As we hope that the next installment of Texas A&M football coach Dennis Franchione‘s Friday with Fran will be as entertaining as last week’s installment, the following are ways in which more than a few Aggie fans are getting up for this Saturday’s clash in Norman, Oklahoma between the Aggies and the Oklahoma Sooners:
FireDennisFranchione.com
FireFranPetition.com
FranUnderFire.com, which includes this handy list of embarrassments.
On the heels of yesterday’s post regarding General Motors’ Enronesque experience, the Washington Post business section leads with this article today that links General Motors and the “b word” in the same headline, and includes the following tidbit of information:
In a research note yesterday, Ronald A. Tadross, an auto analyst at Banc of America Securities LLC, called a bankruptcy filing “inevitable” and put the risk over the next two years at 40 percent, an increase from a previous estimate of 30 percent. Tadross said he thought GM management could be held responsible for the accounting errors and, if the management team is shaken up, the option of a bankruptcy reorganization would become more likely.
The London Daily Telegraph chimes in with the bankruptcy theme, too.
The Houston Texans face a vexing decision with regard to quarterback David Carr, the team’s first draft pick in its existence — whether to pick up an $8 million option to retain Carr’s services over the next four seasons?
In what has become his typically superficial manner, the Chronicle’s main NFL beat writer, John McClain (previous posts on McClain here), weighs in with this column in which he contends that the Texans will and should pick up the option to retain Carr’s services. McClain reasons that the Texans should retain Carr because “every team in the NFL that needed a quarterback would line up to give him a signing bonus of a lot more than $8 million,” although McClain provides no supporting analysis for that conclusion.
Two and a half months after Hurricane Katrina and the resulting flood hammered New Orleans, this NY Times article notes that the rebuilding of the city is being hampered by a scarcity of labor, a condition that was noted in this earlier post.
Given the massive exodus of people from New Orleans and the relunctance of many former residents to return, my sense is that we are experiencing uncharted waters with regard to the rebuilding of New Orleans. The tremendous loss of jobs almost overnight — particularly from small businesses that were destroyed by the damage from the flood — is unprecedented in the modern United States for an area this large. Inasmuch as most of the jobs that are arising as a result of the reconstruction effort are of a different nature from the ones that were lost, many of the people who left New Orleans are not attracted to return by those new jobs. Consequently, my sense is that the key to real rebirth in the area is the re-creation of small businesses, which is a tricky and slow task.
On a lively Thursday in New York, Phillip R. Bennett, the former CEO of the big commodities broker Refco Inc., was indicted on multiple counts of securities fraud, wire fraud and of making false regulatory filings with the SEC at the same time as creditors in Refco’s pending chapter 11 case fought over the price to be paid for the company’s key regulated futures business. Previous posts about Mr. Bennett and the Refco saga are here and a copy of the indictment is here.
Refco filed a chapter 11 case on Oct. 17 a week after the company announced that a $430 million debt owed to the company by a firm controlled by Mr. Bennett had been concealed and then repaid by Mr. Bennett. Refco’s board placed Mr. Bennett on indefinite leave Oct. 10 and he was arrested on federal securities fraud charges shortly thereafter.