A few days ago, on November 15, we passed a rather random unobserved anniversary. That was the 158th anniversary of the debut of the first stock ticker machine. It was unveiled, appropriately, in New York City, by its inventor Edward A. Calahan. Calahan was building upon the now ubiquitous telegraph, combining it with a printer so that institutions that chose to get one could receive a steam of stock prices, transaction by transaction, from a particular exchange whose action they were following. The transactions would print out on a tape. The machine with its click click clickity click became quite familiar very rapidly, and lasted a long time. I seem to remember that the father in the old Addams Family sitcom had one in the family abode. Also, the tape generated by such machines could then be cut up and thrown out of windows on festive occasions like so many streamers. Hence the expression "ticker tape parade". So: congratulations Mr. Calahan for gi...
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What are the reasons for believing that Mamdani, even if he wins the mayor's office, will find that it is for him a dead end? There is his rent freeze thing, to begin. My old anarcho-cap instincts kick in here. Markets are very useful things -- it is precisely in the valuation of assets (and of transferable liabilities) that they most directly prove their worth, and rent control in all its forms is a direct attack on this function. New York City's history with "rent stabilization" is a solid illustration of this point. The history is not happy. And intensifying the war on the discovery of value will do a good deal of harm to actual values. Brenda Richardson wrote a fine brief piece in Forbes on some of these issues two years ago. The bottom line is that Mamdani seems likely to mess with the housing market in ways that effectively freeze new construction of livable spaces, force further skimping on maintenance, lead to longer waitlists and reduced m...
I believe several Mayors of the city of Waterbury, Connecticut, have been indicted. Some have served time. There are protocols for this in Waterbury. Regular training for what to do when the federal marshalls show up and want to speak to the Mayor. Nobody who grew up in Connecticut is all that impressed with the indictment of Mayor Adams in the city to our southwest. One neat thing about the indictment though, is that they don't play the cutesy games other indictments do when they are made public. The bill of indictment is readily available. In fact, I'll just give you the link in case you haven't come across it elsewhere. https://www.justice.gov/d9/2024-09/u.s._v._adams_indictment_1.pdf But what do I mean by "cutesy games"? The anonymization of terms with pretty obvious referents. Some US Attorneys would have referred to "Country Number 1" yet made it obvious what country was referenced. Maybe with a reference to a waterway that rhymes with the word...
Looking again at Lundberg's book on Greeley. The Tribune's first printing was a run of 5,000 copies, only about 500 of them sold. That was only one of the snowballs of bad news that nearly buried the new project at its start. This was 1841. Greeley had enthusiastically supported William Henry Harrison's campaign for President the previous year. But that victory turned sour when Harrison, barely inaugurated, took ill and, weeks later, died. When the company started its life in the red, Greeley looked to political allies for help. But he was caught between two sets of Whigs -- an Albany-centered crowd associated with the state government and the New York City crowd -- and neither was solidly behind the new project. Fortunately, help came. In May. Greeley found a business-savvy partner: Thomas McElrath. McElrath infused an immediate $2000 and took over management duties, leaving to Greeley all decisions about content. Fourteen years later, an enthusiastic adm...
Are restaurant reviewers useful creatures? Does anybody choose to go to a particular restaurant after and because of having read a favorable review in a newspaper or magazine, or online site? These thoughts are stimulated by Tanya Gold's piece in the September issue of HARPER'S, "A Goose in a Dress." The image suggested by the title is that of a goose being force-fed to make a restaurant delicacy, so that at the other end of the production chain a (sillier) goose, a female restaurant patron, formally dressed, can be force fed as well. Gold's animus is directed especially at Per Se, a fashionable place on the fourth floor of the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle. The well-dressed geese there are "hostage to ... a nine-course tasting menu by Chef Keller and his acolytes....The client ... is a masochist waiting to be beaten with a breadstick....The restaurant seethes with psychological undercurrents and tiny pricks of warfare. It is not relaxing....
The Metropolitan Opera recently reached an agreement with its stagehands' union, one that will keep the doors open. The brinksmanship was scary to those who love the art form, and hope to see it continue to thrive in New York City. I count myself among that company. In a slower news season, this threatened strike, and its resolution, might have been big news. It hasn't been, simply because news from Missouri, the Ukraine-Russian border, the Middle East, etc., has all seemed so apocalyptic of late that some matters have gotten pushed into the back pages and the back burner of public consciousness. The agreement with the unions for the musicians (separate unions for orchestra and chorus) came first: here's a link . That happened on August 18th, but it left the stagehands, i.e. the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, unaccounted for. That union signed with management on Wednesday August 20th. This means the Met's 2014-15 season will begin...
My recent reading has included a novel kindly given me by a friend for Christmas, TOP PRODUCER written by Norb Vonnegut and brought out in 2009 by St. Martin's Press. SPOILER ALERT: On the off chance you haven't read this novel yet and plan to do so: please don't read further. The book begins by taking the metaphor of Wall Street as a "shark tank" quite literally. The boss of a hedge fund --or, strictly speaking, of a fund of hedge funds -- is murdered by being fed to the sharks at an aquarium. It turns out that the dead man, Charlie Kelemen, was engaged in various financial shenanigans that unsurprisingly made him enemies, and part of this was the blackmail of other people involved in financial shenanigans. The protagonist of the story is a friend of Charlie's named Grover O'Rourke, who works at the prop desk of a second-tier investment bank, and is a "top producer" there. Whether he was named after a president or a muppet is unc...
I suspect that the state of Michigan, perhaps with a sharp push from a federal bankruptcy court, will eventually expand the borders of the city of Detroit. They can't expand them southward -- that's an international border after all. But I can see Detroit, with the authorization of the federal bankruptcy court, and its state capital, grabbing some of those ["white suburbs"] to the north and west. Rochester Hills, Eastpointe, Voila! wider tax base, solvency (at least for awhile), and public service ads about how "we're back!" Just to be clear I'M NOT ADVOCATING THAT! This is a reflection about what will be, not what ought to be. I remember New York scraping along at something akin to insolvency, without the help of the bankruptcy courts, in the mid 1970s. There was a good deal of talk about extending the definition of the city into Westchester and Long Island. Nothing came of it. The people in those places would have raised a stink had such a b...