This was a weird and wonderful day on Wall Street; one for the history books.

First, we learnt that David Rubenstein of Carlyle Group had bought a copy of the Magna Carta for $23.1m and plans to keep it on display at the National Archives in near his office in Washington. He did it, he told the Wall Street Journal, to "repay a debt I have to the country".

Talking of debt, Morgan Stanley then declared a $9.4bn write-down on mortgage securities, mostly run up by a single trading desk, which is quite a lot of money for a few people to lose. It said it was taking a $5bn capital infusion from China’s sovereign wealth fund and John Mack, its chief executive, would give up his annual bonus as penance.

Finally, we had a conference call to match - and indeed surpass - for strangeness the one held by Bear Stearns in the summer at which Jimmy Cayne, its chief executive disappeared halfway through the call and Bear’s stock fell sharply.

This time, the conference call was held by Sallie Mae, the giant mortgage securitisation group. It started amiably but Al Lord, its chief executive, then got into a tussle with analysts about how much information he was divulging. The call ended with Mr Lord saying testily to his head of investor relations head: "Let’s get the (expletive deleted) out of here" and Sallie Mae’s shares dropping 21 per cent.

You might have thought that staying on a call long enough to answer questions and remaining polite would not be too much to ask of a chief executive trying to retain confidence in his company. These are strange times indeed.

For my weekly column in the FT, I have written about the decision by Tim Mason, the head of US operations for Tesco, to rule himself out of the race to succeed Terry Leahy as chief executive on the grounds that he is too old. Mr Mason is 50.

I conclude that companies are acting rationally in looking for chief executives in their mid to late-forties but that does not mean everyone over the age of 50 is doomed.

You can read the whole column here and post comments below.

Via Marginal Revolution, via Kottke, from LinuxWorld, (isn’t the internet a wonderful thing?) comes this sentiment:

Google is one of the few large companies that gets one fundamental rule of the Internet: Trying stuff is cheaper than deciding whether to try it . . . Don’t over-plan something. Just do it half-assed to start with, then throw more people at it to fix it if it works.

I think this is quite an important insight into the evolving nature of product development. Traditionally, companies hem and haw for a long time about launching products, partly because they are hard to come up with, partly because they do not want to waste money on something that does not pan out, and partly because they do not want to damage their reputations if the products fail.

But Google has, from the start, adopted a far more relaxed and improvisatory approach to new products. Many of them, as a Business Week article on cloud computing illustrated, emerge from the "20 per cent time" that Google engineers are supposedly allowed to spend on special projects of their own choosing. Others start off small, remain in beta for some time, and eventually gather steam.

This venture capital-style approach to new products has its risks. Some Google products publicly flop and others do not go anywhere much. But it allows the company to throw things up quickly. And it does cost less than having big layers of bureaucracy deciding what should be approved and what killed.

I have heard management consultants suggest that this "portfolio" approach to product development - essentially to try out a lot of things and see what works - is the future for all kinds of companies. The LinuxWorld post expresses its benefits neatly.

Scott Patterson of the Wall Street Journal thinks the fact that Wall Street analysts did not predict the downturn in investment bank earnings from the credit squeeze is "perhaps one of the biggest analyst lapses since Wall Street made darlings out of such 1990s Internet companies as Pets.com."

I don’t know about that. Surely the point of the analysts’ scandal of the early 1990s was that they knew that internet companies were no good but failed to tell investors because their banks wanted to gain advisory and underwriting business?

Getting earnings forecasts wrong may be embarrassing but it is hardly a scandal. In fact, I would say it is the opposite: it demonstrates that inside information was not leaking down from the top of the banks to their analysts. Chalk one up for Chinese walls.

I was gripped by Pico Iyer’s essay on the enigma of why service on US airlines is so bad compared with that in other US industries. As he pointedly asks:

Why is it, I often wonder, that US carriers have far and away the worst — most surly, inattentive and often snooty — service in the world?

It is a bit of a puzzle but I do not believe his theory that US airlines place the oldest and least enthusiastic attendants on the long-haul flights that he frequents. If that were so, then travelling on domestic US flights would be preferable. It is not.

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What is the most powerful newspaper in the world? This weekend, it have been the Des Moines Register, which usually exists in relative obscurity but every four years has a big say in which candidates are nominated by the state of Iowa to be Democrat and Republican presidential candidates.

This year, as before, Iowa and New Hampshire have a disproportionate influence on who gets chosen as party candidates because they go first. The first vote this year is the Iowa caucus (the rules of which are too difficult to explain, or indeed for me to grasp), which will happen on February 3.

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The baseball scandal in the US is an extraordinary story of an entire sport seemingly getting caught up in illegal drug-taking. Watching the press conferences given by George Mitchell, who conducted the inquiry into Major League Baseball, and others on Thursday I was most struck by the dog-in-the-manger attitude of Don Fehr, the head of the players’ association.

Mr Fehr spent most of his opening statement complaining about Mr Mitchell and the way that the inquiry had been conducted rather than apologising for the conduct of his members. True, it is only alleged conduct in the particular cases of the 89 players named in Mr Mitchell’s report. But Mr Fehr cannot seriously dispute that baseball has a big problem and that at least some of his members are part of it.

Here is the FT’s editorial on the subject.

Continuing my fascination with the Wall Street Journal and its takeover by Rupert Murdoch, I turned to the newspaper’s masthead this morning for a spot of Kremlinology.

The old US masthead, at the bottom of the second editorial page, featured Gordon Crovitz, the publisher, on the left side - the column reserved for editorial - and Peter McPherson and Richard Zannino, chairman and chief executive respectively of Dow Jones & Co, topping the business names on the right.

That was a clear enough division of church and state. So what would the post-takeover masthead look like, I wondered, after the fuss over whether Mr Murdoch will interfere in editorial matters?

The answer is: the masthead’s former strict division of left and right has been, ahem, superseded. Marcus Brauchli, the paper’s managing editor, is now at the top of the left-hand column with Clare Hart, executive vice-president of Dow Jones, at the top of the right-hand column.

But floating above both columns are now: Rupert Murdoch, chairman, Leslie Hinton, chief executive, and Robert Thomson, publisher. They are, by implication, the three kings of everything below. That answers that question.

Of course, none of this resolves the vexed issue of whether Dow Jones is the greatest brand in financial journalism.

Roy Greenslade is upset about a story in today’s New York Times about Rupert Murdoch’s impending takeover of the Wall Street Journal. Personally, I cannot see too much wrong with the article, although it might have made more of the fact that the NYT is directly in Mr Murdoch’s sights.

But I do wonder about one line in it, the statement that:

For The Journal’s editors and reporters, this is a time of both anxiety and anticipation about what will happen when more than a century of independent family ownership reaches its end.

Actually, Dow Jones & Co was not family-owned. It was a public company controlled by the Bancroft family through a two-tier share voting structure and it has been bought by News Corporation, a public company controlled by the Murdoch family through a two-tier share voting structure. I am not sure how much of a change in status this amounts to.

Granted, Dow Jones was a small company and News Corp is a big one. Granted also that the Bancrofts did not take a view on editorial content while Mr Murdoch has ink all over his fingers. I still find that bald assertion of the Journal losing its "independence" debatable.

This is particularly so when reported in The New York Times, a newspaper that presumably regards itself as "independent" but is owned by a public company controlled by the Ochs-Sulzberger family through a two-tier share voting structure.

Independence can be in the eye of the beholder.

My Financial Times column this week takes a look at the Hollywood screenwriters’ strike and the freelance walk-out at MTV Networks.

I argue that collective bargaining only has a limited role for professionals of this kind because the people who do best are those who negotiate their own contracts. But collective action has an emerging role outside the workplace - trade unions or mutual groups can organise health insurance and pension schemes both for employees and freelances.

You can read it here and post comments below.