Media Navel Gaze: October 17, 2011
The Week Unpeeled
It was a good week for the markets, while much of everything else seemed to crumble. The Dow wound up in positive territory once again for 2011 (up 0.6 percent for year) and advanced nearly 5 percent for the week to close at 11,644. Much of the media world focused on jail terms, outages and “about-faces.” Such as:
Galleon hedge-fund newly minted felon Raj Rajaratnam was sentenced to 11 years in prison in the largest-ever conviction for insider trading;- Gap decided to mind its own sales gap by saying it would close more than 20 percent of its stores in North America over the next two years;
- Blackberrys went silent as the company and millions of users faced its worst-ever outage (ironically as Apple was launching its iPhone 4S): Best Joke Last Week: “What did one Blackberry user say to another? Nothing.”;
- The White House $447-billion jobs bill failed to pass Senate;
- The “about-face” part: Hewlett-Packard said it was reconsidering a decision to spin off its PC division and Netflix said that it was NOT splitting DVD from its streaming business;
- JP Morgan Chase record a quarterly drop in profits, compared with year-ago levels;
- The US sent troops (only a 100 strong but still symbolic) to central Africa to help find leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army; and
- The NBA canceled its first two weeks of the season amid labor disputes, showing once again it’s always about jobs.