Randomly Noted

One of the most interesting aspects of the 26-page annual missive penned by Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Chairman Warren Buffett was the reproduction of a 1939 letter from his grandfather and the mathematical trajectory one can trace from a homespun lesson on savings to Berkshire’s ability to massively benefit from the recent financial crisis.

In that 1939 letter from Ernest Buffett to one of his sons and the son’s wife, Ernest described the $1000 cash reserve he had built for them. “I hope it never happens to you, but the chances are that some day you will need money, and need it badly, and with this thought in view, I started a fund …” Ernest wrote. Without liquidity, he said, one might have to “sacrifice some of their holdings” when cash was immediately needed.

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This may be a case of  over-the-top tea-leaf reading.

So, by definition, it will be convoluted. But here goes. My interpretation of some comments made today byFederal Reserve Vice Chair Janet L. Yellen indicates the central bank will feel no rush to remove the famous “extended period” language from its post-meeting statements.

The reason for that, essentially, is that Yellen thinks the Fed’s conditionality around that phrase has been sufficient to allow market participants to change their views about when the central bank may finally come off its long-standing emergency easy policy, which features zero short-term interest rates. Said another way, the phrase “extended period” is flexible.

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Score one for the California Public Employees’ Retirement System. The country’s largest public pension fund won in its scrimmage with Apple Inc. about how Apple directors get to stay on board.

Apple shareholders voting at the company’s annual meeting today backed a CalPERS-offered proposal that asks the board of directors to jump on the majority voting bandwagon.

“An election where you can be voted in without a majority is unworthy of a great company like Apple,” said Anne Simpson, CalPERS’ senior portfolio manager who heads its corporate governance program, in a press release. “We strongly urge Apple to make the change that its owners are requesting.”

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Disappointment is the word recently used by a commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission about the percentage of corporate directors at big U.S. public companies who are women.

The figure cited by SEC Commissioner Elisse B. Walter in a Feb. 10 speech was 15.7%. That’s the percentage of board seats held by women at Fortune 500 companies, according to the 2010 Catalyst Census.

Here is the fuller quote from Walter, who fills one of the Democratic seats of the five-person commission:

“I think it’s fair to say that there are significant challenges for those who want to see true gender diversity in corporate governance,” Walter said in the text of a speech to the DirectWomen Board Institute. “While I will not offer up a personal analysis as to why women are underrepresented on corporate boards – I’ll leave that to the experts – I can tell you that my initial reaction to the statistics is disappointment.”

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Hewlett-Packard reported earnings today and while the numbers for the quarter ended January 31 were generally good, investors focused on the tepid outlook. Initial analysis of the results zeroed in on soft PC sales for the recent quarter and the question raised by the company of whether consumers were really opening their wallets. The stock fell 12% in after-hours trading.

There’s another longer-term trend investors should consider when looking at companies that have a lot of exposure to the printer business – will the introduction of tablets like the iPad make printing documents less necessary? Combine that with the green movement and it could spell troubles for companies that make printers.

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In the fast-paced financial market world, history gets started more quickly all the time.

Feb. 10. Twelve days ago. History.

So while enthusiasts for the growth of the U.S. economy surely want to take heart from the data on U.S. consumer confidence delivered earlier today by the Conference Board, the chilling reality is that date – Feb. 10. The Conference Board tells us in a press release: “The cutoff date for February’s preliminary results was Feb. 10, 2011.”

That means that the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index, reported today at 70.4 for February, up from 64.8 in January, can’t take into account a particular lack of confidence expressed today through the price action in certain U.S. financial markets.

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To those fretting about the very real budget problems of U.S. cities and states, their difficulty in fulfilling  financial promises they made and the implications of all that for the market in tax-free bonds, here’s a number that might offer a measure of reassurance. 72. Or, if you like, 77.

These numbers represent the percentages, respectively, of the number of polled New Yorkers who support the tough budget proposal of the state’s new Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, and the percentage who have a favorable view of him. (The source is the Siena Research Institute.)

That’s New York, the fabled liberal state. Across the river in New Jersey, the controversial Republican governor, Chris Christie, is lighting into government worker benefit and retirement plans that threaten the state’s fiscal future.

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Sen. Charles Schumer, D-NY, is concerned about a name. So is a Congressman from Florida. But they’ve got it wrong. Whether a name is kept or not, the world it represented already is gone.

Schumer and Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Fla., and no doubt other U.S. politicians yet to be heard from are hell-bent that if a merger between Deutsche Borse and NYSE Euronext takes place, as expected, the New York Stock Exchange name be preserved.

Schumer even went so far Sunday as to say the New York Stock Exchange name has to come first in the combined and so far undeclared title of the new entity, which would be the planet’s largest exchange. This despite the fact that Deutsche Borse shareholders would have 60% of the new entity.

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Some good quotes from Robert Khuzami, head of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement division, as he laid out how people associated with an “expert networking” or “matchmaking” firm allegedly shared inside information about some of the big companies that employed them with hedge fund employees.

Said Khuzami in a statement issued today: “Today we pull back the curtain and reveal that the only matching that was going on here was to match theft with greed.”

And lest anyone not understand what’s allegedly involved, Khuzami employed analogy to good use. He said: “These trusted employees chose to steal information that belonged not to them, but to the company and its shareholders. They lined their pockets with tens of thousands of dollars by trafficking in that stolen information in a manner that is not unlike an employee who drives to the loading dock late at night and fills the trunk of his car with valuable office equipment and sells it to his neighbor.”

Here’s yet another sign that the economy is showing some strength: In it’s first quarter earnings report released a short while ago, Walt Disney Co. showed a couple of examples of being able to raise prices, something that has been nearly unheard of for the past couple of years in just about any business.

In its cable networks division, sales were higher in part on stronger advertising growth. The drivers? More ads but also, higher rates. Again, in the ad-challenged media business, the idea of raising rates over the past few years was certainly unheard of.

And in the parks and resorts division, sales were higher because attendance levels were up. But also because the company raised ticket prices.

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