Who to Blame for Job Losses...

From Instapundit:

Like many business owners, we are no longer willing to take all of the financial and legal risks and put up with all of the aggravation of owning and running a business. Not with the prospects of even higher taxes, more regulation, more litigation and more emboldened bureaucrats on the horizon. Like others we know, we are getting out while the getting is, well, tolerable. Many who aren’t getting out are scaling back. . . . It is no secret that owners circulated endless emails leading up to election day discussing lay off plans were Obama to win. Entrepreneurs instinctively understand the danger posed by larger liberal majorities in power. The risk-reward equation and fierce independence spirit of start up businesses are anathema to the class warfare, equality of outcome and spread the wealth mentality of the left. . . .

We got into business to be independent. We will get out for the same reason.

Read the whole thing.

Scary - very scary.  

Repeal SOX?

I've been involved in the Finance and Accounting business for most of the past dozen years.  I can state that, for me and many of my friends, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was a wonderful thing.  It created billions of dollars of work, and it came to us at a time when things were slowing down after the Dot.com bubble burst in the early part of the decade.  
I don't speak for everyone in the industry, of course, but I believe we all thought the Act was flawed in many ways.  It was vaguely-worded, and imposed drastic penalties upon individual executives as a way to force companies to impose hugely complex internal reporting structures on business entitities.  Worse, it often caused well-functioning internal controls structures to be scrapped for structures that "complied" with the directives of the Act.  Not without reason was it often referred to as the "Accountants and Lawyers Full Employment Act of 2002" around my offices.
Billions have been spent, and continue to be spent, to comply with the Act.  But what have we gotten from that "tax"?  Have any major accounting scandals been averted?  (One data point for you: Fannie and Freddie didn't have to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley).  Have our capital markets been as robust since it was passed?   
One key feature of our business environment used to be that management would decide, with their own data and insight, how much to spend on internal controls structures within their firms.  Investors should probably be aware of management's internal controls focus and discount those firms that don't control things as well, but I don't believe government should be setting the standard for what management invests in this function.  (Especially when government is notorious for  a "belt and suspenders" approach to almost everything it regulates).
This editorial makes these points more eloquently than I can.  I have to say, from the perspective of someone who's been deeply involved in helping firms comply with SOX over the past half-dozen years, that the authors are right.  
(I'd love to hear your comments, too.)

The Most Important Vitamin

...is Vitamin D. Studies have been showing for years that this vitamin (which is really a "precursor hormone") may be vital to staving off everything from heart disease to various cancers. And yet, because of our media-driven fear of skin cancer (which occurs in much lower incidence than the diseases prevented by Vitamin D), up to half of adults and 30% of children in the U.S. show a deficiency of this vitamin.

This Vitamin is generally produced when skin is exposed to sun. It doesn't take much, only 10 minutes per day between 10am and 2pm, to produce enough to keep you healthy - but that's only if you're Caucasian and if you're not wearing sunscreen. Those with darker skin need more exposure, or supplements, to keep them at optimal levels.

This article is a great overview of how Vitamin D is being associated with increased risks for heart disease.

Please think about Vitamin D - this may be one of the most important health factors you can pay attention to. The payoffs could be enormous later in life when you consider how many of us are affected by the diseases this substance helps us prevent.

Do Politics Shape Buyout Performance?

In this interesting article summary from the Harvard Business Review, Oliver F. Gottschalg and Aviad A. Pe’er make the case that buyouts conducted in "Red" (Republican) states outperform those made in "Blue" states by a significant amount.

Here's a quote:

This key conclusion of our study, which looked at 5,870 U.S. buyouts by private equity firms made between 1980 and 2003, points to serious inefficiencies in the market for corporate acquisitions. In an efficient market, the average risk-adjusted rate of return on investments in identical target companies located in different states should be the same. Our research, however, found that the average return in red states was 3% above the mean (and as much as 17% above it in the best-performing red state—Oklahoma). The average return in blue states was 6% below the mean (and as much as 21% below it in the worst-performing state—Michigan). Yet most acquirers and sellers don’t seem to accurately consider local factors in the valuation methods they apply.

The economic consequences of this oversight can be substantial: Using data on the returns from actual buyouts, we constructed two hypothetical funds—one that invested only in companies located in red states, and the other only in companies in blue states, and found that the first fund achieved a 9% higher annual net internal rate of return.

Can we extrapolate and conclude that firms do better under national policies that mirror those of Red states (such as right-to-work, the ability to close underperforming business units without interference, etc.)? The coming four-to-eight years should provide some data to support or debunk that hypothesis.

From Tony Barnhart's (Excellent) AJC Weblog

For those of you outraged about the fact that OU could go to the Big 12 Championship game over Texas - a team that beat them on a neutral field - here's the best explanation I've seen.


Oklahoma finished No. 2 ahead of No. 3 Texas in Sunday’s BCS Standings which means the Sooners will play in the Big 12 championship game against Missouri. The BCS will get blamed for this because the BCS gets blamed for just about everything that goes wrong in college football. In fact, this is the Big 12’s fault. Their fifth tiebreaker in the case of a three-way tie in the division is that the team with the highest BCS ranking wins the spot in the championship game. The SEC has an additional tiebreaker for this situation that simply says that if there is a three-way tie and the top two teams are within FIVE spots of one another in the BCS Standings, then the head-to-head game between those two teams will be the tiebreaker. Under that rule Texas would have gone to the Big 12 championship game because it beat Oklahoma 45-35 on a neutral field back on Oct. 11. Remember how all of us screamed when Florida State went to the BCS championship game over Miami in 2000 after the Hurricanes had won the game on the field? Head-to-head competition matters. Look for the Big 12 to change its rule and adopt the SEC model in the future.