If you feel like a shock, try finding out how many online advertising companies are tracking you every time you use the internet.

One way to do so is to go to the Network Advertising Initiative site in the US (www.networkadvertising.org) and click on the opt-out button that allows you to evade their surveillance. It also tells you how many have been watching you already.

My laptop browser, for example, contains cookies (small text files that hold passwords and other data that are used when you browse websites) planted there by 14 advertising networks, such as Google’s DoubleClick, Revenue Science and Tacoda.

I did not know they were there before I looked, although I suspected some were. I gave permission when I signed up for the sites of publishers such as FT.com or WSJ.com and many others. Even using search engines such as Yahoo and Google exposes you or, more precisely, your browser to being trailed.

“The reality is that people have had little choice in terms of online privacy. Try browsing the internet after switching off your cookies and see how well it works,” says Kent Ertugrul, chief executive of Phorm which crunches data obtained from internet service providers.

You can read the rest here and comment below.

The tendency in the past was for investment banks to pull in towards the centre in the US when markets were troubled. Banks retreated a couple of times in the early 1990s from China during weak periods for the business.

The opposite is occurring in this downturn. While jobs are being cut in London and New York, they are still being added in India and China and other fast-growing regions such as the Gulf.

This article in the New York Times this morning details the ways in which India is benefitting from the shifting balance. Meanwhile, the FT on Monday recorded how Credit Suisse plans to expand there.

The upshot will be that cyclical weakness in western economies adds to secular trends towards the rebalancing of economies and investment banks.

One interesting question is what long-term effect this will have on London. London has had a great run as an international financial centre and the place from which bankers fly to do business in the Gulf and Asia. But, as local operations in these places develop, London’s role could weaken.

It has an entertainingly deranged quality since Lady Amiel admits no wrong, on behalf of either of the pair, and is contemptuous about almost everyone else’s behaviour. The facts, she thinks, are on their side.

The fact that the courts did not believe her husband’s story proves their imbecility, in her view.

It is also pleasingly written, combining high dudgeon, amour propre, self-delusion and expansive rhetoric in a wonderful recipe. If anything, she manages to make herself seem more unlikeable than her already fearsome reputation.

(more…)

UK banks are now suffering from credit losses on a scale not seen since the early 1990s when the last large property and economic downturn hit the UK and, as it happened, I had just become a banking correspondent.

So, given this excuse to go down memory lane, here are a couple of thoughts about how the past compares with the present.

(more…)

My FT column this week is on the e-book rivalry between Sony’s Reader and Amazon’s Kindle:

Ever since Sony lost the battle between its Walkman music player and Apple’s iPod, it has been trying to strike back. This week, it paid $900m to take full control of Sony-BMG, its music joint venture with Bertelsmann.

Sir Howard Stringer, Sony’s chief executive, wants to make it as easy as possible to download or stream music and films to all of Sony’s electronics devices, from Bravia televisions to PlayStation 3 consoles.

Sir Howard, still smarting at how Apple integrated hardware, software and its iTunes music store far better than Sony, has another target in mind. He wants 90 per cent of Sony’s hardware devices to be networked, and even to be connected wirelessly, within two years.

In one small corner of Sony’s empire, however, it has just made the same mistake all over again. It has squandered an early lead in a new field because another company was better not just at inventing an electronic device but also at linking it to a wireless network and making it easy for consumers to use.

You can read the rest here and comment below.

Mr Jha apparently wanted to be the chief executive of a public company - and doubted whether Paul Jacobs was going to move over at Qualcomm - but his pay and benefits package is reminiscent of a private equity deal.

Motorola plans to spin off its mobile phone arm and, if it does, Mr Jha gets to own 3 per cent of the company. If it does not, he will be paid $30m to compensate him for his time and trouble. His entire package is estimated as being worth up to $94m.

(more…)

The most interesting aspect of it is that Mr Cayne himself talks candidly about how he failed to prevent Bear from collapsing and having to be rescued by the Federal Reserve and JP Morgan Chase.

One reason was that he was in no physical condition to do so. He collapsed from a prostate infection last September and lost 30 pounds in weight while in hospital recovering. He was 73 at the time.

But the other is that, as Mr Cayne himself admits, he was the wrong man for the job. His background as a broker, trader and card player did not give him much insight into the chaos in credit markets and he compounded matters by firing Warren Spector, the man who ran Bear’s trading operations.

(more…)

It starts like this:

On Friday August 3 last year, as US financial markets were approaching the summer doldrums and bankers began to head off for holidays on Long Island or Cape Cod, Bear Stearns held a conference call for investors.

Shares in the investment bank, the fifth largest in the world, had fallen as investors worried about the collapse of two hedge funds that it managed and its exposure to the troubled housing market. But few were prepared for the candour of Sam Molinaro, its chief financial officer. Instead of reassuring them about Bear Stearns’ financial condition, he scared them even more: “I’ve been at this for 22 years. It’s about as bad as I have seen it in the fixed income market during that period . . . [what] we have been seeing over the last eight weeks has been pretty extreme.”

Later that afternoon, Jim Cramer, the former hedge fund manager, whose show, Mad Money, on the CNBC financial cable channel had become a cult among US retail investors, took to the air to sound his own alarm. Mr Cramer chided Bear Stearns for admitting publicly that it was struggling to cope but then launched into an angry tirade. He lambasted Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, for not cutting interest rates aggressively, and said bank executives were calling him in distress. “We have Armageddon. In the fixed income markets, we have Armageddon,” he shouted, as Erin Burnett, his co-host, tried to calm him down.

If all of this sounded bizarrely alarmist at the time, a year later it reads like a fair assessment of the havoc that was breaking out in financial markets as the liquidity that had washed through the US economy and the rest of the world abruptly froze.

You can read the rest here and comment below.

Devoted readers of this blog will recall my childlike sense of wonder at renting a car in Los Angeles last year and being guided around the city with a GPS device. Of course, GPS was already old hat then for many car drivers, but there we are.

My latest experiment has been to buy a small GPS Bluetooth fob for about $50 that links with my Blackberry and the Google Maps software that I have downloaded to it. As a result, I can now see where I am: a little blue dot on the map marks the spot.

(more…)

My column in the FT this week is about cross-border mergers and whether they are really more risky than other kinds. It starts like this:

Tuesday was not a propitious day to be announcing grand plans for a cross-border merger.

That morning, Alcatel-Lucent ejected Serge Tchuruk and Pat Russo, its chairman and chief executive, over its own unhappy merger. Meanwhile, Robert Dudley was trying to run TNK-BP, the disputed joint venture between BP and some Russian oil tycoons, from a safe haven.

Neither was an advertisement for the benefits of link-ups with foreign companies. The lesson appeared to be that chief executives of failed mergers at best lose their jobs and at worst have to flee the country.

Yet Willie Walsh of British Airways and Fernando Corte of Iberia chose this moment to say they wanted to join forces, following the example of Air France-KLM and Lufthansa, which acquired Swissair in 2005.

Were they mad?

You can read the rest here and leave comments below.