The Journal has a piece this morning on the rise of bowling (indoor 10-pin bowling, not the outdoor sort played by Sir Francis Drake). It has become a kind of hipster retro outing for people who enjoy its fake-suburban appeal.

Coincidentally, there is an article in the New York Times pointing out that golf has been in slow decline for some time. Men are apparently finding it harder to justify spending half a day on the golf course (or a Saturday excursion, as Jack Welch used to insist upon for GE executives).

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Further to my post the other day on the remarkable staying power of Marcel Ospel, the chairman of UBS, it seems the clock is ticking.

By cutting his term of office - and those of all board members - from three years to one, UBS is throwing a sop to investors who would like him to step down.

More generally, the problem of managerial entrenchment has always seemed to me to be bigger at continental European companies than those in the UK and US, where terms of office on board can often be short.

The tide is, however, moving in the Anglo-Saxon direction. It is bound to do so, given that investors have become more active and obstreperous in countries such as Germany and France.

There is a sort of irony here. The continental European institutions that have been the keenest to bring an “equity culture” to their countries have been the big banks such as Deutsche Bank and UBS. They have tried to break out of low-profit domestic retail banking into the volatile world of international investment banking.

Live by the sword, die by the sword. 

It has been obvious for some time that Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination is badly run compared with that of Barack Obama.

Leaving politics aside, it simply seems like a poor managerial effort. The fact that she has had fund-raising problems, did not grasp that the campaign would continue beyond Super Tuesday, and has not been able to organise effectively on the ground are all signs of a fundamental lack of competence.

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My Financial Times column this week is about Northern Rock. It sets out, David Letterman-style (well, sort of) the top 10 losers of the affair. You can read it here and post comments below.

The tensions between American politicians and sovereign wealth funds over investments in the US, which have been muted of late, could easily reignite.

Charles Schumer, the New York senator, has welcomed investments by SWFs in New York-based banks such as Citigroup. But at a hearing on Capitol Hill yesterday, he sounded a more defensive note, saying he was disappointed in the SWFs’ failure to come to Washington to explain themselves:

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This FT article today points out that businesses in industries other than financial services are generally more optimistic about the state of the US economy than Wall Street people.

I don’t know whether the US is in recession, is entering a deep or shallow one, or will avoid one altogether. But one thing struck me recently when talking to executives at an investment bank. They said that their financial traders were more pessimistic about the outlook than their economists.

It could be that Wall Street firms have been suffering so much themselves that they have extrapolated their own misery to the entire economy. Worth bearing in mind, at least.

My Financial Times column this week is about why it would be a bad idea to regulate investment bankers’ pay, a suggestion made last month by my colleague Martin Wolf. You can read my column here and post comments below.

Andrew Ross Sorkin’s column in the New York Times this morning on Special Purpose Acquisition Companies opens on the intriguing fact that Michael Gross must find a company to buy in the next 14 days for $300m or return the cash to his shareholders.

The rise of Spacs - shell companies that raise money in an initial public offering to buy unidentified other companies - reminds me of the days of the South Sea Bubble. Investors in Spacs are pretty much going on faith that the sponsors of these vehicles know what they are doing.

Old hands will recall the story in Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds about the South-Sea era company that was formed:

For carrying on an undertaking of great advantage; but nobody to know what it is.

Esther Dyson, who knows a thing or two about media and technology (as well as being the board member of 23 and Me who helped me with my genetic sample in Davos last month) wrote an op-ed piece in the Journal yesterday on the internet-based future of advertising.

It caught my attention because of who wrote it and because it was pegged to the Microsoft bid for Yahoo, as was my column on the same topic last week. I found it especially engaging because she agreed with me on one point but then branched out into something else entirely.

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Squeezed in amid the political coverage on its front page this morning the Wall Street Journal had a fun piece on how chief executives in the US are starting to talk like sailors. They are using weather-related allusions to describe the market conditions facing their businesses.

The naval weather that best symbolises the condition of financial markets, it seems to me, is the opening scene of Master and Commander; The Far Side of the World, the film based on the Patrick O’Brian sea-faring novels. As you may recall, it opens on the Surprise, the ship captained by Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) coming under unexpected cannonball fire from a ship hidden in fog.

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