DDO Roundup - Vodka, Olympics, MBAs, MS Office & Vitamin C

• WSJ on Vodka: "Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev earned the wrath of millions in the mid-1980s with his antialcohol drive, when liquor production and sales were drastically curbed. Industrial output rose, divorce rates fell and there were fewer accidents. Hardened alcoholics simply switched to toxic surrogates like bug spray and eau de Cologne." Link

• The Winter Olympics...brace yourself: for non-stop winter sports action mixed with sob stories about otherwise gifted athletes. Question I find myself asking: when are we going to stop insisting that people be both great and pitiable at the same time? Why can't we just tolerate watching people kick ass? I know it's a cultural thing - the whole charade reminds me of kids from the most privileged backgrounds imaginable trying to write stories for college admissions about overcoming hardships. 

• Dow Jones reports a rumor: that Arcelor, in an attempt to fend off Mittal Steel's hostile ~$18 billion bid, was looking into acquiring US Steel (X). The logic must be: rather than be the subject of someone else's messy merger, better to engage in your own. The resulting loss of operational focus should keep you safe from potential acquirors for a year or two while you work things out...

• Men are from Mars, women, Venus: My girlfriend thought it silly, I thought it genius: "For the 8th year in a row, Anheuser-Busch won the USA Today Ad Meter consumer ranking of the top Super Bowl ads. The winning ad featured a refrigerator that disappears behind a revolving wall to hide the beer from guests." Watch the ad here.

• The Harvard MBA Indicator says we're still in frothy market conditions: at 30% of the class of 2005 going into market sensitive careers, I'll still guess that 2006-7 sees that percentage go even higher as the economy and stock market hobble along, fueled by the vapors of the consumer-spending bonfire...even though the much-hyped capex-resurgence will fail to materialize. Soifer Consulting has the details: "If 10% or less of the year's Harvard MBA class takes market-sensitive jobs (investment banking, investment management, sales & trading, venture capital, private equity or leveraged buy-outs), that's a long-term ‘Buy’ signal. Conversely, if 30% or more do so, that's a long-term ‘Sell’ signal.

Data released by HBS show that 30% of the MBA Class of 2005 chose market- sensitive careers, up from 26% a year earlier and 23% in 2003. A long-term 'Sell' signal was also sent in 2000, with 30% (compared with 28% in 1999 and 29% in 1998), and remained in effect for 2001 and 2002 (32% and 36%, respectively). Prior to 2000, the last such long-term 'Sell' signal was given in 1987." (Data from Soifer Consulting - Link).

• I'm actually excited about MS Office 12: which "features a revamped graphical user interface and new business intelligence tools, or ways to sort through data to get relevant information. Microsoft has worked to make it easier to do such things as see results of a spreadsheet displayed graphically and save a document as a PDF, she says. It also uses XML technology to share information among applications and update data in documents." (Source: IBD) Am I wrong to think that Microsoft could still do something interesting? Although Google is most widely expected to do "the next great thing in software," I've been pretty disappointed by their offerings thus far. A company as big as Microsoft must have a few great ideas left in her yet...right?

• China corners the market for Vitamin C?: "Ten years ago, China's pharmaceutical firms had a sliver of the world's market for vitamin C. Today, China is the OPEC of vitamin C. Chinese manufacturers currently supply more than 85% of the vitamin C used in the U.S. ... After a 2001 agreement among China's four largest producers, spot prices for vitamin C rose to as high as $9 a kilogram from lows of less than $3." The folly of our current economic path becomes ever clearer...here's the global value proposition: you make it, we'll buy it (don't worry if it doesn't make sense, everyone knows that deficits don't matter...) Link

Comments

[Anti-Aging Vitamins]

china is cornering the market in just about anything and it is because we allow them to.