Financial Mines

My Delta itinerary tells me that I’m flying on a 737-200 Monday night from Atlanta to Hartford, flight No. 1756. This flight is usually operated by an MD-88, but the seatmap sure enough has 3-3 seating, not 3-2.

I thought all the -200s had been melted into beer cans or sold off to maintenance-challenged airlines in places nobody has ever heard of.

If it is a -200, that would be pretty cool, since I haven’t flown on a JT8-powered 73 in about 25 years, and I kind of miss the noise and smoke of those long, skinny, low-bypass engines under the wing.

But maybe it’s just a mislabled 737-700. Ho-hum.

Does anybody have a guess?

An addendum to my post yesterday on unemployment and vacant office space in Greenwich. Today’s Wall Street Journal notes that Greenwich hedge funds Duff Capital Managment, Plainfield Asset Management and AQR Capital Management have all abandoned plans to add more space or are seeking to sublease new space they have contracted for.

These funds are among the cream of the crop in terms of management and ongoing success for the hedge fund industry in Greenwich. This economy is unforgiving even for the best financial firms, and Greenwich is feeling the pain.

We’ve run two pretty disturbing stories about Greenwich business in the past week. First, the unemployment rate is now 6 percent in town, well above the norm when every investment banker and bond trader has a job.

And the office vacancy rate has nearly doubled from 9.75 percent to 18.92 percent, the likely culprit being disappearing and downsizing financial firms.

Even Best & Co., the kids’ clothing store on Greenwich Avenue has gone bankrupt and closed.

Is this recession a sea change for Greenwich? Will further changes in the financial industry — sure to come with a federal government that is planning more regulation — cause more job losses and empty offices in town? What institutions will be next to fall?

It’s a little hard to believe that some people, including supposedly skeptical journalists, took seriously the purchase of WWE’s Monday Night Raw by Donald Trump. Several news outlets reported it as fact without the simplest of fact-checking, which would have revealed it was all for show. Fox Business News even devoted a segment to the announcement and whether it violated SEC regulations.

Come on. Anybody with half a brain and a TV set know that the Donald and Vince McMahon were once again playing out a story line. If you must dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s, the press release came not from publicly traded WWE but from the USA Network, which carries RAW. The press release in addition did not come through the news service that carries all of the WWE’s financial information. And Finally, the WWE did not file an 8K with the SEC, as it surely would do in the case of the material sale of an asset.

And today come the news that Mr. McMahon fired the Donald after Trump refunded the price of everyone’s ticket to last night’s RAW, obviously abrogating his fiduciary responsiblity … but to what, since he supposedly owned RAW. The WWE said, however, the he doubled his money selling RAW back to McMahon after a week of ownership. It sure was fun while it lasted.

Trumping the WWE

The latest update on Donald Trump buying RAW from the WWE has Trump landing his fancy helicopter atop the company’s headquarters on East Main Street in Stamford.

Those from outside the city may not know it, but it is against Stamford ordinance to land a helicopter here. I personally can’t believe that Mr. Trump or Mr. McMahon would flout the law so blatantly, as this photo from a WWE blog seems to show.  Could it be something more sinister? Could this photo be a fake? Would the WWE go so far as to portray anything that isn’t 100 percent for real? Nah, I can’t believe that either.

The last time that Stamford-based World Wrestling Entertainment got involved with Donald Trump, dollar bills floated down on the audience from the ceiling of the arena, heated rhetoric was exchanged publicly by Vince McMahon and The Donald over who first made gold of the phrase “you’re fired!” and a matched between proxy wrestlers for both principals ended up with Vince getting his head shaved in the Wrestlemania 23 ring.

Yesterday’s announcement that Trump has purchased WWE’s popular RAW program heralds a likely new match between the impresarios, who were once Greenwich neighbors. We’ll see where the drama takes us over the next few RAW episodes.

For anyone inclined to believe the announcement, suffice it to say that it came outside of regular WWE channels — the ones used to report earnings, executive hires and the like. Also, it was not accompanied by an 8K filing reporting a material event by the publicly traded WWE to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and thus to its shareholders.

So lighten up, everybody. All the world’s a stage when you’re Donald Trump and Vince McMahon. Who knows, maybe Carrie Prejean, the former Miss California fired last week by The Donald, will turn up in the RAW ring for some appropriate mayhem.

So some kids over at Greenwich High took first place in Connecticut for the fall 2008 in the Stock Market Game, a national simulation that gives a team $100,000 play dollars to make-believe buy and sell equities.

With their $100,000, these enterprising teens ended up with $267,553.64 in the course of three months last fall. The DJIA was hanging in at around 11,000 back in September. By the end of December it had crashed to the 8,600 range.

Now in the land of hedge funds and investment bank presidents, financial advice is pretty easy to come by. This is a town were some folks make a billion dollars a year after all. But these kids beat the returns of some of the craftiest investors in the world — folks who happen to live right down the street from them.

I don’t know if they shorted the whole market, or if their strategy was long-short, event-driven or whatever, but if they’d like to start their own hedge fund, I think Alexander Scheetz, Alexandra Scott, Sean Broderick and Thomas Murphy would have no problem finding some qualified investors.

Congratulations, kids, and teacher Jan Reid. And do you have any hot tips?

News is the federal government, in its continued spree of printing money, is considering new incentives for car buyers of up to $4,500. The “cash for clunkers” plan would grant tax credits for purchasers of vehicles substantially more fuel-efficient than their current cars or light trucks.

Essentially, it’s putting money once again into the Toyota (or Honda, Mini-cooper, Kia – you name it) treasury and will do little to help the American car makers that you and I are bailing out of bankruptcy.

As a taxpayer/owner of General Motors, I’d like to see the incentives skewed at getting it and Chrysler back on their feet, rather than subsidizing the sales of cars that are built offshore. Not that I have a problem with foreign brands as such, I’d just like not to throw another roadblock in the way of the American industry’s recovery.

I first got a little angry seeing that my Connecticut tax dollars were being spent on Toyota Priuses for the state government’s motor pool. The state could have bought Ford Focuses or Chevy Cobalts and gotten sufficiently green mileage numbers — lower list prices too, which might have negated any fuel savings from the offshore hybrids.

The government is tossing around billions, a lot of which have gone overseas to pay the bad bets of AIG, etc. Using the incentives to boost Focus and Cobalt (and Malibu Hybrid, Saturn Vue hybrid and other good domestic vehicles) sales would be a good way to make me feel my tax dollars are being spent somewhat wisely.