"For truly good business ideas—even ones that are a decade ahead of their time—bankruptcy can be an operating room, not a mortuary"

Sure... if you kill the patient, you can't make any more money from them. If you attach parasites to the body, which suck it dry, and then give them a transfusion... you can attach parasites again and again.

The lowly consumer, as well as the most connected corporate entity have learned to use Bankruptcy as a tool... now perhaps the entire economy is facing bankruptcy?

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Cross Posted from La Times La Land Blog (Can't wait to see if they actually let this one through the rubber stamp)

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You'd better sit down:

The more we're becoming aware of how perceptions play a role in what happens to markets (mortgage, housing, or otherwise), the more we should become aware of those that seek to affect our perceptions and how they do it. Otherwise, we'll remain "suckers."

The media is becoming more and more entangled with suppliers of data... makes sense, right? They need those fancy stats to report. If you take a good look at the folks that are providing data to the la times for instance... interest.com and dataquick, you might wonder if this is a good thing for everyone. Seems ok... free access to plenty of numbers. La Times, for example, has a tool that lets you search by zip code for number of home sales, pricing, etc. Sound good so far?

But at what cost? I began to think about this when I read the article that was attached to this post... Dataquick was all over the article... lots of branding and lots of "commentary" on the numbers.

Who is Dataquick? Apparently a the property data business unit purchased from Acxiom (largest aggregator of credit card and other data, in the world), based in Little Rock, AK - by McDonald Detwiler, a Canadian company that also happens to be, funny enough, a large contractor to our federal government (among other things).

Detwiler's execs and board seem to have experience with oil and many other industries. They have offices in Canada, UK, Ireland, India, and even Plano Texas. Acxiom supposedly retained the "information gathering process" and has "signed a long-term licensing agreement to provide MacDonald Dettwiler with data used in creating the products." "Acxiom will retain use of the information in modeling products for other industries, but it has agreed not to compete with MacDonald Dettwiler in the real estate arena."

Who is interest.com? Well, if you do what's called a whois lookup to find out who registeed the site, you encounter something I've never seen before (doesn't mean much): a cryptic message, but no registration info or even a message that says it's been privately registered.

So you poke around a little and discover that the company behind interest.com is MMIS, Inc. MMIS, Inc./Interest.com was recently purchased by bankrate. Bankrate.com, when you do the whois search... tells you that they're located at 11760 US Highway One, suite 500, North Palm Beach. (ah... sunny north palm beach... cigars, flip flops, hawaiian shirts).

So? What is BV babbling on about again? Well... Thomas Evans, CEO of bankrate, it seems came from the "Official Payments" world... (Official Payments is (was?) "an internet processor of payment to government entities which he took public and subsequently was acquired by Tier Technologies." Remember that our old friend Kal Wayman was also in the payment processing industry?) "prior to that, Mr. Evans was a 20 year veteran of the magazine publishing business, his last post being the President and Publisher of U.S. News & World Report, Fast Company and the Atlantic Monthly Magazines."

Bruce Zanca, SVP and Chief Communications at bankrate came from Official Payments as well and was a "press aide in the Reagan and Bush administrations. There, he was a White House Spokesman and deputy to Marlin Fitzwater in the first Bush White House.

If you look at bankrates sec filings lately, you'll notice some interesting additions to the family.

So? Where's the quid pro quo? Who knows and who cares. Here's the concern... things have gotten a "little" unbalanced in the information gathering world from the looks of it. As we all know, knowledge is power... and it seems that the raw power is running wild here.

What's this got to do with La Times and Real Estate? Well, if the owners of the La Times have all these powerful folks giving them data, and if La Times is quoting these sources and advertising them liberally... isn't it reasonable to assume that these people have a very solid platform for influencing perceptions? And we all know that in the stock market (and now in real estate) perceptions make certain people a LOT of money, at the expense of 99.99% of everyone else. The bullies have gotten together with the big brains and they're having quite the party. Please cross post this if you think it has merit.