No Deaths or Serious Injuries Yet

The Canadian tour continues. We are at our 4th stop, Hamilton, Ontario, returning home tomorrow. It's nice too see that oil is still headed lower.

I'm not sure why everybody is making such a big deal about Lehman selling its Neuberger stake. Two things: Either they need more capital or they don't. Since they're considering they sale I guess they do. After they exit the asset management biz, the investment bank will have to stand on its own. Is that a big deal? Banking might not be as good a business as it was but if Lehman can't cut it they're going to find out sooner or later regardless of whether they own Neuberger.


I had no cell phone service in Northern Ontario the last week or so and didn't miss it. I only checked my email once. The truth is that I refuse to use dial-up Interweb but it felt like a true vacation being away from it all for a while.



One of the highlights of the week was undoubtedly a heated negotiation between myself, my partner in the golf tourney we played and a couple of local guys over a wager we ended up losing.


Athlete-turned-local politician Al French and noted short stop Jean-Guy Chamaillard, despite a wealth of local knowledge and undeniable natural ability, managed to swindle a few strokes from us for the last day of they tourney. As I mentioned, tyranny triumphed and we lost the bet. I have to question what they lost in the process. I remember when I was in Business School and we had a case study project in a Labor Relations class. The assignment was a mock collective bargaining session where two sides negotiate a contract and the results are graded. My team acutally got a bad grade because we got too much from the other side. Familiar territory.