I have never seen Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, in person so I took the opportunity to do so this lunchtime at the Milken Institute Global Conference. I have to say that I was impressed.

Mr Schwarzenegger was talking about his push to build infrastructure such as roads, rail links and schools in California. He has also linked up with Ed Rendell, governor of Pennsylvania, and Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York to spread that message across the US.

I expected him to be amusing and unusual but he surprised me with his fluency in talking about the topic and his charm. Maybe it helped that he was in a room full of business people (and financiers with an interest in the subject) who were on his side.

I also liked his lack of tact. At one point, eulogising about why his state was “the greatest place in the world” he compared it to other states. “People are not dying to go to Iowa,” he said. I can only imagine the apology he will have to make for that.

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My FT column this week is about Michael Milken and his defence at the Milken Institute Global Conference of high-yield finance in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis. I think he gets some things wrong but is correct about one big thing.

You can read it here and comment below. Incidentally, Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times is at the conference and wrote about the same topic earlier this week, so you can compare and contrast here.

Amid all the financial confusion, one things seems clear enough: the days of the $10bn plus leveraged buyout are gone for now.

Even when the backlog of unsyndicated high-yield loans held by banks is cleared - which now looks like will happen fairly quickly - they are not going to be rushing back to the private equity funds to offer new multi-billion facilities.

The reason for that is not simply that they have been burned by the events of the past year. More concretely, they can no longer package up mezzanine and secured debt for buyouts and transform it into collateralised loan obligations (CLOs).

This was the unanimous conclusion of a panel on private equity this morning at the Milken Institute Global Conference, which included Leon Black of Apollo Advisers and Thomas Lee of the eponymous private equity group.

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If Warren Buffett does team up with Mars to buy Wrigley for more than $22bn, it will be not only a quintessential Buffett deal but a reminder of where value lies in a downturn.

Mr Buffett has a sweet tooth, not only personally (he is known for his devotion to Cherry Coke) but as an investor. Berkshire Hathaway’s 8 per cent stake in Coca-Cola is among his longstanding stakes in big consumer brands.

Famously, confectionery companies are often good investments during in recessions as people cut back on luxuries and comfort themselves with small indulgences such as chocolate bars.

They also meet the Buffett test, which he used recently to justify not taking a stake in Google, that he has to be able to grasp a company’s product and the sustainability of its competitive edge.

One might put chewing gum at the opposite end of the scale to Bear Stearns. Mr Buffett was said to have discussed taking a stake in the Wall Street firm last September but rejected the idea, which was a smart decision.

He has more faith in chewing gum than credit derivatives.

Having been travelling recently (I have just shifted from London, via New York and Washington, to Los Angeles for the Milken Institute Global Conference) I am sensitive to things that help or hinder the voyager.

In this context, I am struck by the fact that the wheel-along suitcase is one of the great consumer product inventions of recent years. I would go so far as to place it alongside the upside-down tomato sauce bottle as a transformative variation of an existing product.

Unfortunately, the industrial designers who come up with inventions such as this rarely gain the recognition they deserve. I wonder if the readers of this blog can think of other examples?

I am back in London again to pick up a prize and continue my ongoing comparison of my native city with the one where I live - New York.

As always, when arriving at London Bridge station this morning, I was reminded of T. S. Eliot’s lines from The Wasteland:

Eliot once worked in Lloyds Bank as a clerk. I recall that Sir Jeremy Morse, the former chairman of the bank, had tears in his eyes when he recited those lines from memory in a valedictory speech.

Anyway, this morning they were as true as ever as I pushed through the crowds to board the Jubilee Line. A sign proclaimed that the line service was good but, as Bill Clinton might have said, that depends on the meaning of the word “good”.

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I hesitate to say this because he has built a vast global media empire and I have not but I think Rupert Murdoch is wrong about the Wall Street Journal.

The resignation under pressure of Marcus Brauchli as its managing editor this week brought to the surface underlying tensions between Mr Murdoch and Mr Brauchli over the editorial direction of the paper.

I agree with some of the changes that Mr Murdoch wants to bring to the paper but in one big respect - his wish to compete more directly with the New York Times - he is misguided.

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For this week’s column in the FT, I have gone down memory lane to the origins of the disastrous UBS foray into credit derivatives and subprime mortgages. You can read it here and comment below.

Well, that did not take long. The resignation of Marcus Brauchli as managing editor of the Wall Street Journal just 11 months after taking up the post and four months after Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of Dow Jones occurred faster than almost anyone expected.

Despite Mr Murdoch’s pledge not to interfere in editorial matters, and the creation of a special committee to ensure that Mr Brauchli was not told what to do by the paper’s new owner, it never seemed entirely plausible that Mr Murdoch would remain editorially detached.

His influence - transmuted through Robert Thomson, the former US managing editor of the FT who is now publisher of the Journal - is evident in the paper’s extra political coverage and the expansion of its opinion pages.

My sense is that Journal staff are uncomfortable about Mr Murdoch’s enthusiasm for taking on the New York Times by broadening the political coverage. Even if it does the job well, it will inevitably lose some focus.

One question is how much of a fuss the committee will kick up over Mr Brauchli’s rapid departure. Since he has resigned, the committee has no obvious grounds to interfere but its members are likely to feel uncomfortable if they do not at least make a statement.

They will not want to meet the fate of the independent directors of the Times of London, who did not protest when Harry Evans resigned as editor in 1982 after falling out with Mr Murdoch. They are still there but have not been taken very seriously since then.

It promises to be quite a drama in the world of US newspapers and of financial publications, including this one.

All does not appear to be well in the venture capital industry, to judge by the move by Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent investment firms, to broaden its business to include everything from shares to property.

That follows shifts by two of the UK’s longest-established venture capital firms - 3i and Apax Partners - away from early stage investing and towards buy-outs of established companies.

Sequoia’s move would make it look more like one of the private equity firms, such as Blackstone and Carlyle, which have raised funds to invest in all kinds of assets. Property investment has been Blackstone’s highest-return business.

But the fact that Sequoia may follow is a big symbolic shift. Under its lead partners Michael Moritz and Doug Leone, it has been an early investor in many of the biggest Silicon Valley successes of recent years, including Google, Yahoo and YouTube.

If even Sequoia is feeling the need to diversify, what does that mean for the rest of the venture capital industry?