Remember the good old days before we taxpayers found ourselves bailing out the likes of Bear Stearns, back when the most exciting story on the business page was stock option backdating? Sure, the backdating scandal was disturbing, revealing widespread sneakiness in the service of greed, and it caused a bunch of earnings restatements. But no [...]

How much is Playboy (PLA) spending to provide food, housing and other “personal benefits” for Holly Madison, Bridget Marquardt and Kendra Wilkinson, Hugh Hefner’s live-in girlfriends and the stars of The Girls Next Door on the E! Network? About $400K according to the 10-K that Playboy filed on Friday.
Although according to Wikipedia, The Girls [...]

Last January, we footnoted the strange sequence of events at Build-A-Bear Workshop (BBW), which at the time was trading close to $30. In various presentations last winter and spring, I used the company as a case study, asking groups of participants to make either the bear or bull case on the company based on a [...]

Blackstone (BX) filed its first 10-K yesterday morning and given its year-end results, not to mention its sagging stock price, it’s not surprising that the company spent 27 pages highlighting potential risk factors. Among our favorites is the one where Blackstone warns about the difficulty of sustaining growth as a public company:
These requirements may place [...]

Exactly a year ago, we footnoted about how HSBC (HBC), which was just starting to feel the heat from the subprime mess, was still plenty generous when it came to handing out perks to its top executives. Judging by the 10-K they filed earlier this week, little has changed in the past year across several [...]