Emails From David Moffett and Dick Syron to Freddie Mac Employees

"From: Employee Communications
Sent: 09/07/2008 08:57 PM EDT
Subject: E-Mails from Freddie Mac CEO David Moffett and Dick Syron

Good evening, I am David Moffett - the new CEO of Freddie Mac. Attached below is a letter from former CEO and Chairman Dick Syron, whose contributions to this company over the past four years are deeply appreciated. I’ll be communicating with you a lot in the coming days and weeks, so there’s no need to go into great detail here. For now, I just want to say a few key things.

I appreciate the long hours that Freddie Mac’s employees have been putting in to strengthen the company and serve the GSE mission in this difficult environment. I can only imagine the pressure you have been under, and the frustrations you must have felt in recent weeks. This has been a difficult and draining period for all of you. I want to thank you for your extraordinary service during an extraordinary time.

I’m going to work very hard as CEO to provide the leadership Freddie Mac needs. I sincerely believe the company has a great opportunity to improve and strengthen itself during this period with the government’s support. And I look forward to making the decisions that will help this company move forward. I would not have taken this job if I was not deeply supportive of the company’s mission and its essential role in helping our nation through the toughest housing market in decades.

On Tuesday, we will conduct an All-Employee Town Hall that I would like you to attend. In the meantime, please stay focused and continue to conduct the company’s business in the ordinary course.

Treasury Secretary Paulson said in today’s announcement, “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are critical to turning the corner on housing.” I couldn’t agree more. The expertise and commitment of Freddie Mac’s employees is a major asset to the company - as well as the country - and I look forward to meeting you in the coming days.

David Moffett
Message From Dick Syron

To the Employees of Freddie Mac:

As you have probably heard, the Treasury Department announced today that it has placed Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae under the conservatorship of our regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

Under conservatorship, FHFA will assume direct control of both companies. FHFA has appointed David Moffett, former Vice Chairman and CFO of U.S. Bancorp, to succeed me as CEO. He will be joined by an equally strong non-executive Chairman, John Koskinen. I will retire and have offered to assist in the transition.

With the turmoil in the housing and mortgage markets over the past year, the role Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae play in providing affordable mortgages to homeowners and reliable liquidity to lenders is more important than ever. The conservatorship process is designed to ensure that the GSEs continue to fulfill that critical role, despite the significant increase in credit losses and erosion in capital we have experienced.

Under the conservatorship process, Treasury will backstop the GSEs, providing additional capital if future credit losses cause our capital base to be depleted. This will ensure that we can continue to operate and fulfill our housing mission.

Treasury Secretary Paulson today said, “I attribute the need for today’s action primarily to the inherent conflict and flawed business model embedded in the GSE structure, and to the ongoing housing correction. GSE managements and their Boards are responsible for neither.”

We have been through a lot together. Earlier this year we completed a multi-year accounting restatement, a massive and complex project. More recently, we have had to manage significant increases in delinquencies, foreclosures and loan modifications as a result of the sharp decline in house prices. I am deeply grateful for your commitment and hard work through all of this, and proud of what we have accomplished together amid the worst housing market in our lifetimes.

I accepted the CEO position at Freddie Mac at the end of 2003 because I believed in the company’s housing mission. Given the current turmoil in the housing market, I believe that mission is even more important today.

As the conservatorship process plays out, I ask you to stay focused on performing your job responsibilities and give your full support to Mr. Moffett so that Freddie Mac can continue to fulfill its housing mission. The vast majority of our employees will see no changes in their day-to-day activities as a result of the conservatorship process.

It has been a pleasure and an honor to work with all of you.

Sincerely,

Dick

Cisco is putting up $215 million for PostPath so it can include the company's e-mail and calendaring software in Cisco's upcoming collaboration service, WebEx Connect. But the software could also become a component in a unified communications bundle that businesses buy outright, industry observers say.

MBA toughens ride

Credit crunch hits MBA financingFinancial Times, UK - Jul 14, 2008In today’s Business Education section of the FT: a story by Della Bradshaw showing how the crisis in the credit markets is making it more expensive ...

The need for understanding social media and Web 2.0Merinews, India - Jul 16, 2008WHILE MANAGEMENT education, online or face-to-face, is on the rise with a spurt of Master of Business Administration (MBA) and other ancillary institutions

Warning: Google is becoming Microsoft's evil twin

EMC replaces the chief and co-founder of VMware, silencing talk of a spinoff - International Herald Tribune

"For the last month, several reports from Wall Street analysts have debated whether EMC, the big computer storage company, would sell off its 85 percent stake in its crown jewel, VMware, a fast-growing software star.
EMC seems to have given its answer with a dramatic gesture on Tuesday. It fired VMware's chief executive and co-founder, Diane Greene. She is being replaced by Paul Maritz, a former senior executive at Microsoft who joined EMC this year when it bought his Web start-up.
Greene was fired after she refused to resign or take another position at VMware, according to a VMware manager who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
The point of conflict, the person said, was that Greene had been pushing hard for VMware to be spun off early next year. After five years of ownership, a subsidiary can be sold off in an essentially tax-free transaction. EMC bought VMware for $635 million in cash in December 2003."

What Does Microsoft Have in Store for Photography? - Seeking Alpha

"My pal Robert Scoble has a blog post up entitled, 'Is Microsoft (MSFT) Trying to Capture the Photography Market?' Robert's post is in part a reaction to Microsoft's invite-only Pro Photo Summit which is taking place this week on Wednesday and Thursday at Microsoft's campus in Redmond. Scoble is going to be attending as am I.

This is the third year that Microsoft has held a Pro Photo Summit, so I'm not entirely sure that this event is predictive of any change in Microsoft strategy towards photography per se. This is the first year that I'm going, though, and I'm excited to check out what Microsoft has in store to share with us.

The agenda for this year's events includes a keynote talk by Microsoft CTO David Vaskevitch and a photographer keynote by photographer Frans Lanting. Additionally, summit topics include microstock photography (Lise Gagne, Artistic Director of iStockPhoto will be there), an update on the orphan works act, Eric Chan from Adobe (ADBE) on camera profiling, a talk about photographing the Presidential campaign from the Washington Post's Melina Mara and a number of presentations from folks doing interesting things with photography from the Microsoft Research groups."

"Technology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
By the mid 20th century, humans had achieved a mastery of technology sufficient to leave the surface of the Earth for the first time and explore space. ...en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology "

lolzzz linds

Microsoft Sets Deadline for Yahoo to Make Deal - New York Times

Microsoft Sets Deadline for Yahoo to Make Deal - New York Times: "Microsoft warned the board of Yahoo on Saturday that if a merger agreement was not completed in the next three weeks, Microsoft would make its offer directly to Yahoo shareholders, probably at a lower price."

more babes

paris

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Pick your next best stock

"Fund managers: Mutual fund managers, on the whole, produce lousy returns. And they're getting worse. The average actively managed mutual fund lagged the broad market by 1.7 percentage points a year during the two decades ended 1965 and by 2.7 percentage points during the two decades ended 2003, according to a 2005 Journal of Finance study.
Your mutual fund manager might seem different. You might have been convinced to buy shares of the fund only after reading that it had soundly beaten the market over the past one, three and five years. But I've got news for you, and you're not going to like it.
Imagine you call 800 people. You tell half of them the stock market will rise tomorrow, and half that it will fall. Come tomorrow, you'll have given great advice to 400 people. You call them and repeat the process. You keep going until you've been right four times in a row with 50 people. Then you offer these amazed folks and the next day's forecast for a fee. Sounds shady, I know. But the mutual fund industry was all but founded on that practice. Fund companies "incubate" far more funds than they need, placing different investments in each. Some win, some lose. Winners get marketed. Losers are quietly closed.
We can hardly blame fund managers for their poor performance. They face obstacles that you and I don't have to deal with. Diversification requirements force them to buy 100 or more stocks they're only ho-hum on, whereas we can buy just the eight or 10 we love. Fund managers have to pretty-up their portfolios with popular stocks each quarter before shareholder reports go out, whereas we can hold ugly stocks when doing so seems wise. And of course, fund managers have to make up for those big fees.
Analysts: Forget Wall Street analysts, too. According to an exhaustive 2004 study of more than 50,000 recommendations made over 13 years, the predictive ability of a "buy" recommendation is statistically insignificant. Often, these recommendations are based on guesswork disguised as math, called discounted cash flow analysis. If you know what a company's sales and margins will look like over the next 10 years, and you can somehow quantify exactly how risky that company is and will become, you can calculate to the penny how much it's worth today. But you can't know any of that stuff without guessing. (And are the analysts who project 2017 revenues the same ones who can't get this quarter's earnings forecasts right?)
Brokers and advisors: Stockbrokers are rarely worth the money. The ones who are still permitted by their firms to recommend individual stocks are usually restricted to ones that analysts at those firms have saddled with "buy" recommendations -- no thanks. Many investment brokers aren't allowed to recommend stocks at all. They are usually called something like "financial advisors." They stress a consultative approach and plenty of long-term planning, but nearly always suggest high-fee mutual funds. Invest $100,000 with these advisors, and you might pay as much as $5,000 up front, or $1,500 annually. Ouch.
Other stock pickers. What about pundits like, well, me? Some are better at talking or writing about today's popular stocks than selecting tomorrow's winners. Some pundits really know their stuff, but are then called on to produce dozens of stock picks a week, which dilutes their ability. And as for stock tips from friends, coworkers and relatives, they can usually be traced back to pundits, analysts and brokers.
You should pick your own stocks. The best way to do that involves a process called screening. Tomorrow's great stocks are leaving clues today. Decades of research have shown which clues work the best. One company's clue might be that its managers are buying shares in a particularly promising pattern. Another company might have recently spent plenty on research, suggesting that its profits are poised to balloon. You can search the entire market in seconds for a handful of companies producing these clues and many others. My job as a columnist at SmartMoney is to write about the most reliable and profitable stock screen strategies I can find. I don't create the strategies. I steal them from people who are much smarter than me, but who aren't nearly as willing to yammer on about their work in columns and on television. I've collected the best stock screen strategies I've found (stolen) into a new book called Your Next Great Stock. "

Hi Jim Cram

Blodget: Time to Update Facebook Revenue Estimates

"Henry Blodget submits: That Facebook rate card Valleywag published Tuesday? It was from February. And, yes, February was eons ago, but who would have suspected that Facebook would have doubled its sponsorship rates in the meantime?
Well, it seems it has. Valleywag's Owen Thomas reveals the June rate card.
Let's see, 150 group sponsorships times $300,000 per sponsorship for three months ($1.2 million per year), and you're at $180 million in revenue. And that's before the homepage sponsorships. And the $200 million three-year display deal with Microsoft (MSFT). Etc."

STUFFITI.com - Cool Stuff. Hot Deals.

STUFFITI.com - Cool Stuff. Hot Deals.: "List Price: $387.00
Deal Price: $99.99
You Save: $287.01 (74%)
(Yesterday’s Price: $179.99) Milwaukee invented the reciprocating saw, so we have high expectations for every model they put out. This one does them proud. At its heart is a 13-amp motor that does not hesitate no matter what you’re cutting. "

Hi Poppy