have managed my money even if I did know him.

I don’t have access to superior information. I read the same journals, papers, blogs, and research as everyone else. My advantage is that I know what I don’t know, and unlike most investment advisors, I don’t have to make believe I know more. My portfolio is diversified among low-cost index funds that track the markets.

If you know what I know, or less, then your portfolio should be managed in index funds also. Don’t feel bad about being an index fund investor. Being honest about our skill, or lack of it, releases us from an expensive denial. Index investing is a more profitable investment solution than what the masses of investors who remain in denial will achieve in their lifetimes.

By the way, we’re in good company. Some of the most brilliant minds ever to have walked the face of the Earth have come to the same conclusion. After losing a fortune investing in South Sea Bubble stocks during the early 1700s, Sir Isaac Newton famously confessed, “I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” Now, that’s one really smart guy. He would have liked index funds.

Traxis Partners Founder Barton Biggs Dies at Age 79

 Passing of a Legend. God bless him.

Traxis Partners Founder Barton Biggs Dies at Age 79

By Elizabeth Stanton - Jul 16, 2012

Barton Biggs, the money manager whose attention to emerging markets during a 30-year career at Morgan Stanley (MS) made him one of the first global investment strategists, has died, according to a memo to employees from Morgan Stanley Chairman and Chief Executive OfficerJames Gorman. He was 79.

Biggs died on July 14, according to the memo obtained by Bloomberg News. Jeanmarie McFadden, a spokeswoman for Morgan Stanley, confirmed the contents of the memo to employees.

Biggs predicted the bull market in U.S. stocks that began in 1982 and warned investors away from Japanese shares in 1989 before they collapsed. He sealed his fame telling investors to sell technology companies as they soared in the late 1990s, a judgment dismissed by the press and other investors until the dot-com bubble burst.

“He has a strong constitution for standing away from the crowd,” Ed Hyman, chairman and founder of Institutional Strategy & Investment, said in a 2009 interview. Hyman, an investor in Traxis, played tennis with Biggs.

After retiring from Morgan Stanley in 2003 at age 70, he started Traxis Partners, a hedge fund, with two other Morgan Stanley alumni. While he was blindsided by the credit crisis that sent the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index in 2008 to its biggest annual decline since 1937, he correctly called the bottom in U.S. stocks in March 2009, and Traxis’s flagship fund returned three times the industry average in 2009.

Traxis Manager

Traxis sold stocks in September 2011 and July 2010 just before gains of more than 20 percent in the S&P 500, adding them back as the rallies progressed.

Biggs largely invented the role of chief global strategist, which he assumed at Morgan Stanley in 1985, said Stephen Roach, who joined the firm as an economist in 1982 and became chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia.

“When I joined Morgan Stanley, we were a U.S.-centric business, and within three years, he said, ‘Look, I’m going to step down as U.S. strategist and redefine myself as a global strategist,’” Roach said. “He was way ahead of the pack in discovering and committing himself personally to being one of Wall Street’s first global investors and global strategists.”

Japan Call

Biggs’ calls on U.S. stocks in 1974 and 1982 established his reputation as a prognosticator.

In 1974 he recommended industrial and natural resources stocks instead of the so-called Nifty 50 large companies, which subsequently collapsed. In 1982, he said U.S. stocks were beginning a major bull market. The S&P 500 rose for eight consecutive years.

He warned investors away from Japanese stocks in 1989 as the Nikkei-225 (NKY) stock index approached a peak from which it is down more than 77 percent.

He grew increasingly bearish on U.S. stocks as the Dow Jones Industrial Average posted advances that averaged 25 percent from 1995 to 1999. In a July 1999 Bloomberg Television interview, Biggs said the U.S. stock market was “the biggest bubble in the history of the world.”

Biggs’s view proved right when the Nasdaq Composite Index (CCMP) tumbled 78 percent starting in March 2000.

For three years, Biggs’s reports regularly cited his bullish plumber to illustrate the conventional wisdom of common investors. In 2000 he acknowledged that he had fabricated all the quotes but the first one, “Buy the dips,” which the plumber had told him while unclogging a sink at Biggs’s Sun Valley, Idaho, vacation home in 1997. After Bloomberg News identified the plumber, Biggs apologized and said he had used him as a literary device.

Rally Forecast

In March 2003, Biggs predicted gains of up to 50 percent in U.S. stocks, more for emerging markets. The S&P 500 (SPX) climbed as much as 88 percent, while the MSCI Emerging Markets Index rose more than fourfold.

Biggs, who majored in English and studied creative writing at Yale University, wrote a memoir, “Hedgehogging,” published in 2006. “Wealth, War and Wisdom,” published in 2008, explored how financial markets discounted major turns of events during World War II. He also wrote a novel about a money manager during the boom-and-bust first decade of the 21st century.

“There have been many bear markets that we’ve all lived through, but this has been the most severe, and certainly has had the most personal effects on people’s lives,” Biggs said in 2009, discussing his novel. “I’m interested as to how hubris and arrogance have destroyed people’s lives, and not just the lives of the hedge-fund money managers, but the lives of their wives, children, dogs and everything else.”

Father’s Roles

Barton Michael Biggs was born on Nov. 26, 1932 in New York City, named for his maternal grandmother, whose last name was Barton. He was raised on Manhattan’s East Side and in Washington. His paternal grandfather, Hermann M. Biggs, was the top public-health official in New York and instituted measures that stopped the spread of tuberculosis.

His father, William Biggs, held positions including chief investment officer at Bank of New York from 1931 until his death in 1974, according to his obituary in the New York Times. In Washington, the elder Biggs renegotiated defense contracts for the government during World War II and chaired the executive committee of the Brookings Institution, the public-policy research organization.

Biggs went to Yale, his father’s alma mater. Despite being given a portfolio of about 15 stocks worth about $150,000 when he turned 18, he had little interest in financial matters.

After his graduation in 1955, he served three peacetime years with the U.S. Marines, taught English at a private school and wrote short stories that publishers rejected.

Graham’s Book

Bored and feeling left out of dinner-table conversation between his father and younger brother, Jeremy, who worked for a pension fund, Biggs chose his career. On his father’s advice, he twice read “Security Analysis,” the guide to value investing by Benjamin Graham and David Doddfirst published in 1934. He enrolled in business school at New York University, graduated with distinction, and went to work as an analyst at E.F. Hutton, then the most prestigious retail brokerage, in 1961 through a family connection.

Hedge funds, mostly private pools of capital whose managers participate substantially in the profits from their speculation on whether asset prices will rise or fall, were in their infancy. Biggs helped start one of the first, Fairfield Partners, in 1965. The fund returned 133 percent over the eight years he was there, compared with 19 percent for the S&P 500.

In May 1973 he accepted a partnership offer from Morgan Stanley to create equity research and investment management divisions. While he was more famous for the strategist role, Biggs also led Morgan Stanley’s investment management arm and managed money personally.

Blowback From Investors

In “Hedgehogging,” Biggs wrote that he overheard derogatory comments at a conference in August 1999 after he predicted a panic in technology stocks. Clients withdrew money managed by Morgan Stanley, and Biggs in particular, in the months before equities began their plunge, he said.

Biggs was voted among the top three U.S. portfolio strategists in Institutional Investor magazine’s poll every year from 1976 to 1984. His global asset-allocation team garnered the top ranking in 1998 and 1999, and his global equity strategy team was first in 2000 and 2001.

A lifelong fitness buff, he read stacks of reports while exercising in the Morgan Stanley gym, Roach said. In addition to playing tennis, he routinely climbed mountains in the 12,000 to 15,000 foot range, including Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn in the Alps and Mount Rainier in the U.S., until 2008.

Biggs and his wife, Judith Anne Lund, had three children. The marriage ended in divorce.

To contact the reporter on this story: Elizabeth Stanton in New York at estanton@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Greiff at jgreiff@bloomberg.net

(BN) JPMorgan Claim of Possible Trader Intent May Help Bank

Yes screw the traders, it's all their fault! CEO is a victim, poor Jamie! He deserves his salary, yes, and more!

Bloomberg News, sent from my Android phone

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)'s announcement that an internal inquiry may show "intent" to misprice trades in a unit that lost $5.8 billion may help a U.S. investigation while putting distance between management and any wrongdoers.

"E-mails, voice tapes and other documents, supplemented by interviews" were "suggestive of trader intent not to mark positions where they believed they could execute," the bank said in a presentation today as it reported net income fell 9 percent to $4.96 billion. "Traders may have been seeking to avoid showing full amount of losses," the bank said, noting management had concerns about the integrity of the prices used. The bank didn't provide evidence to support the allegations.

The U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in New York in May began a probe of the bank's trading losses, a person familiar with the matter said. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates derivatives trading, are also examining New York-based JPMorgan's trading activities, according to people familiar with those probes.

The largest U.S. bank by assets today restated first- quarter results to reduce net income by $459 million after a review of the prices used in the unit. Yet multibillion-dollar losses and an internal report by the bank are just the beginning of any federal prosecution, said Sam Buell, a former U.S. prosecutor in New York who worked on the Enron Corp. Task Force and is now a professor at Duke University School of Law.

'Prosecute Someone'

"You can't just say, 'hey, this is bad, there are billions of dollars in losses, let's prosecute someone,'" Buell said. Eight weeks after Enron collapsed, the company's board of directors produced a report about what transpired at the energy trader. Prosecutors, however, weren't able to bring charges for two more years, he said.

JPMorgan's statement "suggests they are trying to isolate this as a problem that occurred below the management level," Buell said. Any attempt to reach beyond traders to management would be difficult for prosecutors, he said.

"In U.S. criminal law, we very rarely do hold people criminally responsible for failure to supervise," he said. "You need to show not only outright knowledge but also willful blindness -- having a strong suspicion that there is wrongdoing and then taking steps to avoid it."

Ellen Davis, a spokeswoman for Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, and Jim Margolin, a spokesman for the FBI's New York office, declined comment on JPMorgan's statements.

Suggesting Traders

Jennifer Zuccarelli, a spokeswoman for JPMorgan, declined to comment on whether the bank was suggesting traders had broken the law. JPMorgan didn't name any employees involved in the potential mismarking of positions.

The discrepancy between prices used by the chief investment office and JPMorgan's credit-swaps dealer, the biggest in the U.S., was first reported May 30. The trades in question, made by a Chief Investment Office group that included Bruno Iksil, nicknamed the London Whale because his positions grew so large, were on so-called tranches of credit-swap indexes, people familiar with the matter said at the time. All declined to be identified because they weren't authorized to speak publicly.

Tranches allow investors to wager on varying degrees of risk among a pool of companies. Credit swaps pay the buyer face value if a borrower fails to meet its obligations, less the value of the defaulted debt. Because JPMorgan had amassed such large positions, even a small change in how the prices were marked may have generated a big difference in the value of the trades, one of the people said.

External Groups

Banks use internal or external groups to independently verify that prices used by traders to value their investments are accurate, and firms typically use one price for an asset that may be traded in different parts of the bank, according to Brad Hintz, a brokerage firm analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York who is the former chief financial officer of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

JPMorgan shut down synthetic trading in its CIO unit with the exception of an $11 billion short position in "basically liquid indexes" to hedge other credit assets, Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon said today. Positions in Series 9 of the Markit CDX North America Investment Grade Index, a credit-swaps benchmark known as IG9 that's at the heart of much of the loss, were cut by 70 percent, Dimon said.

The residual portfolio, largely in so-called tranches of indexes that wager on the degree to which companies will default together, was transferred to the investment bank, where they have "the expertise" to manage it, Dimon said.

The bank transferred about $30 billion of risk-weighted assets to the investment bank, an amount that is "down substantially" from the peak and back to levels at the end of 2011, he said.

Voice Recordings

The e-mails and voice recordings that JPMorgan claims to have would be particularly important to proving securities fraud, said Peter Henning, a professor at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit and a former enforcement attorney for the SEC between 1987 and 1991.

"That's all very helpful to prosecutors," he said. "It's what the person had in their mind at the time. Their own words are the best way" to show intent, he said.

Henning agreed with Buell that JPMorgan is seeking to distance itself from the traders in the unit.

"This seems to point the finger at individuals in the bank who misled the bank," he said.

JPMorgan restated in a regulatory filing its first-quarter net income to $4.92 billion, rather than the $5.38 billion previously reported. The CIO was responsible for trading losses that the bank estimated at $2 billion in May.

Restatement

"Restatement is significant, too, because it says what we did is wrong because it's no longer defensible, here's what went wrong. We were lied to," Henning said. "That was a way of mitigating Dimon's comment about a 'tempest in a teapot.' It really was a tempest."

Dimon dismissed initial reports about the loss as a "tempest in a teapot" when the bank reported first-quarter earnings on April 13. He reversed course less than four weeks later, disclosing a $2 billion loss that he said could grow to $3 billion or more during the quarter.

The release of the details today may also be a way for JPMorgan to dissuade employees from fighting the bank as it seeks to take back salary and bonus payments to the traders and executives in the CIO unit, Henning said.

CIO Unit

Ina Drew, the former head of the CIO unit, will forfeit her pay and other managers were ousted following the bank's internal inquiry. The bank accepted Drew's offer to return about two years of compensation, the maximum clawback allowable under employment terms, said Joe Evangelisti, a company spokesman. Drew didn't respond to a request for comment.

Other London-based managers of the CIO's synthetic-credit bets left without severance and will be required to forfeit as much as two years of pay, including restricted stock and options, the bank said in a presentation.

"JPMorgan is sending a message," Henning said. "You have much bigger issues to face than a clawback suit. The employees will certainly be looked at by the SEC and DOJ."

John Moscow, a former prosecutor in the office of Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, said the statement by the bank about "intent" was unusual.

"They are tripping over themselves to suggest the possibility the conduct may have been criminal," Moscow, now with Baker Hostetler LLP in New York, said. "This is quite strong for a corporation that is not formally accusing its people of crimes."

Federal Investigation

As for the speed of the federal investigation, it's too soon to know how prosecutors will proceed, said Daniel Richman, a former U.S. prosecutor in New York who now teaches at Columbia Law School.

"Here you have an interested party making a not-so-veiled allegation of improper behavior by subordinates. It serves the bank's interest to identify them as rogues," he said. "While they in fact may be rogues, the most important thing for the government has to be sort out what's in this report and the bank's statements and determine for themselves what the facts were and what inferences of criminal intent can be made."

To bring a criminal case, "the burden is heavy," Richman said, and requires evidence someone knowingly and willfully intended to break the law.

"What is required is to look into the mind of the person who is being charged," Richman said. "The fact that mistakes were made is certainly nowhere near enough for a crime or even civil fraud."

Internal Probe

Prosecutors can use a bank's internal investigation as a tentative road-map, he said, but they will want to hear the traders' side of the story if at all possible. And the government may also have to get access to people and information that the banks don't have at this point, said Richman.

"There's no way to make this happen fast," said Buell. "Just because there is a report there is still a criminal investigation that must be done," he said. "There's this mosaic; it's not a smoking gun. You can't put all the pieces together until you gather up all the millions of pieces."

To contact the reporters on this story: Matthew Leising in New York at mleising@bloomberg.net; Patricia Hurtado in Manhattan federal court at pathurtado@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alan Goldstein at agoldstein5@bloomberg.net; Michael Hytha at mhytha@bloomberg.net.

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Get in line: one Apple store per 216 million Chinese

Behind which desk on earth is this Reuters reporter writing from? There are more unofficial re-sellers and re-re sellers for apple products than there are ants in Pennsylvania. 

Do your homework, don't report this trash! 

What's going on which reporters at Reuters and Bloomberg?!

Get in line: one Apple store per 216 million Chinese


By Melanie Lee

SHANGHAI | Wed Jul 4, 2012 4:22pm IST

(Reuters) - Apple Inc (AAPL.O) has more retail stores in Pennsylvania than in all of China - where it earns a fifth of its revenue - and a slow pace of expansion may cost the firm more than just sales.

Apple's six stores in Greater China are routinely packed, and customers often wait in long lines for iPhone repairs. Scalpers are known to camp out to be first in line for new products, which they then re-sell for a tidy profit.

The California company is notoriously fastidious when it comes to its flagship stores, and has said it is taking its time in China to ensure it secures the right locations. But its retail expansion has fallen well short of its own goals.

In 2010, Ron Johnson, then-Apple's retail head, forecast the company would have 25 stores in China by this year.

"There's certainly more demand than Apple can serve with their store footprint currently," said Torsten Stocker, a partner at business strategist Monitor Group.

The clamour for Apple products has spawned a bustling grey market where smuggled goods are peddled by unauthorized re-sellers. Copycat Apple stores have popped up in smaller cities that don't have the real thing.

The Apple frenzy will only intensify now that the company has agreed to pay Proview Technology (Shenzhen) $60 million to settle a lawsuit over the iPad trademark, freeing it up to sell its latest tablet computer.

Apple has two retail stores in Beijing, three in Shanghai, and one in Hong Kong. Chinese government officials said last month the company is looking to open two more in the major cities of Chengdu and Shenzhen.

In Pennsylvania, a state with a population of 12.7 million, Apple has eight stores, including three in the city of Pittsburgh alone. The population of China is 1.3 billion.

Apple declined to comment for this story.

HANDS-ON EXPERIENCE

The shortage of retail stores and authorized re-sellers leaves ample room for unlicensed re-sellers to move in. Bad consumer experiences at these unauthorized shops are common and they run the risk of eventually eroding confidence in Apple's products, said David Wolf, chief executive of Beijing-based consultancy Wolf Group Asia.

If Apple doesn't expand its network of stores and authorized re-sellers, it "loses not only near-term sales, it also endangers the sustainability of its success in China," he said.

Apple products can also be bought online in China, but many consumers prefer to buy at the store after testing the product.

Its flagship stores in China are packed with people tinkering with the company's latest gadgets, even on weekdays. Last October, Apple's Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer said the China branches were the highest trafficked and among the highest revenue stores for the company.

Demand for new Apple products is so high that earlier this year scalpers queued overnight outside a Beijing store for the latest version of the iPhone 4, only to pelt it with eggs after Apple decided against selling the phone at the store because of security concerns.

Apple competes with Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) as well as homegrown Chinese technology firms Huawei 002502.SZ and ZTE Corp 000063.SZ in China's fast-growing smartphone sector.

The pace of retail expansion may not be dictated entirely by Apple. Red tape often hampers foreign firms' expansion plans in China, and that may be holding back growth.

"There are complications around opening stores in China that you don't get in Western countries," said Andrew Milroy, vice president of ICT Research for Asia-Pacific at Frost & Sullivan in Singapore.

(Additional reporting by Lee Chyen Yee in Hong Kong; Editing by Kazunori Takada, Emily Kaiser and Ian Geoghegan)

(BN) Singapore Gets Blogger to Apologize for Court Criticism

This blogger is another of those publicity seekers with a dwindling eyeball count.

What a pity Bloomberg is sensationalising this. Pathetic, Andrea and Douglas...

Bloomberg News, sent from my Android phone

Singapore made blogger Au Waipang apologize for posting allegations the city's judicial system is biased and a plastic surgeon received special treatment from the courts, charges the government called "contemptuous."

The city's Attorney-General threatened to charge Au, also known as Alex Au, with contempt unless the blog post was taken down, and a letter from the Attorney-General and an apology were posted.

British author Alan Shadrake was convicted of contempt of court in November 2010 for his book, "Once a Jolly Hangman: Singapore's Justice in the Dock," which accused the city's judiciary of succumbing to political influence and favoring the rich over the poor. He was sentenced to six weeks in jail, fined S$20,000 ($16,000) and ordered to pay S$55,000 in costs to the prosecution.

Au didn't respond to an e-mail seeking comment. He told the Singapore Straits Times that he wasn't going to stick his neck out for something he couldn't prove.

Woffles Wu, a plastic surgeon, was fined S$1,000 last month for having an employee take the blame for his two speeding offenses in 2005 and 2006. Au had implied Wu was "treated favorably" by being charged under the Road Traffic Act instead of the criminal code, according to a statement issued yesterday by the Attorney-General's office.

In a June 18 blog "Woffles Wu Case Hits a Nerve," Au wrote that police, prosecutors and judges are "indulgent towards the well-connected," the Attorney-General's office said in a July 6 letter to Au.

'Scurrilous' Allegations

"The serious allegations, which are scurrilous and false, scandalized the courts," the Attorney-General's office said in yesterday's statement. "His allegations of judicial bias in relation to the Woffles Wu's case were also based on a number of distortions of the facts of the case."

The doctor could have been jailed for as long as one year and fined as much as S$5,000 if he was convicted under the criminal code for providing false information to the police. Wu's charge under the traffic laws carries a maximum fine of S$1,000 and a jail term of as long as six months. Both sections of the traffic act and the criminal code had the same maximum penalties before 2008, the Attorney-General's office said.

Au took down the post and put up the July 6 letter from the Attorney-General's office as well as an undated apology.

"I apologize for committing that act of contempt," Au said in the apology, which was drafted by the Attorney-General's office. "I will not in future put up any post to the same or similar effect."

To contact the reporter on this story: Andrea Tan in Singapore at atan17@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Douglas Wong at dwong19@bloomberg.net

Find out more about Bloomberg for Android: http://m.bloomberg.com/android

Reform Party chief seeks to block US$4b loan to IMF

Great Work Kenneth! Here's a pat on the back, we know that you can read the constitution. Now step aside dearie, there is work to do to save the global economy. 

PUBLISHED JULY 07, 2012

Reform Party chief seeks to block US$4b loan to IMF

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[Singapore]

THE Reform Party's secretary- general Kenneth Jeyaretnam is taking court action to block the Singapore government's US$4 billion loan commitment to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

This came after a series of blog posts by Mr Jeyaretnam asserting that the commitment contravened Article 144(1) of the Constitution as neither Parliament's approval nor the President's consent had been sought.

In the High Court yesterday, Mr Jeyaretnam made an application to prohibit the government or the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) from giving any loans or guarantee to the IMF unless such loans were made in accordance with the provisions of Article 144. He also sought an order to quash the government and MAS's decisions to make the commitment to IMF because they contravened those provisions.

Laos denies pushing ahead with controversial dam

Shouldn't the blame should be pointed at the buyer, EGAT?

Laos denies pushing ahead with controversial dam

Reuters – 19 hours ago

REUTERS - Laos is not pushing ahead with the construction of a controversial $3.5 billion hydropower dam on the Mekong

River in defiance of an agreement with neighbouring countries, official media reported on Friday.

In recent weeks, environmental activists have said Ch Karnchang Pcl , the main developer of the 1,260 megawatt Xayaburi

dam on the river Mekong, was carrying on with work on the project, which Laos agreed to suspend last December.

Campaigners say the dam would harm migratory fish and the livelihood of fishermen, and last week Cambodian villagers

demonstrated against it.

Viraphonh Viravong, Laos' deputy energy minister, said the government had kept its promise, though geological sub-surface

surveying was being carried out in the Mekong valley.

"We plan to invite development partners and Mekong River Commission member countries to visit the project site so they can

see the actual development for themselves," he told the Vientiane Times daily.

"The Xayaburi project will develop one of the most transparent and modern dams in the world," he added.

The dam has come under fire from activists, people living along the river and some neighbouring countries because of what

they saw as an inadequate environmental impact assessment.

Viraphonh said the government had subsequently hired two independent consultants who had advised it to modify the

construction plans for the dam.

The changes would ensure that 85 percent of fish would be able to pass through the dam, in line with Mekong River

Commission guidelines, he said.

Vietnam, normally Laos's biggest ally, and Cambodia, have both called for the project to be suspended pending further

studies.

Cambodia's National Mekong River Commission said last week that Laos had violated a 1995 agreement requiring prior

consultation before starting any project on the Mekong.

(Reporting by Amy Sawitta Lefevre in Bangkok; Editing by Alan Raybould and Daniel Magnowski)

(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2012. Check for restrictions at: http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp

Copyright © 2012 Yahoo! Asia Pacific Pte Ltd (Co. Reg. No. 199700735D). All Rights Reserved. | Yahoo! News Network | /

Martin Hardy: Betrayal in the Arsenal air as Robin van Persie turns his sword on king Arsene Wenger - Comment

An excellent comment on the perverted state of affairs in football today.

Vikram Singh • 5 hours ago

At what point does an over-privileged football player feel entitled to dictate to a club what their philosophy should be?

After 8 years at the club... seemingly most of it with van Persie in the injury room, that same player decides he knows what's in Arsenal's best interests over everyone else at the Emirates.

Doesn't van Persie recognize that there's barely a club in world football that wouldn't have offloaded his sorry, brittle, self by now. Doesn't van Persie recognize he might just have a moral obligation to take the good ethos with the bad - if indeed that's what this is.

As for trophies. He's talking as if he were somehow detached from the process of attaining them. As if he were somehow not involved. All the near-misses and empty-handedness were clearly someone else's fault. And this is the reason he's decided to leave. And categorically not for the money.

When Cesc left, there was barely a supporter that didn't understand why. It was a gut-wrenching loss. But his was a comprehensible case. Van Persie's is quite different. In fact it might be fair to say that the situation with RVP condenses much of what's wrong with modern football.

Here's someone who's paid more than the average CEO of of a major city bank (yet crucially without the responsibility) feeling empowered to lay down how those actually responsible should run things. Really? He has time to do that job: manage the club, scout the world, sit on the board, and still go on holiday?

What Robin's side-stepped is that there's more to football than just trophies or money. There's a thing called legacy. Even without a single piece of silverware, history will view Arsenal's transition from Highbury to Ashburton Grove rather well I imagine. Especially during a global financial crisis that's far from over.

Robin's legacy, alas, will be viewed rather differently. One-and-a-half fulfilled seasons out of eight. And we thank him for that. But he'd better choose his next club very carefully, because there are no guarantees in football. And as he's evidenced - no (reasonable) room for loyalty.

RVP10 ... the man who in 2011-12 'scored when he wanted' ... is about to find out just how little influence an ex-icon actually has. And just how inept and luckless other managers ... most managers ... nearly all managers ... can be.

Robin van Persie is about to get a lesson in football.

Google's Nexus 7: Who's Sweating Now?

There is only 1 person who should be sweating - Apple, who has been sleeping like a log. Apple is the proverbial hare who has taken a rest under a tree while the tortoises trotted past, and now, is protesting in the courts.

Apple has already lost the phone war to Samsung, and hopefully, will be losing the tablet to Google. If it goes bust (and might very likely happen in the next 5-10 years in a tech generation), there will be no love lost. I will still keep my $1000 iphone 1, $1000 ipad 1 and $500 ipad 2 for keepsake, the last apple phones and tablet I will ever buy.

Google's Nexus 7: Who's Sweating Now?

By Rob Enderle
TechNewsWorld
07/02/12 5:00 AM PT

The Nexus 7, for the same money as the Kindle Fire, is a much more complete tablet. It should be -- it is a generation newer. It has a Retina-like display, it has a huge number of available applications, it will run most of the major TV- and movie-streaming clients, it will run a Kindle reader (though not as well as the Kindle does), and it is tied to a variety of music properties including Google music.

See the groundbreaking results of a Forrester Consulting report of over 400 business and technology leaders and find out how they are making customer focus a strategic imperative.In this video broadcast experts discuss changing customer dynamics. Learn more.


The iPad is an interesting product. It is basically a light Mac netbook lacking a keyboard but with touch. Had any other company brought this to market, it probably wouldn't have sold.

The most successful product in its class that isn't an iPad is the Samsung Galaxy tablet, and it so close to an iPad that a judge just concluded it's an illegal copy. There isn't a tablet market -- there is an iPad market.

However the Kindle Fire has also been very successful, at least in the fourth quarter of last year, and it is smaller, lighter, and far cheaper than an iPad. It is so different, Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) doesn't even really consider it a competitor. While it is equally easy to use and it is also focused on media consumption, Apple clearly thinks it is going after a different customer. But is it?

The new Nexus 7 is about the same size and price as the Kindle Fire. It has a screen that is similar to the iPad Retina display and the full Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) tool set, which was modeled after -- and in some unique ways, is superior to -- the iPad.

But is Apple right, and are Google and Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) fighting for a market it doesn't care about? Or is it a case of Apple not being able to handle the truth: that a US$200 product can truly be better than its gold standard iPad?

I'll close with my product of the week which has to be the Nexus 7.


10-Inch vs. 7-Inch

Now I don't carry an iPad, and while I have several Android 10-inch tablets, I don't carry them either. I carry a Kindle Fire. This is because I don't spend my time browsing the Web or working on the device -- I use it to read, watch movies or TV, and occasionally shop on Amazon.

A 7-inch tablet fits in my jacket pocket, easily cohabits with my laptop in my backpack, and I only occasionally have a coronary because I've forgotten to charge it up. I tried carrying a 10-inch product, but it is too big to pocket. Also, I noticed the extra weight, particularly when standing and reading, and I rarely found the size to be an advantage.

Now most folks look at a 7-inch product and see something that is too big to pocket (certainly too big for a pants pocket) or to use as a phone, and too small to use for much of anything else. However, that wasn't my experience, and several million co-Kindle owners likely agree with me.

The iPad, however, has tens of millions of people who currently don't. I'll bet that a large portion of one of these two groups would be happier with the other size product -- and that is what Google is going to explore.
Nexus 7

The Nexus 7, for the same money as the Kindle Fire, is a much more complete tablet. It should be -- it is a generation newer. It has a Retina-like display, it has a huge number of available applications, it will run most of the major TV- and movie-streaming clients, it will run a Kindle reader (though not as well as the Kindle does), and it is tied to a variety of music properties including Google music, which seems to do a better job than iTunes at organizing and syncing all of your music across all of your devices.

Like the Kindle Fire, it is light -- and like the Fire, it is $200. Now this last is more important than you think in the fourth quarter. This is because during the holidays, products like this are given for gifts, and parents and grandparents like to treat children and grandchildren equally. This means if there are five kids, all five need to get similar presents -- and more than one present, so they aren't sitting around pouting while everyone else opens gifts.

At $200, you can buy five Nexus 7s for less than two configured iPads. That is a massive difference. It is the difference between seeing a smiling face of happiness and frowns of disappointment -- or being able to look at your January credit card bill with a mere grimace rather than having a full-on coronary. That price is going to play a big role this Christmas -- much like the price on the Kindle Fire played last Christmas.
Kindle Fire

However, we shouldn't discount the Kindle Fire, which is due for a refresh this holiday season. It will be one of two wild cards that could also shift business away from Apple and the iPad, as it too is expected to get a better display and improved battery life.

Amazon also has a year of additional experience with the Kindle Fire and gets the additional revenue from folks like me who use the device to shop. It is a virtual storefront to Amazon's various on-line properties, suggesting that Amazon could more aggressively subsidize it and price it under the Nexus 7 profitably.

You'd then have what amounts to a price war in the $100 to $200 range, and far fewer folks would even be interested in devices that cost more than $500, and that would be problematic for Apple. You may recall it started out in that price range with the iPhone but eventually was forced to drop down into the high end of the vastly more popular $100 to $200 range.
Wrapping Up: Surface Tablet

I spoke of the Surface tablet last week, but it is the other wild card. It also comes in at the stratified $500 price range, but it could share the downside with Apple of a market that has reset at $200. It would be ironic if Apple and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) collaborated to jointly move against these lower-cost offerings -- remember, these firms have combined against common threats in the past.

It wouldn't surprise me to find that the two firms put aside their differences and decided to at least go after the Google threat together, and given Amazon already licenses from Microsoft, finding another way out of that competition might also result in a creative collaboration.

In the end, we are likely to see the battle of all battles between Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft in this tablet struggle of the decade. 1, 2, 3, 4, I call a TABLET WAR!! Let the games begin!
Product of the Week: Nexus 7

This is actually a nice piece of work, built by Asus, which has been cropping up as a very aggressive and innovative OEM of late. The Nexus 7 at $200 is a pretty impressive piece of hardware, and this from a died-in-the-wool Kindle Fire user.

Google has improved the software experience with the Android platform solidly over the last few versions, going from barely tolerable to pretty usable over time. This latest version is clearly the best yet with a clean entry screen, and since I've been getting used to Android over time, I'm now finding the experience less jarring.



The Nexus 7 uses the Nvidia (Nasdaq: NVDA) Tegra 3 platform, which is arguably the most powerful and popular on tablets, and the only one capable of giving Apple's impressive latest offering a run for the money.

Note -- this is what the ARM (Nasdaq: ARMHY) version of the Microsoft Surface Tablet will be running as well. It should beat the iPad with a rich gaming experience if it can get some impressive titles -- Microsoft demoed a nice one at its launch event.

With a Retina like display, decent near-10-hour battery life, strong performance, and an aggressive price, the Nexus 7 likely gives us an early look at what the next Kindle Fire will bring to the table. While it isn't shipping yet, this latest offing from Google is giving both Amazon and Apple a run for the money, and competition is a good thing, so the Nexus 7 is my product of the week!

Rob Enderle is a TechNewsWorld columnist and the principal analyst for the Enderle Group, a consultancy that focuses on personal technology products and trends.