Bizzy’s Business Briefs (100705)

There’s been a heavy dose of weirdness in the business news of the past few days. Just four examples:

USA Today Headlines an Unproven Claim as Fact

Headline: Female bosses less likely to cut health benefits
(stated as fact)

Excerpt: “Statistics on the gender divide are not tracked, say Kaiser, health consultants and government agencies. The Center for Women’s Business Research is seeking funding to study the matter. Executive Director Sharon Hadary believes the results would show women make medical coverage a bigger priority.”
(i.e., nothing but sheer speculation, but I guess it “feels right”)

Don’t they have editors?

About Those iPod Nano Scratches

The author gets a bit conspiratorial but nevertheless believable:

There is another possibility. The conspiracy theorist side of me sees the disproportionate response as a symptom of something other than reality—like it’s being generated. Why would a complaint about nano by such a relatively small group of consumers (Apple’s already sold more than it can make) be deemed worthy of news reports? I could see a jealous competitor planting the story and feeding reporters or, more likely, blogs, details on how to scratch nanos and how impossible it is to remove the scratches.

The truth is likely far more pedestrian. Apple’s iPod line suffers in much the way Windows does: It’s the most popular product in its class, and with far more users than even the nearest competitor, it’s bound to have more complaints, and those complaints are amplified by the product’s popularity.

Is it possible that there is a group of people so obsessed that they have nothing better to do than generate bogus buzz about the Windows OS, and a different group doing the same to the iPod Nano? Unfortunately, despite the author’s minimizing the changes, there’s reason to believe it. If that’s the case, you people doing ths need to get a life.

Dueling Hedge Funds

Speaking of obsessed, it’s hard enough to make money in investing without getting sidetracked by petty squabbles, but these two hedge funds have turned their petty squabble into their investing philosophies:

Max Keiser (is) one of the managers of a project called Karma Banque, which holds a hedge fund that tries to make money by encouraging people to boycott a company and then sells that company’s stock short.

Steve Milloy and Tom Borelli are trying to fight this with their new Free Enterprise Action Fund. Apparently their fledgling effort has really gotten under the skin of Keiser.

So Karma, whose Mr. Keiser has beliefs that make Cindy Sheehan seem like Michelle Malkin, picks a company to boycott and short, and Free Enterprise tries to offset whatever Karma is doing.

If you were an investor, would you feel well served by either of these funds?

Of All the Publications to Warn about the Transparency of a Chinese Bank’s IPO

The Wall Street Journal wants to school us. This is too rich (requires subscription):

But when it comes to public listings, corporate disclosure, gaining investors’ confidence and jumping through regulatory hoops, the nexus between the political and the economic are there for all to see. CCB will be the first of the Big Four (Chinese banks) to list, and the others — Industrial and Commercial Bank, Bank of China and Agricultural Bank — will follow sooner or later. Unless something drastic happens, however, they won’t be able to list with the New York Stock Exchange, the deepest and most efficient of all world securities exchanges.

True, part of the reason for that has to do with the nefarious consequences of Sarbanes-Oxley, a post-Enron piece of legislation that makes onerous demands on corporate executives, raising the risk of liability for both foreign and American managers. There has been a sharp drop in the money Chinese companies have raised in IPOs this year in the NYSE; as of August only $1.37 billion had been raised compared to $7.26 for all of 2004, and this law bears some responsibility for that.

But even without SOX, as the law is commonly known, Chinese banks would have a difficult time listing in the U.S. Simply put, not enough is known about them because they are just not transparent enough. Thus they must go to Hong Kong.

Why is this a hoot? This is the same Wall Street Journal that whined when Chinese government-controlled oil company CNOOC failed in its bid for Unocal–as if CNOOC is any more transparent than one of the Chinese (government-controlled) banks.