Events

Yesterday the Tribune reported on Groupon scaling back their IPO, from which they had hoped to raise the equivalent of Norway's GDP. Today's Economist has more: Groupon created a new market. This is a boon to consumers, but confers no lasting “first-mover” advantage on Groupon. Its business model is unpatentable and simple to replicate, so there are already more than 20 copycats. Groupon aspires to be global, but the markets it serves are intensely local. Internet selling is best suited to “experience...

The Tribune is reporting that Groupon, one of several thousand companies that strikes deals with vendors, has scaled back its IPO: The size of the sale, expected to be completed in the next two weeks, could be $500 million to $700 million under plans to be disclosed in advance of the company's roadshow beginning in the next few days, the people said. The size is meant to cut the amount of stock being sold at what may be a knock-down valuation, in hopes that more shares can be sold later at higher...

Series finale

Series finale

I can't think for a moment what those odd folks at #OWS are protesting. It couldn't be crap like this, could it? Buoyed by one-time gains from accounting changes and the sale of assets, Bank of America reported a $6.23 billion profit for the third-quarter Tuesday, even as weakness on Wall Street hammered underlying results and the firm surrendered its position as the country’s largest bank by assets. The other major commercial banks that have reported earnings in recent days posted profits of around $4...

Paul Krugman once again points out the obvious and straight line between policy choices and the economy today: [T]he financialization of America wasn’t dictated by the invisible hand of the market. What caused the financial industry to grow much faster than the rest of the economy starting around 1980 was a series of deliberate policy choices, in particular a process of deregulation that continued right up to the eve of the 2008 crisis. Not coincidentally, the era of an ever-growing financial industry...

The AP has picked up the story about the tzinfo database moving to ICANN: The organization in charge of the Internet's address system is taking over a database widely used by computers and websites to keep track of time zones around the world. The transition to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, comes a week after the database was abruptly removed from a U.S. government server because of a federal lawsuit claiming copyright infringement. Without this database and others...

New York Times op-ed columnist Tom Friedman interviewed Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel recently: I find “Rahmbo’s” Chicago agenda intriguing because it’s a microcosm of what the whole country will have to do for the next decade: find smart ways to invest in education and infrastructure to generate growth while cutting overall spending to balance the budget — all at the same time and with limited new taxes. It’s a progressive agenda on a Tea Party allowance. “I want to be honest about this budget,” the mayor...