NEW YORK (CNN/Money) -
A bit of relief! And we needed it bad! Stocks moved up today, nothing much, maybe a positive report out of Yahoo? (Please!) Lots of fun news today, see below, just not markets!! The Dow climbed 23 to 8,221, while NASDAQ was up 8 to 1,365.
Hey watch me, Billy Collins (Our poet laureate. Try "Picnic, Lightning"), I mean Andy Serwer, on CNN's "American Morning with Paula Zahn" and Headline News. Read Loose Change to find out why I'm sad the Concorde is shutting down. Here's wazzup:
STOCKYARD So here we go again with earnings season. Whoopee! GE reports before the bell tomorrow. Just to remind everyone, GE now trades for $27; three years ago, it was in the mid $50s. Even so, GE yet again has the biggest market cap of any stock -- around $274 billion. Looks like the first trillion market cap will have to wait a few years -- or decades!...
Hey Wall Street no like that Fox DirecTV deal! Fox very active, fell 17 percent, $4.65, to $22.60!! Couldn't happen to a nicer guy. (Street Life stands by its story, Rupert!)...
Did you see the HealthSouth stuff, where the former CFO was wearing a wire when he talked to Scrushy?! Wow! The FBI got him to do it and got it on microchip and then put it on a CD. Scrushy's lawyer trying to discredit it! Scrushy's wife set to testify soon!...
Hotels.com soared $10.20, or 19 percent, to $63.50. Diller's buying!...Cognizant and IDEC got blasted.
PURE PORK Congress is having a tough time passing an $80 billion war spending bill. They're arguing over pork. Such as: $98 million to complete an agricultural research center at Ames, Iowa; about $3 million to repair a Vermont dam; and a provision to designate Alaska wild salmon as "organic." Why are you surprised?
WHY I LIVE ABOVE THE P.O. (I mean, "Why I Never Bought An Internet Stock) By Eudora Serwer: "NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Software company Ariba Inc. said on Thursday it restated or adjusted all but one of its quarterly financial statements since becoming a public company in 1999, citing accounting errors, dubious partner deals and questionable payments for chartered airplanes."
I'm not sure what kind of "software" Ariba makes. I'm not sure I care. I do know two things: I'm sure I don't understand what Ariba does. And I will never buy its stock. Now the latter statement would have been a stupid one, if one had had the foresight to buy ARBAE at a split-adjusted price of around $20 on its IPO day in 1999, and sold it at $200 in 2000. If you were one of those folks, buy yourself a cigar on me. Today Ariba trades for $3 and change (actually I'm surprised it's that much).
So Ariba, out of Sunnyvale, CA (but of course), is chaired by one Keith Krach, who was apparently once General Motors' youngest VP and a top executive at computer-aided design automation specialist Rasna. So the company says that almost all of what it reported to you, dear shareholder, was inaccurate. But that you should believe them going forward. By the way, the company's name is a derivation of "arriba," the Spanish word for "up." As in Screw Up, no?...Arriba Arriba, Andre!
THE LUCE AWARDS These are our in-house Academy Awards at Time Inc. FORTUNE's own Betsy Morris won the best personal service award for her GREAT story on dyslexia. Best line of the day came from the legendary sports writer Frank Deford, who won a Life/Time (get it?) Achievement award. Deford quoted Bobby Knight on sportswriters: "The best year of a sportswriter's life are the three he spends in 3rd grade." Nice!
MORE SARS NEWS From NJS in Singi/Jakarta: "An interesting thing that I am picking up on the grapevine: A lot of people are 'stranded' in Hong Kong because of SARS. That is, a lot of professionals in banks and law firms I know who are based in HK are not allowed to go visit other offices of their own firms outside of HK. I assume, but don't know, that the same approach probably holds true for China.
So what does this mean for companies that are looking to ride high on the great China growth engine? Can their operations function in HK and China on their own and via remote control? Maybe yes, but there's at least a potential wrench in the works. Of course all the above is wholly apart from the question: What will the impact of SARS be on growth in China? We already have seen the reports on the effect of SARS on the economies of HK and Sg (e.g., HK retail sales down 50 percent for February as I recall seeing -- and predicted worse for March). So if the main growth engine for Asia is China: What will the effect of SARS be there? And the ripple effects from that?" Grim N, grim.
Loose change
I'm really going to miss the Concorde. I flew it almost every week...
Big shout out to Ann Moore: Sorry I'm a little late on Street Life, but I was visiting with Moore, the CEO of Time Inc. Really had a great time with her, very cool. AND a Redskin fan, AND a Vandy grad, AND....
Okay, who is your NBA MVP? If you say Kevin Garnett, you are wrong! The Wolves are the same team as they were last year, and like last year a nowhere team in the playoffs. I guess you say Tim Duncan, right?...
Some Billy Collins:
And the soul is up on the roof
in her nightdress, straddling the ridge,
singing a song about the wildness of the sea
until the first rip of pink appears in the sky.
Then, they all will return to the sleeping body
the way a flock of birds settles back into a tree...
Andrew Serwer is editor-at-large of Fortune magazine.
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