The Exchange
  • By John Licata

    Stale is a word not typically associated with Exxon Mobil (XOM) but is an adjective I’m afraid represents the company rather well. XOM’s cash position has dropped from over $38bln in 2008 to $4.61bln as of the June 2013 quarter while the company’s debt to equity ratio has risen to the highest levels since late 2010 (0.117).

    So could it make strategic sense for CEO Rex Tillerson to make XOM more debt heavy near-term to position for huge growth longer-term? That strategy has actually helped many major integrated oil companies in the past (see chart) and it could be the very logic that XOM must embrace to help pay for stock buybacks and all the recent dividend hikes.

    Good timing

    XOM’s paper, which is rated Aaa and AAA by Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s respectively, may be more secure than US Treasuries, so the timing could be very appropriate to raise cash, especially as Fed taper talks again start to make the rounds. Also, the company appears to be needing to find new ways

    Read More »from Could Growth and Legacy Fuel Exxon to Tap Debt Market?
  • If the U.S. Congress were run like a business, it probably would have been downsized to 20 or 30 members by now, rather than the 535 who occupy space in the Capitol. After all, it takes only a couple dozen legislators to accomplish the work Congress actually gets done.

    Congress, for better or worse, is not run like a business, which is why we’re once again confronted with the spectacle of a needless government shutdown. No viable company would arbitrarily shut itself down, leaving customers, suppliers and employees in the lurch. To members of Congress, however, these are minor inconveniences compared with the urgent national need to draw attention to themselves. When companies are forced to shut down, it’s usually dire. But when Washington shuts down, it’s a tactic.

    You and I voted for these jokers, so it seems like an opportune moment to examine ways in which the politicians we send to Washington live in a taxpayer-funded utopia in which normal workplace rules don’t apply. Here are

    Read More »from 4 Things Congress Can Get Away With but You Can’t
  • By Ben Evans

    Benedict Evans is a strategy consultant at Enders Analysis in London. Read his excellent blog here.

    This Google (GOOG) Trends chart provides a neat shorthand illustration of the rise and fall of five different social networks. All of these had strong lock-in effects. All of them thought that there were barriers to switching away. All thought that people would not want to abandon their history of photos, interactions and tags. But when it came to it, people just walked away from all of that accumulated history and adopted a new platform.

    I've been wondering how broadly applicable this message is. How much value do ordinary people place on their email history, for example? At least half of the subscribers to my newsletter are using Gmail, and in the tech world we tend to think of such things as extremely sticky. But real people walk away from services that they're supposedly locked into with disconcerting ease. And when a corporate person (as opposed to a VC or

    Read More »from Can LinkedIn and Facebook Learn from Dead Social Networks?
  • The federal do-not-call database was supposed to protect consumers from annoying telemarketing calls. There’s only one problem – fraudulent telemarketers ignore the list and make billions of robocalls pitching scams and con games.

    Overwhelmed regulators are turning to technology for part of the answer. A new service opening on Sept. 30, called Nomorobo, can block most telemarketing offenders.

    The service, created by 35-year-old software engineer Aaron Foss, relies on a feature of the phone system known as simultaneous ring. When a consumer signs up on the Web with the service, all their calls are routed simultaneously to one of Nomorobo’s online servers. Before the call even rings at the consumer’s end, the service analyzes whether the call should go through or be blocked, based on a vast database of fraudulent calling numbers.

    The Federal Trade Commission, which receives some 200,000 complaints a month about robocalling, last year held a contest for the best technological solutions;

    Read More »from New Service Can Block Pesky — and Illegal — Robocallers

Pagination

(1,080 Stories)
 
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