Catching Up on 2 Weeks of WSJs

A while ago, I mentioned that I stopped receiving the print edition of The Wall Street Journal, opting for their online-only subscription and saving $136 per year.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that I haven’t developed the habit of reading The Journal’s online headlines every day. Bam-I was two weeks behind, but I just caught up.

It’s amazing the items I catch in the WSJ that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere else (all links, of course, require that pesky subscription).

Ask yourself how many of these stories you have seen elsewhere, especially the ones that are good news about the economy:

Good economic news:

• Oct. 10: Office Vacancies Hit 3-1/2 Year Low–“… by all accounts the office market is in much better shape than it has been. Vacancies are down 1.8 percentage point from their peak of 16.9% in the first quarter of 2004.”
• Oct. 18: PCs on fire (i.e., selling well)–“The personal computer market, bucking expectations and negative economic trends like rising interest rates, posted 17% growth in the third quarter, according to two closely watched surveys.”

Good (and some not-so-good) consumer news:

• Oct. 13: Citigroup’s credit card unit is coming out with a card called Simplicity, “which will be advertised as having no late fees for customers who make at least one purchase a month.”
• Oct. 13: Many hotels are no longer charging for hi-speed web access, and the discount chains(!) are leading the push.
• Oct. 19: College costs continue their relentless climb–“According to the (College Board) survey, tuition and fees at four-year public universities are up 7.1% from a year ago, with the average bill at $5,491. A year at a private nonprofit school costs an average of $21,235, up 5.9%. Add in room and board, and a year at a public university will set a student back an average of $12,127, while a private school’s bill comes in at an average of $29,026.”
• Oct. 21: In the competitive broadband environment, this will not sit well–“Several large telephone and cable companies are starting to make it harder for consumers to use the Internet for phone calls or swapping video files. Some of the companies say the users are hogging bandwidth, taking up too much space on networks and slowing down service for all customers that tap the Internet for email, video, music, phone and other services.”

Scandals R Us:

• Oct. 11: Remember David Boies, Al Gore’s lawyer in the 2000 presidential recount? He’s been caught with undisclosed family ties relating to legal referrals, and, for such a smart guy, seems astonishingly ignorant of what’s been going on–
  

  Superstar lawyer David Boies has built a reputation as a meticulous fact-finder, counseling companies battered by scandal to make full disclosures.
  But Mr. Boies says he didn’t ferret out a fact closer to home: His children owned a one-third stake in an expert-witness and research company to which his law firm steered clients. A similar stake in the company, Legal & Scientific Analysis Group, was held by a felon, a former Boies colleague.
  A “substantial portion” of LSAG’s more than $2 million in revenue in 1999 and 2000 came from referrals from Boies, Schiller & Flexner, the law firm headed by Mr. Boies, company documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show. A holding company partly owned by four of Mr. Boies’s children received about $200,000 in profit and consulting fees from LSAG in 1999 and 2000, the documents show.
  Mr. Boies says he is aware of some, “but not all,” of the children’s ventures, and didn’t know about their LSAG stake until a reporter told him about it. He says three of his children, who worked at Boies Schiller at the time, also didn’t know about their own stake in the company. LSAG and its parent company, UHY Advisors, declined to comment. None of the children returned calls. Mr. Boies says his oldest son, David Boies III, who has his own law firm, oversaw his siblings’ investments.

• Oct. 18: Under-fire housing behemoth Fannie Mae “used its regional partnership offices primarily to lobby Congress instead of to promote affordable housing as the organizations were intended, the Department of Housing and Urban Development concluded following a yearlong review.”

General Motors and the United Auto Workers:

• Oct. 18: Lost in the hubbub over health care at GM is the news that the company is “exploring the sale of a controlling stake in its lucrative finance company — which would likely strengthen the unit’s long-term prospects while producing a windfall for the auto maker.”
• Oct. 19: To make sure the GM-UAW health care agreement will pass legal muster, in a bizarre but apparently necessary move, the UAW sued GM to “prevent legal challenges by retirees to the cuts it says it negotiated on their behalf. Normally, the law doesn’t allow a union to negotiate to reduce the benefits for people who are already retired. Nor does the law allow employers to unilaterally cut benefits for those who have retired under negotiated union contracts. As a result, the union is suing the company and asking the court to settle the matter by approving the tentative agreement with GM.” Wow.

Overseas:

• Oct. 12: Who’s the Real Resource Hog? In an article about China’s economic plans–“Chinese leaders also worry that the country won’t be able to sustain economic growth without more efficient use of resources. In a commentary yesterday, the official People’s Daily newspaper noted that while China’s gross domestic product accounted for 4% of the global total, its consumption of primary energy sources accounted for 12% of the global total; freshwater, 15%; aluminum, 25%; and cement, 50%.”
• Oct. 12: Japan’s postal privatization law appears nears passage. Friday the 15th (from another source), it became a done deal.
• Oct. 13: The Chinese capital markets are still primitive–“The report …. ticks off a number of danger signs at big Chinese companies. They rely too much on simple bank lending. Half of their bank borrowing is for periods of a year or less. Nearly every dollar of profit earned by Chinese companies has been offset by new loans for investment. Only 13 Chinese companies have obtained an internationally recognized credit rating. Capital markets provide few alternatives for longer-term funding. The report notes that the size of China’s stock market, relative to gross domestic product, ranks behind that of every major economy, and the corporate-bond market is essentially nonexistent.” And you were expecting free and vigorous capital markets?
• Oct. 15: The bankruptcy law changes that took effect on October 17 have big companies on the brink so worried that nobody wants to the “guinea pig”–the first to file under the law.

Other:

• Oct. 17: In a painfully long article about corporate compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, this little fact-bomb appeared–“….. audit fees increased 61% on average last year for a wide sampling of companies in three Standard & Poor’s Corp. stock indexes, including the S&P 500. This year, according to AMR Research, a technology-research outfit in Boston, U.S. public companies will spend a total of $6.1 billion complying with Sarbanes-Oxley rules, a figure that includes everything from staffing to consultant fees to technology.” One irritated exec grumbled that his auditors “now drive a Mercedes instead of a Buick.”

Whew. I won’t fall behind like THAT again.