Articles

What once looked liked a done deal now suddenly isn’t. General Motors’ board has decided against selling Opel, it main European division, to Magna, a Canadian part supplier, which had partnered with Sbrebank, a Kremlin-backed bank, along with GAZ, a Russian carmaker, and the Opel union. Germany wanted this deal, but GM’s new board increasingly didn’t.

Barry Ritholtz discusses the importance of McClatchy’s big investigative report into Goldman Sachs (GS) and its conflicting behavior throughout the housing meltdown.

The San Francisco Chronicle's tech blog has been stirring up life in the Valley lately, with a series of posts about Google's (GOOG) increasingly dull and conventional workplace culture. The vaunted sandbox and 20 percent time climate, Googlers complain, is giving into the inexorable pull of big organizations toward boring management arrogance and bureaucracy.

At the launch event for Barnes & Noble’s (BKS) new Nook reading device, the company made an aggressive effort to pretend the Kindle didn’t exist. Their claim was that B&N is the leading innovator in publishing, not Amazon (AMZN). That’s certainly true in terms of bookselling, but that hid the truth: B&N is scared by the success of the Kindle.

At one time, Delphi was just another component of the vast vertically integrated manufacturing, management, and marketing colossus that was the Big Old General Motors. But in the early 1990s, GM decided to de-integrate and created the Automotive Components Group as a separate entity. About a decade later, this entity became Delphi. By 2005, Delphi was bankrupt. The bankruptcy gobbled up four years, with Delphi only emerging recently.

It is the job of activists to never be content, even when things are generally going their way. In that light, Paula Crossfield's critique of the Obama administration's food-policy initiatives seems reasonable enough.

People who were "hoping for deep improvements in our food system can point to only a few successes, while other policies that could lead to food insecurity are brewing in back rooms," she writes on her blog, Civil Eats.