Is Moody&rsquo;s Investors Service a member of the free press or a financial advisory firm? If you listen to the credit rating outfit&rsquo;s arguments for some of the duff advice it has given investors over the years, you&rsquo;d think it was the former. But when it comes to determining executive compensation, it fancies itself as the latter.

Moody&#39;s: Have the cake and eat it

Business Standard

Wall Street summer: Wall Street can now officially start its summer. Goldman Sachs has settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission over fraud charges. The U.S. Senate has passed financial reform legislation. Even hapless BP appears to have finally capped its oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico. All that on Thursday afternoon -- rounded out on Friday morning with the first profit increase in nine quarters for economic bellwether General Electric. The financial community can afford to take a breather, and maybe even to party.

Woo Hoo!

Investors unimpressed by Hewlett-Packard&rsquo;s dysfunctional governance have sold off its shares, leaving the tech company vulnerable to a bid. And Larry Ellison&rsquo;s acquisitive Oracle is a credible potential suitor. At least financially, a deal would stack up. A Breakingviews analysis suggests that even paying a 40 per cent premium, Oracle could reap a hefty return.

Oracular returns

Steve Jobs has died at 56. He was no ordinary chief executive, and he leaves no ordinary company. The force behind the iPod, iPhone and iPad not only co-founded and then rescued Apple, building it into the most valuable tech company on the planet, worth some $350 billion. He also changed the way people live. It&rsquo;s a rare entrepreneur who leaves that legacy &mdash; and a company that can thrive without him.

Job's worth

Bill Clinton&rsquo;s campaign advisers are still right: For Barack Obama, it really is the economy, stupid. One respectable forecasting model puts the US president with a hair over half the two-party vote on November 6, 2012. A Breakingviews calculator shows how even slight changes in the economic growth rate before then could tip the result dramatically.

O's odds

It&rsquo;s the talk of the blogosphere even if facts can&rsquo;t be checked because Wikipedia has gone dark. The community-edited encyclopedia founded by Jimmy Wales is blacked out in protest over Hollywood-backed anti-piracy legislation in the US Congress. Its passage now looks unlikely. But the spat is revealing about old media, new media and Washington.

Wikibattle

Facebook's 31 underwriting banks are mobilising for the company's initial public offering (IPO). In such a hyped IPO, any kind of valuation is possible. But a comparison with the history of the social network's closest thing to a rival, Google, suggests that even $75 billion - at the low end of the talk to date &mdash; would be a stretch. A new Breakingviews calculator shows why, and allows bulls and bears alike to tweak the inputs.

What's Facebook really worth?

Contemporary art is becoming the gold of the new rich. This week&rsquo;s strong auction sales in New York brought record bids for Rothko, Klein, Lichtenstein and several other post-war artists. Scarcity is part of the allure, along with taste and the spending power of the global plutocracy. One thing to please at least the financiers among them is that contemporary art has inked good returns, too.

Untitled investing

Mark Zuckerberg&rsquo;s $14-billion Facebook stake has heaped fresh attention on the newly-minted rich. But, the old money, with its slower, quieter approach, hasn&rsquo;t gone anywhere. David Rockefeller, 96, and Jacob Rothschild, 76, sent a reminder to that effect with the transatlantic investment alliance they unveiled on Wednesday.

Those Rockchild fellers

Apple won big with Friday&rsquo;s $1 billion US patent judgment against Samsung. In a sense that seems fair, as Apple revolutionised the cell phone and rival products from the Korean manufacturer and other competitors mostly look like copycats. But if the fear of future lawsuits forces Google, which makes the Android operating system used by Samsung, to push the technology and hardware makers forward, users could benefit, too.

Richard Beales