This column started out being titled “Is Goldman Sachs Evil?” until I realized the issue is far more broad. It began with a blog post by my old boss Jim Casella, who now runs Asset International, a financial publisher. Jim concludes after a review of some recent and very negative press that Goldman isn’t evil, per se, just cocky. But by comparing the investment bank to sports teams and players I think Jim makes a grave error. Goldman Sachs isn’t evil, just stupid. And that stupidity comes in the form of their witless abuse of technology.
Jim’s sports analogies are misplaced because while sporting events must inevitably have winners and losers economies don’t. TRADING […]

A couple weeks ago you may recall a
I live in Charleston, South Carolina, which is a regional health care center with a local medical school and a lot of doctors, some of them my neighbors. So I hear a lot of doctors bitching about their professional lives. And that bitching generally comes down to a single argument: “I’m bringing home less money than I used to: if this medical system is so out of control, why isn’t my income out of control, too?”
This morning Google announced it was spending $106 million in stock to buy On2, a maker of audio and video compression software. The very logical question I don’t hear being asked, though, is why would Google spend money for something it is already getting pretty much for free? It’s to turn yet another partner into a competitor, this time Adobe Systems.