The Great Debate UK
from Paul Smalera:
Facebook.coop
Facebook shouldn't pay its users. Its users should pay to own Facebook.
“Facebook was not originally created to be a company,” founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote in his letter to investors announcing the IPO of his already hugely successful and profitable company. “It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.”
Facebook has succeeded wildly, despite internal admonitions that its “journey” is only 1 percent finished. Journalists have latched onto Zuckerberg’s statement that Facebook wants to “rewire” the way the world works. In a world of thousands of self-anointed “social media experts,” only Zuckerberg can claim to have basically invented what the world thinks of as social media. He has etched himself into the timeline of human innovation.
Pity then, that Zuckerberg hasn’t turned his talents or attention toward Facebook’s financial underpinnings. After all, an IPO? How ho-hum can he get? If Mark really wants to accomplish his social mission with Facebook, he should share the company’s ownership with the people who helped him create it. Not just his Harvard contemporaries. Not just the programmers. Not even just the venture capitalists.
I’m talking about us. All of us. The users. Facebook should be a user-owned, user-managed company, run for the benefit of users. For the Facebook, by the Facebook. The company should be a cooperative.
Equities are dead. Again.
–Todd Wenning is lead adviser of The Motley Fool’s Dividend Edge newsletter. The opinions expressed are his own.–
In August 1979, following a decade of high inflation and a shaky stock market that led to depressed investor sentiment, BusinessWeek magazine published a now-famous issue with a cover declaring “The Death of Equities.”
from Breakingviews:
Hoarding gold makes sense only for the hopeless
By Robert Cole
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
LONDON -- Compared to U.S. equities, gold is expensive. You have to go back to the stagflation of the 1970s -- or the depression of the 1930s -- to find a time when the yellow metal was more valuable. Today's worries could push it higher. But only the gloomiest can think gold will maintain its glittering trajectory.
from UK News:
Pru’s Asian misadventure: a cautionary tale
By Clara Ferreira-Marques
Prudential's ill-fated Asian adventure has left the company and its management badly bruised. But it has offered at least two valuable lessons for ambitious executives tempted onto the acquisition path by post-crisis, "once-in-a-lifetime" deals.
Lesson one: It's not 2007 any more, Toto.
Lesson two: Disregard shareholders at your peril.
On the first, bold mega-deals that once impressed the market now seem to mostly unsettle both investors and regulators.
Equities may now be a better bet
- Edward Menashy is chief economist at Charles Stanley. The opinions expressed are his own. -
Not exactly shock and awe as the MPC keeps base rates on hold at 0.5 percent while the most recent financial surveys have been unanimous in expecting a no change decision for some time now. It was always going to be an MPC meeting to discuss whether or not to persevere with quantitative easing. The difficulty for the MPC is that it is too early to judge the effectiveness of the quantitative easing. Clearly the Bank of England would prefer to wait at least until it publishes new quarterly growth and inflation forecasts to explain how it wishes to proceed.
