Marketplace Scratch Pad

Morning Reading

Scott Jagow Dec 21, 2009

Good morning. Hope you had a good weekend. Here are a few things to get the week started:

Tiger Woods, Person of the Year (NYT) This is a terrific piece and a must read:

As cons go, Woods’s fraudulent image as an immaculate exemplar of superhuman steeliness is benign. His fall will damage his family, closest friends, Accenture and the golf industry much more than the rest of us. But the syndrome it epitomizes is not harmless. We keep being fooled by leaders in all sectors of American life, over and over.

Let the Tiger Woods booking wars begin (NPR):

All the big shows are in the hunt. “They’re figuring out who might be some intern’s cousin’s neighbor who caddies at the golf resort that Tiger Woods played at three years ago,” says Jessica Stuart, a former producer for NBC’s Today Show, The Oprah Winfrey Show and ABC News.

AIG, show us the emails (New York Times) This will never happen, but it should:

The three of us, as experienced investigators and prosecutors of financial fraud, cannot answer these questions now. But we know where the answers are. They are in the trove of e-mail messages still backed up on A.I.G. servers, as well as in the key internal accounting documents and financial models generated by A.I.G. during the past decade. Before releasing its regulatory clutches, the government should insist that the company immediately make these materials public. By putting the evidence online, the government could establish a new form of “open source” investigation.

Citigroup may provide lowest return for taxpayers (Bloomberg):

The value of the 465 million Citigroup warrants may depend on whether buyers think the stock can quintuple within nine years…

“It’s a big stretch,” said Bernard Chriqui, vice president of equity derivatives trading at Nomura in New York. “It’s sort of like a lottery ticket.”

Yeah, it’s pretty much chaos at Delta and Northwest right now (The Consumerist)

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