The "Vampire Squid" reference for Goldman Sachs is to this quote from Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone: "The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."
It is a common complaint in pyramid-shaped hierarchies that the "best" people leave. This is because they have to leave. As they climb the ladder, the rungs get smaller so fewer can fit. Each year, many of the people who were the best the year before (and got to the next rung on the ladder) have to leave. So people in organizations like this naturally come to think that the "best" people leave -- because eventually they all do. Of course, it is possible to design a hierarchy so dysfunctional that the best people leave and the worst people stay, and I don't know enough about the armed services to assess whether that's the case here, but whenever I read about the best leaving, I wonder how much of that's an intended feature or an unintended bug.
Every quarter the publicly-traded tech companies hold earnings calls. After the company gives its spiel, it allows the analysts to ask questions. These calls are open to the public, and I suggest you listen in on one for a company you know well; the questions you hear will tell you pretty much all you need to know about these analysts.
You make useful points. The efficient market hypothesis, particularly in its stronger forms, is in retreat. Value investors like Buffett are a big reason for this. But... for most people without the skill or the time to find the next great investment or the next great investment manager, index investing offers the lowest cost of investment and, if you dollar-cost average over a long enough time, you will invest in up and down markets, thereby minimizing your market timing risk. Clearly this is not a swing-for-the-fences investing strategy, but for most people it is good enough.
Barnes & Noble is doing better than Borders, but I don't think it is doing "just fine." B&N has been losing money in recent quarters and, while its Nook is a more successful e-reader than the Borders Kobo, it is still far behind the Kindle. If Borders dies, B&N will benefit in the short-term, but I am not sure how well it will do over the long-term.
Borders leases all its stores. It has about $1.3 billion in liabilities ($350 million in debt, $620 million in payables and another $350 million in other long-term liabilities). In the most recent quarter for which it reported results, it lost $74 million. Ouch.
Problem is if borders declares BK, it will wipe out your equity and give control to creditors. If you thought BK likely, better strategy may be to buy debt if you can.
Pomplamoose is a musical act that seems to have attained a level of success primarily through YouTube and commercials (recent holiday Hyundai ad) instead of touring.
Sufjan Stevens seems to have built a reasonably successful music career without having a major label deal. His CDs are issued by an indie label (Asthmatic Kitty) he reportedly co-owns with his stepfather (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asthmatic_Kitty), and while he doesn't seem to come close to Dave Matthews in concert revenues, his tours seem to do all right.
The $88 billion market cap for Goldman Sachs is the value of all GS shares, including those held by insiders. So if you could buy $50 billion of GS shares at the current price, you'd own about 57% of the company.
Presumably at places like MIT the credential value of a degree is still worth a lot, particularly for those looking for careers in credential-reliant sectors such as academia, but one wonders for how long second- and third-tier institutions with low or no credential value can continue when excellent and free programs like this are so widely available.
Chris Wickham's recent book "The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000" shines a light on this oft misunderstood period, showing ways in which it was darker and ways in which it was lighter.
Although the SEC considers itself the "investor's advocate," it usually steps back and allows "accredited investors" and "qualified purchasers" (terms it uses for "rich investors") to invest on their own. So if Goldman Sachs and its clients are truly rich and sophisticated, I don't think the SEC will view protecting them as a good use of its time.
That being said, Goldman Sachs and its investors will likely insist on financial disclosures from Facebook and maybe even some governance rights that, while not quite public company-strength, will lead to Facebook disclosing more information to more people than it had previously.
Poor Charlie's Almanack collects many of Munger's best speeches. You can find some of them on the web (here is a transcript of his famous "Psychology of Human Misjudgment" speech: http://www.rbcpa.com/Mungerspeech_june_95.pdf); read one and see if it speaks to you. If it does, the book, which includes Munger's edits to these speeches, is a worthwhile investment of your money and time.
An increase in life expectancy and a decline in birth rates means that population increases in the near future will more and more be in the form of people living longer, rather than increases in the number of new people. After a while the decline in birth rates will catch up, and population will decline. Japan and Europe are furthest along this curve, but rest of world looks poised to follow.
If that is important to you, you can make it clear to the investors before they come in, and get them to agree to limit their ability to remove you from the board and from your position running the company. This can be done in a shareholders agreement. The problem is (a) if you need the investors more than they need you, they will not agree to this, and (b) people often think of this only when they are on the verge of getting the boot, when it is too late to work something out. Investments usually always begin with everyone singing "kumbaya" in harmony, and every investor always says they invest in founders, but when things don't go according to plan, the founder who's sold control is often going to be the first to go.
Ultimately the directors are always elected by the shares, and unless there is something really strange about the voting rights, someone owning a controlling interest in the shares should be able to control election to the board, which in turn would allow that person to control the board. Controlling the shares + controlling the board = controlling the company.
If you own 90% of the stock you should be able to remove or replace all the directors, and once you do that your new directors can rehire you. There may be a lag if the company's charter prohibits shareholders from acting by written consent or calling special meetings, but even if that were the case, anyone owning 90% should not be out in the cold for long.
I would think Google's wet dream is a world in which ultra-high speed internet access is available everywhere at low or no cost to the user, and I would expect Google to be thinking hard about how to help make that a reality. Today cellular phone companies are our de facto ISPs when we're away from our homes and offices, so I would expect Google to be thinking about how to deal with them or become them or whatever, but that's just an accident of history and there are other ways to make Google's wet dream a reality. Or so I hope...
Admittedly, my comment itself was superficial and broad-brushed, but I still have a hard time seeing our world, even accepting the truth of the author's premises, becoming anything evenly remoting resembling the 12th century world. So much else is so different.
If you ignore the millions of ways the world has changed since the 12th century, and focus only on one superficial broad-brushed similarity, then this article is persuasive. Otherwise, not.
Years ago Paul Krugman wrote one of the best explanations of international trade and why so much of it is so counterintuitive so many: http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/ricardo.htm.
Today no one pays tax on stock until they sell it. What this guy seems to be proposing is that no one except founders pays tax on stock until they sell it. He calls that "distributive justice" but I have a hard time seeing the justice in taxing the same asset differently depending on what hat you happen to be wearing.
I agree. We do not compete as "Americans" vs. "Indians" or "Chinese." We compete as firms and products vs. each other. I guess it is not surprising that an article in Foreign Policy would see the world exclusively in the form of nation vs. nation, as that is surely how its diplomatic audience sees it.