Get on Board the SWIFT Boat

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The New New SWIFT Boating (Cracks in the Facade): Does the blogosphere have anything intelligent to say about the SWIFT controversy?

It’s kind of a dusty and underwhelming topic to the majority of us who do not make a lot of international transfers and transactions — and the people who might well be upset or incommoded by it (commercial bankers, I mean) don’t tend to blog, and wisely so.

So, no, generally speaking.

Bimbos de Mama Go 1-1

Copa do Mundo FIFA 2006: Italy whomps Ukraine, but Argentina falls to Germany on penalty kicks.

Therefore, my personal theory of World Cup dominance is 1-1 today.

Mortarboard Marketing Mashup

Is that an op-ed or a self-promoting ad? (Investment News): The “reverse spin” column of one of my favorite trade rags — I have high regard for all Crain’s titles, really — tees off on a pet peeve I share: advertorials from Academia, Inc. and the editors who let ‘em get away with it. See also Harvard Should be Crimson Over IT Op-Ed:

Mere mortals have to buy ads to tout new products. Not Jeremy J. Siegel, professor of finance at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and author of an investing classic, “Stocks for the Long Run” (McGraw-Hill, 1994). The Wall Street Journal gave him beaucoup space on its editorial page to expound on his latest theory about stock valuation, which he calls the “noisy market” hypothesis.

Sic Semper Auditoribus

Court Hears PCAOB Lawsuit (BankNet 360):

A lawsuit aimed at disbanding the federal audit regulator created by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was heard in court Thursday, but no ruling was made.

U.S. District Court Judge James Robertson heard arguments from the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board that the lawsuit should be dismissed, saying the plaintiffs should take their case to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees the PCAOB.

Feed of the Day

Platform Wars (Atom) by Phil Jones of Brasilia, Brazil. Click to go right to the Blog URL.

MySpace Meets the Fantasy League

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? Marrying the online commons to the American pastoral, now that Joe Sixpack can no longer even afford the bleachers …

ESPN Wants to Be MySpace for Fans: It was a cabal of Disney and ESPN folks — flacks, flocks — who launched Newsvine — about which more here and here.

This is intriguing, though: I’ve often thought that the hugely popular fantasy leagues — I myself have managed the Ceara Cangaceiros through three mediocre beisbol seasons on the evil Yahoo! — were the real social network pioneers …

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — ESPN is hoping to become the MySpace of the sports world. In September, it will unveil as part of ESPN’s Sports Nation property the tools for fans to create profiles, contribute to sports blogs, post opinions and link to favorite articles.

Advanced Eurocombinatorics

The Bolsa de Madrid. Source: ES.Wikipedia

DB Approaches the BME (Bloomberg): Some are assuming this means DB is giving up on its Euronext bid, but I have no idea anymore.

The BME has only just demutualized.

Caveat Emptor Note

I’ve said it many times: I am not a trader, or even much of an investor, so don’t come here looking for tips.

My wife’s current crusade to flip an office space we own in Sao Paulo is much more advanced than any wheelings and dealings I have ever done. I’m strictly a “deposit the checks and throw the extra into a CD” kind of guy.

I do have a modest sum in ETFs and index funds, though, just for fun and edification. As an admirer of the late George Plimpton, I like to see what it feels like to do things if I’m going to write about them.

So I thought I would follow up on a fubar I experienced recently with a limit order I placed with Fidelity for EWZ | iShares MSCI Brazil Index (ETF).

Dems: Damn the Hedges, Full Speed Ahead

New hedge-fund bill pushes SEC registration (via Albourne Village)

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — A bill was introduced Thursday in the House of Representatives that would give the Securities and Exchange Commission authority to force hedge-fund managers to register with the agency as investment advisers.

The Securities and Exchange Commission Authority Restoration Act of 2006, introduced by Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.; Rep. Michael Capuano, D-Mass.; and Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa., would amend the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 to require registration by hedge-fund managers.

Collegiality and Cash Markets

This could be an excellent case in point for the con side in the debate over the Creative Commons: Teachers are selling study guides online.

WASHINGTON (AP) — For all those teachers who take work home at night, creating lessons they hope kids will like, the reward is a good day in class. Now there could be another payoff: cash. Teachers are selling their original lectures, course outlines and study guides to other teachers through a new Web site launched by New York entrepreneur Paul Edelman.

Tokyo Contrite

Tokyo Stock Exchange learning tech lessons (UPI Mooniewire):

In its analysis of the recent information-technology problems at the Tokyo Stock Exchange [Price: $2,500 -- Ed.], an analyst at Financial Insight’s Asia-Pacific IT benchmarking advisory service pointed out that the bourse needed to be vigilant about continuously update its system.

From the Telecoms Ecology Watch

A new mobile telephony “ecoystem” emerges, aimed at dominating the food chain in emerging markets:

A worldwide program called the “3G for all” was formed with 9 mobile operators uniting in a bid to make available to consumers handsets based on WCDMA standard. The group includes China Mobile, Hutchison Group, Vodafone and Orange.

I Me Me My

trendwatching.com: July 2006 trend briefing — add “youniverse” to the NMM collection of egocentric network business model branding: “MySpace,” “WeMedia,” “iTunes,” — and the grand-daddy of them all, “personal push-button publishing” — which continue to trend upward in the buzzmarket at the expense of brands that emphasize collectivity, such as Tribe …

We spoke about MASTERS OF THE YOUNIVERSE in December 2004. Back then, this is how we described this phenomenon: “At the core of all consumer trends is the new consumer, who creates his or her own playground, own comfort zone, own universe. It’s the ‘empowered’ and ‘better informed’ and ’switched on’ consumer combined into something profound, something we’ve dubbed MASTER OF THE YOUNIVERSE. At the core is control: psychologists don’t agree on much, except for the belief that human beings want to be in charge of their own destiny. Or at least have the illusion of being in charge.

Dude, that’s just so totally Matrix …

The State of the 4th Estate

While their worries are changing, the problems that journalists see with their profession in many ways seem more intractable than they did a few years ago.

The State of the News Media 2006 (Project for Excellence in Journalism): a study that backs, anecdotally, many of the harder findings of the International Federation of Journalists study released recently.

Beyond cutbacks and pressure to help advertisers or corporate siblings, journalists have other worries as well. Five years ago, people in the news business shared two overriding concerns. As we said back then, “They believe that the news media have blurred the lines between news and entertainment and that the culture of argument is overwhelming the culture of reporting…Concerns about punditry overwhelming reporting, for instance, have swelled dramatically in only four years.”

Deep Strategy

IBM boosts supercomputing powers of Deep Computing centres (press release): See also Blue Gene, Super Money Machine.

IBM today announced that it will significantly boost the availability of supercomputing power offered through the company’s Deep Computing Capacity on Demand (DCCOD) centers.

IBM also announced today that it is responding to corporate client demand and will for the first time add significant UNIX-based capacity based on POWER5 technology.

Breaking the ICE

More info on overseas oil deals needed: Senate (Washington Post): The NYMEX-ICE cold war heats up over the political question of the year — who is to blame for soaring energy prices?

The report by the Senates Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations finds that U.S. regulators, including the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, lack the ability to track “futures look-alikes,” over-the-counter contracts that are based on U.S. futures contracts and traded overseas.

In particular, the panel said that U.S. crude oil, gasoline and heating oil contracts traded on the Intercontinental Exchange Inc’s ICE London bourse were impacting energy prices and large trades should be reported to U.S. regulators.

Troll Toll on The New GNU

Red Hat slapped with patent suit (VNU): A first test of the patent-proofing written into the LPGL — and a nasty surprise, inherited along with the JBoss stack, one that sent shares a-sliding by more than 6%.

Firestar Software has filed a claim against Linux vendor Red Hat for an alleged patent infringement in one of its software products.

Guide to Hybrid Securities

Guide to Hybrid Securities (GT News; free with registration): Could be educational.

The use of hybrid securities is rapidly increasing across different industries and geographic sectors. But despite the hype, there is still mystery surrounding them. This five-part guide takes an in-depth look at how corporates, banks, insurance institutions and investors are using hybrid securities and also answers treasurers’ questions.

Well, so they didn’t spend a lot on the copywriting. Normally, hype is laid on for the specific purpose of mystification. Cite me one case of hype that ever clarified matters.

Still, I do appreciate the offer to pierce the mystery, and accept it in that spirit …

Commons Counterblast

The MSFT-CC dialog box — evidently not localized for PT-Br yet. Source: Maestros Del Web

What moves a movement?: Becky Hogge of Open Democracy articulates what a lot of my Brazilian cumpadis are saying to me as well: How do we know Redmond’s embrace of the Creative Commons is not another exercise in embrace, extend and extinguish?

How do you move a movement? The question lingers in my mind after three days here at the iSummit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, because behind the energy and excitement of the Creative Commoners gathered in their hundreds in Copacabana to share experiences of the free culture sphere, a niggling uncertainty persists.

Three days before the summit began, Creative Commons, the organisation behind the suite of legal licences revolutionising copyright on the net, announced they had teamed up with a company that many in the movement view with deep mistrust, Microsoft, to produce a tool embedded in Microsoft’s Office suite allowing users to attach Creative Commons licences to files created in Word, Powerpoint and Excel. Although the collaboration was relatively small, the ideological significance, to some, seems great.

Bump