Driving through Red Hook, the old docks district of Brooklyn, last weekend, I saw a very evocative sign on a building by the harbour: Waterfront Office.

Red Hook has a fair claim to be the setting for Elia Kazan’s 1954 film On The Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando, about racketeering in the New York docks. The original script, which Kazan commissioned from Arthur Miller, was called The Hook. That script was later taken over after a dispute with the studio and renamed.

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In the annals of nonsensical business-speak waffle, there cannot be too many statements to beat this one from Bob Nardelli, chairman and chief executive of Chrysler, announcing the departure of Jason Vines as the company’s head of communications.

Now that Chrysler is an independent company again, we are taking every opportunity to realign functions in a more holistic manner that allows us to more effectively drive company strategy.

There are so many things wrong with this sentence, from its lamentable grammar to its lack of discernible meaning, that it makes me have serious doubts about Mr Nardelli, who was recruited to head Chrysler by Cerberus Capital Management after leaving Home Depot under a cloud. This was, after all, not an off-the-cuff bit of flannel but a deliberately-crafted press release.

It sounds to me as if he needs a PR person. He had a good one in Mr Vines. The first experience of what to expect now that PR has been "holistically realigned" under human resources is discouraging.

On the principle that one is always most interested in news that is close to home, I have been watching with fascination the appointments of Robert Thomson, editor of The Times, as publisher of the Wall Street Journal and James Harding, The Times’ business editor, as his successor.

As noted by Roy Greenslade, this means that former Financial Times journalists are now in editorial charge of the Journal, The Times and the Telegraph (Will Lewis is editor-in-chief). The FT suddenly appears to have become a management school for editors.

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Nick Carr notes that a senior engineer at Sun Microsystems last week predicted that a large data centre is likely to suffer a disastrous failure some time next year, causing the biggest information technology panic since the invention of the personal computer virus in 1988.

I don’t know if that is indeed likely but there is no doubt we now rely to a worrying extent on data centres of the kind that support Google, universities, businesses and governments. Think of a data centre failure as in your computer’s hard drive crashing and taking with it all your photos, music and documents, except on a much bigger scale.

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I wonder what Hillary Clinton means by "Wall Street". Her speech in New York calling for mortgage lenders to freeze rates on sub-prime mortgages and for a 90-day moratorium on house foreclosures was heavy on rhetoric against the Street.

Wall Street needs to be part of a comprehensive solution that brings to the table all those responsible and calls on them to do their part. Wall Street helped create the foreclosure crisis and Wall Street needs to help solve it.

OK, but does she mean that mortgage lenders and retail banks have to step forward or does she include investment banks that packaged collateralised debt obligations and sold them to investors?

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I am intrigued by the rapid development of West Kowloon, which seems to be Hong Kong’s version of Canary Wharf. The FT reports today that both Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley have signed up to move across Victoria Harbour from central Hong Kong to the new International Commerce Centre (ICC). Other investment banks may follow.

London’s financial district is now divided between the City and Canary Wharf (and Mayfair , if you count hedge funds) and New York’s between the Wall Street district and midtown. Something about financial centres seems to make them split into different districts. I suppose cheap rents - as West Kowloon is offering and Canary Wharf used to - often lures financial institutions to a new spot.

If anything, however, Wall Street appears to be reconsolidating downtown after its move up to midtown in the 1990s. JP Morgan Chase’s investment bank plans to move to one of the five skyscrapers planned for the old World Trade Center site and Goldman Sachs’s new headquarters will also be located nearby. It seems a fair bet that at least one other bank will move to the WTC site.

All in all, it feels as if banks such as Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers, which are still firmly attached to Midtown, could start to feel a bit lonely.

My weekly column in the Financial Times returns to the subject of Goldman Sachs’ great escape from the credit squeeze and what explains it. I put it down to a combination of skill, luck and edge. You can read the whole thing here and comment below.

Since global warming appears to be such a huge and intractable challenge, it is comforting to think there are lots of things that individuals and businesses can do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that would also save them money.

With this in mind, I rose early this morning to attend a briefing in New York by the Conference Board and McKinsey & Co on their joint report on how the US can reduce its greenhouse gas emissions between now and 2030 in an affordable manner.

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Making comparisons between the output of old media journalists (such as me) and bloggers (such as me, I suppose) is a risky business. Anyone who does so, from either side, is prone to get his head bitten off by people from the other.

But my eye has been caught by the coincidence of views on the topic between Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times and Nick Denton, proprietor of the blog outfit Gawker Media and my former Financial Times colleague and book co-author.

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A bit of a kerfuffle this (US) morning about Ben Stein’s column in The New York Times on Sunday, in which he suggested that Jan Hatzius, Goldman Sachs’ chief US economist, is spreading doom-laden prophesies about credit markets to help Goldman gain from its short position in US housing.

The Stein column has become a hot topic, perhaps because Goldman’s exceptional results have caused a lot of muttering about how it does it. I see that Stein’s column is near the top of the NYT’s most-emailed list this morning and it has caused uproar on various blogs, led by Felix Salmon, who maintains a Ben Stein Watch on the grounds that the latter’s columns are often absurd.

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