Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft (MSFT) puts on his best poker face with this letter to the Yahoo! (YHOO) board of directors. Ballmer isn’t known all over the world as an innovator, but as a former lawyer and one of the architects of Microsoft’s monopolistic business tactics, I’m sure he can hold his own at the negotiation table. Of course, that hasn’t been the case lately with the outlandish premiums he paid for aQuantive and Facebook. So maybe he’ll back off of this hard stance:
Dear Members of the Board:
It has …

A few days ago, I remarked how precariously positioned the investment banks had become. Today, we witnessed something spectacular as these once proud institutions accelerated their fall. Bear Stearns (BSC) will be taken over in a fire sale for approximately $2 per share by JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) with backing from the Federal Reserve. Lehman Brothers (LEH), which has a similar business model to Bear, saw its stock take a dive on fear that it too faces liquidity problems.
Yesterday, Fed chair Ben Bernanke took the unusual step of lowering …