* Roger Ehrenberg: How to fail well
* Anya Schiffrin: Jealous Davos mistresses
* Yada Yada: Using Seinfeld to teach economics
* Bethany McLean: “If you took BankUnited’s rebirth to be a parable about the private market’s ingenuity and its capacity for renewal you would be missing the point.”
* Morning Call: U.S. futures look flat on Japan credit downgrade, London falls early, European shares edge higher and the Nikkei gains 0.7%.
* Kedrosky & Macdonald: Scrap metal cowboys
* John Carney: New hedge fund disclosure rules probably won’t help at all
* Joe O’Connor: The true story of strip clubs, paperwork and a plucky pelican
* Where are they now? What happened to the people in Microsoft’s iconic 1978 company photo?
* Today in IPOs: LinkedIn filing could come as early as today, while Skype is delaying its offering until the second half.
* Yesterday’s post-BRIC acronym for emerging markets was MIST. Today it’s SANE.
* Be sure to sign up for our morning Term Sheet emails, with news and views on day’s deal-making
* Bloomberg survey says: 45% of investors believe China will face financial crisis within five years
* Goldman’s Gary Cohn: Too much new banking regulation will push risk “from the regulated, more transparent banking sector to a less regulated, more opaque sector [like hedge funds].” Totally agree. We’ve seen no troubles from risk-taking on Wall Street, just from Greenwich.
* The one that got away: NY Times Co. (NYT) nearly agreed to buy Demand Media (DMD) four years ago. Now Demand is worth more than the Gray Lady. Kind of reminds me of how The Boston Globe, now a NYT subsidiary, passed on an early chance to buy Monster.com.
* Amanda Marcotte on the revelation that Taco Bell’s beef is mostly soy: “I’m sorry that America learned today that you learned you actually like the taste of soy products. I know how traumatic that can be. I’ve seen small children, greedily eating a food they claimed to dislike but that has been served to them in disguise, only to be told what it was, which required spitting it out and saying, “Gross!” We, as a nation, are this small child.”
