I have decided to hold a press conference to confront stories that I was Tiger Woods’ mistress. I’ve never held one before. Nor have I ever met the man, nor am I “inclined” that way. But I figure that now is a good time to jump on the band wagon, especially if magazines are paying up for stories. Stay tuned for the time and place – it might be more entertaining than mortgage banking, and I’ve never been on the cover of “Us”.
I would imagine that plenty of folks at Bank of America, and their clients, are happy. Bank of America Corp. said that it plans to repay its $45 billion in government bailout funds, as soon as this week! Apparently the Bank has that much available cash, without sniffing around in the safe deposit boxes of its customers, and raise $18.8 billion in capital to repay the money. This is great news for shareholders (the stock moved higher on the news). Of the 4 major mortgage investors & servicers, this will leave Citi ($45 billion) and Wells ($25 billion) with owing TARP funds. There is no news from Citi. As for Wells, ever since they accepted their $25 billion of federal bailout assistance last year, management has said that the bank never needed the money, didn’t want it, and shouldn’t have been forced by the government to take it. They keep saying they’d like to pay it back, too, but have not offered up a schedule.
If you went to a mall last weekend to look for Cabbage Patch Dolls, the odds are pretty good that it was owned by General Growth Properties – they own and manage more than 200 of them here in the US. They are in the middle of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy plan after failing to refinance portions of its $27 billion in debt.
When Winston Churchill, in the 1932 essay “Fifty Years Hence,” mused that “we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium,” he may have been more prescient than credited. Alexis Carrel had already been keeping a cultured chunk of chicken heart “alive” in a Pyrex flask for the past twenty years by feeding it nutrients (though Carrel was only interested in whether cell death was inevitable, not whether meat could be grown in a lab for human consumption). Sci-fi author Frederik Pohl was one man who took the idea of in vitro meat seriously enough to write about it – in the novel The Space Merchants, where cultured meat is the primary source of protein. That was science fiction, sure, but most good sci-fi is borne of the author’s honest opinion of what the future might hold and it’s usually inspired by the scientific advancements of the day. And sometimes, science fiction comes true. Like this time.
There’s been plenty of ink spilled, so to speak, over the whole Google versus newspapers debacle yet, for the most part, the search giant has been calm and unperturbed satisfied to issue out the occasional “you can always de-index” argument. Not anymore, it seems, as Google is on an all-out offensive, though usually with a peace offering at the same time, the latest of which comes straight from the man up top, Eric Schimidt. The CEO is making a case for the company with an op-ed in the News Corp.-owned Wall Street Journal of all places. 
