Last week at Muckety.com, we speculated that Henry Cisneros had to be having a lot more fun as a director of Live Nation than he was as a director of Countrywide Financial, the troubled mortgage lender.
Sure enough.
As Countrywide’s stock plunged to its lowest level in four years Wednesday, the company said that Cisneros, the former […]

As pressure continues to build on Angelo Mozilo, a Salon.com reader suggests that the Countrywide Financial CEO use his personal wealth to subsidize mortgage payments of company workers Mozilo is jettisoning.
Just counting the $130 million Mozilo made from sales of Countrywide stock this year, that would mean more than $10,000 apiece to 12,000 terminated workers.
Angelo […]

The stock of The New York Times Co. hit a 10-year low Wednesday as one of its major institutional holders unloaded shares.
At the close of trading the dividend yield on NYT was 4.98 percent, according to Google Finance. You can’t get rates like that for savings at many banks or money funds.
And the Times wasn’t […]

If anyone thinks the spin-off-the-newspapers strategy will save the business, they need to read McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt’s sobering assessment yesterday of his company’s prospects.
Once the ailing industry’s biggest cheerleader, Pruitt said in a statement that he didn’t know when the downturn would end. His remarks came as McClatchy announced continuing revenue declines and said […]

Congressional Democrats want to investigate Texas oil baron Ray Hunt’s close ties to the Bush administration to see if the connections gave Hunt Oil an inside track to its controversial exploration deal in Iraq, The Dallas Morning News reports.
Henry Waxman and Dennis Kucinich, asked Hunt Oil to turn over all Iraq-related communication with the U.S. […]

An Illinois company that recalled 173,000 pounds of frozen ground beef last week because of possible E. coli contamination is related to the New Jersey company that went out of business because of a massive recall.
“J&B Meats is not a direct subsidiary of Topps Meat Company,” a release from J&B Meats of Coal Valley, Ill., […]

Two weeks ago on Muckety.com, we wrote that Hearst Corp. needed a re-write of its script to buy the small piece of Hearst-Argyle Television that it didn’t already own.
Maybe that’s happening.
Friday, privately held Hearst let its buyout offer expire and said it was returning all shares that had been tendered.
One person who could be relieved […]

Some good insight into Google’s cellphone plans this week from Kevin Maney at Portfolio and Saul Hansell at The New York Times.
Writing about a recent interview he had with Motorolo CEO Ed Zander, Maney pointed out that Zander and Google CEO Eric Schmidt once worked together at Sun Microsystems.
“Zander was never direct about it, but […]