Jan
03

Facebook Valuation Boggles the Mind

From the What’s It Worth? Department - big news in the world of finance today:  the great minds at Goldman Sachs have conjured up a way for wealthy investors to get a piece of the Facebook action without actually having to take the company public.

Plunking down $450 million of its own money for a share of Facebook common stock which values the Internet equivalent of a high school lunchroom at $50 billion, Goldman won the right to create a “special purpose vehicle” whereby a select list of its own wealthiest clients can pony up an additional $1.5 billion to fund Facebook’s operations and, presumably, reward its founders and directors for being brilliant, savvy players in the post-Crash era.

Hey, well, bully for them all around.  Smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em, as the old saying used to go.

Just for kicks, though, I thought I’d poke around and see what $50 billion looks like in today’s world. While it won’t buy what it used to back in the day (ie: the entire gross debt of the United States was about $50 billion in 1940; it is over $1.3 trillion today ), you can still take down some pretty rad gear for that kinda dough. Read more…

Nov
03

Election 2010: Here’s Your Takeaway

Above you’ll see in graphic form an image of these United States depicted according to congressional representation in the U.S. House of Representatives after the 2008 election.  Districts represented by Republicans are colored red, those by Democrats blue.

Now, here’s where we stand after yesterday’s 2010 mid-term elections (dark red or blue depicts districts where the respective parties made gains; pink and light blue depict races that remain undecided but where either party has a lead, and gray indicates no results available at press time):

Feel free to use these images as a handy guide to determine where you might like to live in the coming couple of years should you feel a calling to light out for the territories in search of the elusive American Dream.

Click each image for higher-res views.

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