Steve Forbes

It's Wednesday, and yet already this has been a long week for some people in the media business. Sure, it's not as bad as the last week of October, which saw the closure of Radar and 02138, a 10 percent cut in The Los Angeles Times' newsroom, across the board cuts at Condé Nast, and—oh, yeah—the announcement of 600 jobs being eliminated at Time, Inc., but it was pretty bad. (Warning: If you're the person who told The Atlantic's Megan McArdle that this paper needs to be renamed "The Daily Layoff," stop reading now...)  read more »

Mort Zuckerman, the chairman of Boston Properties whose months-long economic doomsdaying was vindicated this September with the demise of Wall Street, has put on his prognosticator of prognosticator hat yet again, this time in an appearance on Intelligent Investing with Steve Forbes.

Here are some excerpts from the conversation (you can find the whole transcript here):

First off, Mr. Zuckerman thinks the $700 billion bailout sucks:

I don't believe that they should be doing it that way. I think they should be taking an equity position....Now, if [bankers, et.al.] can take up that much money on the way up they should take whatever the cost is on the way down. And it is not, it is absolutely a joke to say that their salaries are going to be constrained or their parachutes, golden parachutes, are going to be restricted.

Mort thinks John McCain blew a crazy good opportunity when he decided to support the bailout:

If John McCain had wanted to win the election, he could have sat there at that debate and said, 'This is an outrage. We should not be bailing out the very people who got us into the trouble. If we do anything, we should buy equity into the companies so that we can participate and let the shareholders pay.' If he had said that he would win the election.

Mort says the GM Building was a sweet deal, no matter what the critics say:

We were able to buy the General Motors building at a price that was roughly 20% below what it would have been the previous year. ... We have a very long-term view of these kinds of assets. We're at this stage, we bought that building with a minimum of a 5% yield that will go up every year. It's not the greatest yield, but virtually every, there was a huge gap between the current rents and the market rents. A huge gap. And so as these things rollover over time it will yield to us, in our judgment, the highest internal rate of return of any acquisition we have ever made or probably ever will make. So we think that's a wonderful asset.  read more »

Forbes will, indeed, announce today that it’s leaving its longtime Greenwich Village home in favor of a new, to-be-constructed headquarters somewhere in Manhattan. Forbes.com confirmed this morning the rumor that started floating around on Thursday.

Forbes will sell the eight-story 60 Fifth Avenue, its headquarters since 1965, for one simple, very New York reason, according to C.E.O.  read more »

Eliot Spitzer, shifting from the Day 1 Everything Changes motto, said yesterday, "It takes a bit more than one budget cycle to get us down to the spending levels we want."

"The record-high, $123 billion budget deal neither reforms nor reshapes," according to Fred Dicker.

At a press conference yesterday explaining the budget, Spitzer was "stumbling through answers to basic questions," according to Jacob Gershman.

But the budget does move the state towards reform, which was Spitzer's goal all along, according to Newsday's editorial board.

Lawmakers and the public should be given a chance to study the budget, according to the Times Union editorial board.

Rudy Giuliani and his wife will be interviewed by Barbara Walters tomorrow.

Giuliani, who was endorsed by Steve Forbes, backed the idea of a flat tax-- something he opposed when he was mayor.

Mike Bloomberg said the timetable approved by Congress for withdrawing troops from Iraq was "untenable."

Hillary Clinton was endorsed by the National Organization of Women.

A person who told a witness in the Sean Bell shooting to keep quiet was arrested.

The former Brooklyn judge on trial for bribery had some Machiavellian advice about power and perception.

35 Nassau officials will lose their take-home vehicles.

And voter fraud is a myth, according to the Brennan Center's Executive Director Michael Waldan and Justin Levitt, an attorney there.

-- Azi Paybarah

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