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In Animal Instincts: Main Street Seeks Revenge on Wall Street, Robert Roy Britt and Jeanna Bryner argue unemotionally about why emotional needs should to be satisfied in a banking bailout, for business reasons.

In a free market economy, it doesn’t make sense to complain about executive pay – it is what it is, people only pay high salaries and bonuses because they can still make a profit and therefore shareholders are happy.

Moral hazard is a game theory phenomenon, if you play a game once and people lose badly you can help them out, but that will make them less worried about losing the next time they play. Similarly if people cheat and you don’t punish them or even play badly and don’t lose, you create a problem next time you play. Bailing out large numbers of mortgage defaulters creates moral hazard but not punishing people who deceived does too.

It is the job of a CEO to champion a company, but not to lie to shareholders. If things are OK this isn’t an issue and gets forgotten about. There are many CEOs who behaved like Wachovia’s Robert Steel. He appeared on a TV show (Cramer’s Mad Money) that styles what should be the sober, conservative, world of finance into an activity that looks pro-football, with shouting and bright colors and said his team was winning, days before Wachovia collapsed completely. Entertainment freakshows about speculation, are part of the problem – ditching shows like Cramer’s and replacing speculation with sober investment advice from someone like Buffet will happen of its own accord (you don’t get entertainment shows called ‘Mad Money’ in a deep recession), but Steel is a different issue.

You only need to punish a few people to avoid long term moral hazard involving large businesses. It is what it is, and the fear of god needs to be put into executives and CEOs of companies that could fail. This would create both transparency now, for people to see each others hands and a better game next time.

In addition, when you effectively nationalize banking, the shareholders are the country’s voters and they need to be kept happy. Creating a mechanism to put people like Wachovia’s Robert Steel in jail makes both good business sense and keeps the shareholders in a country happy.

I am back from San Francisco, my favorite place, where the buzzword that comes after Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is Clean Tech.

There are two possible bogeymen that require investment in energy: expensive oil and global warming. The probable solution to the former is to justify dirty tech, like coal, and the probable solution to the latter is reduction in consumption, which goes against capitalism and, therefore, Venture Capitalism.

In the, ever optimistic, Silicon Valley, Clean Tech Capitalism is being offered as a potential panacea for both situations to combat both environmental and oil supply and demand issues.

Both expensive oil and global warming could in theory be solved by clean tech innovation, but that would require absolutely massive advances in things like portable solar technology to make energy simultaneously cleaner and cheaper than fossil fuels, very quickly. This is less likely than smaller advances in things like digging for coal.

This weakness in the current Clean Tech logic allows for Democrat’s energy stance to be leveraged for different ends by the Republican’s (justifying offshore drilling to combat peak oil, for example). Mark Thoma points out a piece by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenbergers which argues that the Democrats “must break once and for all from green orthodoxy”.

The Register points to a Gartner report that suggest that the iPhone may not be an enterprise device because of poor battery life, among other things.

We do not need the Gartner report to nitpick about details, to know that the iPhone is not an enterprise product.

The iPhone is a wonderful, groundbreaking, beautifully designed product, just like the first Macintosh was.

Businesses do not buy groundbreaking, beautifully designed products that give the impression they might be spending too much money, just like they didn’t buy the Macintosh. They will buy a good enough, slightly crappy phone that has a keyboard – the Blackberry.

By quite a long margin: 25% more, in fact (Salesforce.com market cap: $7.5B, GM, just under $6B).

Other unlikely companies that are now worth more than GM: Ryan Air; Pitney Bowes; J C Penney; Autodesk; Bed Bath and Beyond. Even tech. train wreck, Sun Microsystems is worth 25% more. And in a case of a piece being worth more than the whole, automobile parts distributor, Genuine Parts Company, and dashboard GPS maker, Garmin, are each worth $500 million more than GM.

Use Google Finance to screen for companies worth more than GM.