Tell It To Al

Catholics hacked off at Larry Doyle should leave Larry Doyle alone.

I’m talking about the Larry Doyle I recently profiled in my column (click here to  read it on Marketwatch). I am not talking about the Larry Doyle who satirized  Rick Santorum and the entire Catholic faith on the Huffington Post with a piece titled “Jesus-Eating Cult of Rick  Santorum” (click here to see that).

That Larry Doyle is a Hollywood script writer.

The Doyle I wrote about is a devout Catholic who is trying to do the right thing with his life by blogging about the sins of Wall Street, where he worked for many years. Click here to see his blog.

He says a  few people have Googled him up and sent him nastygrams – just for being Larry Doyle.

I’m here to tell you, you’ve got the wrong guy.

Jeremy Grantham, co-founder of $97 billion investment firm, GMO LLC, put out one heck of a quarterly shareholder’s letter, questioning whether our capitalist economic system is proving Karl Marx was right.

Marx predicted capitalists would be hung with rope purchased from their own factories, once workers finally united against them.

Capitalists are indeed overreaching, saddling the world with dangerous amounts of debt, as Marx forsaw. But Grantham sees a problem with Marx’ prediction: The way things are going there might not be any workers left.

Click here to read my column on Marketwatch. And click here to read Grantham’s letter.

When historians write the final history of Earth, they will likely note a moment in time when we began comparing the market value of corporations to the gross domestic product of  various sovereign nations.

Check out today’s headline from CNN Money: “At $500 billion, Apple is worth more than Poland.” Click here to read the story.

CNN also notes: “Apple’s valuation is now higher than the gross domestic product of Poland, Belgium, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, or Taiwan.” And it links to a really cool blog that lists things Apple is worth more than. Click here to see the blog by Downtown Josh Brown.

If any company deserves this valuation, it’s Apple, which has truly revolutionized the world. But such corporate wealth and power is a threat to sovereignty and the world as it is organized today.

The precise moment when companies became more valuable than countries will be difficult for historians to pinpoint as a trend. I think it began some time between the 1970s and today.

Historians will note that as corporations became ever more wealthy and powerful, national borders and sovereign governments became less relevant.

They will note that even the debate over communism vs. capitalism and other forms of government and economic structures disappeared as the world order devolved into a global oligarchy of corporate interests that saddled the world with stock market losses and corporate debt.

 Warren Buffett should chose the Geico Gecko to succeed him at Berkshire Hathaway.

For all we know, he may have already done this. Since the release of his annual sharholders’ letter on Saturday, he’s been has been teasing his loyal followers with claims that he’s chosen someone to succeed him. But he won’t say who it is.

He says it’s someone within the ranks of a fine Berkshire Hathaway company, like maybe Geico. Someone who does not even know themselves that they’ve been chosen, like maybe someone at Geico.

It could be Geico CEO Tony Nicely, but I’m thinking it’s the lizard. Here’s why:

First of all, Geico Gecko rolls off the tongue like Gordon Gekko – the villanous lizard played by Michael Douglas in the Wall Street movies. Only Geico Gecko is a working man’s lizard with an endearing Cockney accent. 

Second, who else has Buffet got who is as charming as he is? One of the girls from Dairy Queen? One of the Fruit Guys from Fruit of the Loom? Wiley Coyote from Berkshire Hathaway’s Acme Brick Co.?

Third, if the Gecko can really save money for people who buy car insurance, just think what he can do for investors. Cars, markets – they all crash, right?

Finally, the Gecko will be cheaper than David Sokol, the top Buffett Lieutenant who resigned last year amid a stock trading scandal. Sokol is getting $1 million a year just to retire. Click here to read more on that.

Some day investors will measure the duration of their investments by the tenths or even hundredths of a second.

The high-frequency trading that dominates markets these days has pushed the average holding time of a stock to unimaginably short  durations, already.

Securities and Exchange Commission chairwoman Mary Schapiro says she’s worried about the influence high-frequency trading has on markets.

If an investor is only holding a stock for minutes or seconds at a time, who has time to care what a company does?

Click here to read my column in The Sunday Wall Street Journal.

After Grubb & Ellis filed bankruptcy this week, I started trolling through their website to see what kind of properties they’ve been trying to sell.

One of them was a 142-acre ghost town near San Jose, Calif., with beautiful redwood trees, a creek the flows year-round with waterfalls, and a really creepy history. The land was a compound for a white-supremist cult in the 1930s and 1940s, and though not far from the sprawl from San Francisco, it hasn’t been developed since. 

Meantime, Grubb & Ellis is becoming something of a ghost town itself, with professionals fleeing to better capitalized firms.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch.

When people ask me, should they buy gold, I tell them my two favorite sectors are canned food and ammunition.

The end of the world is near, and even if it isn’t, a lot of people think it is, as evidenced by the hit National Geographic Channel show, “Doomsday Preppers.” Needless to say I am a big fan of the show, but if  they did a spot on me, they’d learn I’m woefully under-prepared for the end.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch. And watch me yack about it on the Wall Street Journal’s  online show, above.

Citigroup didn’t just hide bad mortgages from the government, it celebrated its employees who did this most successfully.

Click here to read my column in The Sunday Wall Street Journal.

For all the bashing Wall Street gets, for its cutthroat aggression, blatant dishonesty and outright fraud,  you’d think only highly evolved sociopaths would want to work in the industry.

The truth is, there are plenty of good people working in finance who know exactly what’s going on and aren’t afraid to speak frankly about it.

Larry Doyle is one of them. After a long career on Wall Street, he is taking on the ills of Wall Street on his blog, Sense on Cents.

Click here to read my column on Doyle on Marketwatch.

A survey of more than 1,000 people reveals that nobody wants to be a corporate executive.

Nobody.

I found this difficult to believe, but there it was in a press release headline: “Survey Finds That People Don’t Want To Be Corporate Executives.”

What? Nobody wants to make millions of dollars a year being a professional jerk? Nobody wants a corporate jet paid for by shareholders? Nobody wants a golden-parachute contract that ensures even when they flame-out, they still win big?

I suppose it’s all in the way you pose the question.

Boulder, Co.-based Intelligent Office, provider of virtual, professionally staffed office space for mobile executives and small businesses, says most people it surveyed would rather be independent entrepreneurs than climb the corporate ladder. Click here to read details of its survey in a press release.

“We believe there is a paradigm shift happening in our culture as it relates to work style,” said Tom Camplese, Chief Operating Officer. “We have been watching this shift take place … by talking with entrepreneurs, business owners, and mobile executives on a daily basis.”

Click here to take Intelligent Office’s “Work IQ” survey and see if you want to be a corporate executive.

Of course, the survey never directly asks what you want to be. It simply asks things such as whether you like wearing casual clothes and whether you like working at home. If the answers to these questions is yes, the methodology assumes you are better suited to entrepreneurship than corporate life.

Maybe that’s a safe assumption. But I think if the survey asked, would you like to make millions screwing thousands of people out of their jobs, homes, pensions etc., it might have tapped at least one person who said, hell, yes. I mean, a certain percentage of every demographic group contains at least one sociopath.

I, for one, would like to be a work-at-home CEO, never changing out of my sweats.  But the survey didn’t ask.