10 June 1998

Letter ("A New Stadium? Let's Vote on It") responding to "You Too Can Become a Tradeable Security, Rated AAA"

Resurrected another old letter of mine that was published in the Times. Thought it was interesting from an economics perspective. Here it is...
Your June 7 Week in Review article on "securitizing" sports stars and
others has interesting implications for newspapers. Taken to its
extreme, this phenomenon will eventually result in the merging of the
sports stats pages with the stock tables.
When a player hits a homer, we will simultaneously see an increment in
his home-run and runs-batted-in totals and a rise in his "stock
price"!


My Published Letter:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0CEFD6103AF932A25755C0A96E958260
A New Stadium? Let's Vote on It
June 11, 1998, Thursday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section A; Page 30; Column 6; Editorial Desk
To the Editor:
MARK GERSTEIN
New Haven, June 10, 1998

My Submitted Text:
The article on "securitizing" sports stars has interesting
implications for newspapers. Taken to its extreme, this phenomena
will eventually result in the merging of the sports "stats pages" with
the stock tables. When a player hits a homer, one will simultaneously
see increment in his HR and RBI totals and a rise in his "stock price"
-- on the same page in the daily paper!

Article Commented on:
http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/060798cashflow-review.html
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F20F17F6355F0C748CDDAF0894D0494D81
June 7, 1998
You Too Can Become a Tradeable Security, Rated AAA
By LESLIE EATON
Michael Jordan may be the best basketball player in history. He may have more trophies and rings and sneaker contracts than any man on the planet. He may even, as Fortune magazine has just calculated, have contributed $10 billion to the global economy over the last decade. But he has not yet made the big leap that, if Wall Street has its way, is in the future for all sorts of athletes and artists: the leap from marketable commodity to tradeable security... [cached locally]

ooo[clip]ooo ooo[sports]ooo ooo[L2E]ooo