In the future, will major companies ever have a leader for more than a couple years?

We're at the end of the era -- one where chief executives stayed in a position for more than 3 years. Today, Coke named their most recent CEO. That's CEO #3 since Roberto Goizueta died just 7 years ago. Prior to that, Goizueta was CEO long enough to be in the job when they coined the term "Coke is it!" -- 16 years to be exact.

McDonalds has had a similar schitzophrenia problem with respect to CEOs, where a CEO left and came back. He died recently, adding to the confusion.

Call me crazy but I'd just like to see some kind of enduring corporations in the future. They're not so attached to the bottom line constantly growing, but are more in tune with consistently generating money and keeping people employed. Most of the time, layoffs come after a company has tried to grow and fails. How about good ,sustained growth, where there don't have to be pullbacks and layoffs?

As much as I want Bush to lose, John Kerry will lose.

From today's Wall Street Journal: "Mr. Kerry disclosed that he has launched a major push to enlist corporate supporters and touted two stars he has landed so far: investment sage Warren Buffett and technology executive Steve Jobs, both of whom will be advisers, the senator said.... In addition, he praised Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan."

What a freakin' moron.

Ok, Warren Buffett is a good horse to run with, no question. The "Oracle of Omaha" basically doesn't ever make a poor investment because everyone follows whatever he does. So having Buffett on your side is generally a good call. But I don't really think the Omaha Oracle should be considered anything beyond a great investor -- especially given his incredibly deep interest in the insurance industry -- he shouldn't be called upon to guide national fiscal policy. Do you really want someone running the country who has gotten rich off of basically welching on agreements? That's what the insurance industry does after all. If they paid every legitimate claim out there, there would be no insurance industry. Every time there's a massive disaster like a hurricane, we all pay for it through FEMA, rather than the insurance companies getting collected on.

But Steve Jobs for business sense? Jobs has never started a successful company on his own. The one time he tried to, it was a spectacular failure that required being bought out by his old company. And I was a huge supporter of that NeXT company's products, so don't get me wrong -- I loved what they were doing. They just couldn't make a business out of it. He is a terrific salesman though. Millions of people buy overpriced electronics devices from Apple because of him. I give him some credit in making Pixar into what it is, mainly for funding them for so many years, but I reserve most of the due credit for John Lasseter and his creative crew.

Lastly, Alan Greenspan. I still haven't outlined why he should be fired, so I will briefly here. The main reason is, he has overextended the low interest rates. Now home prices are being inflated purely because of them. That's not helping the economy, it's setting up a massive downfall for it. Can you imagine if we had a terrorist attack on the day that the Fed finally decides to raise interest rates? The interest rate raise is going to start easing off some of these markets already -- even before it happens. With anything that comes as a surprise, I guarantee the stock market will collapse much further than we saw in September, 2001. Real estate will come down with it.