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AC/DC made its name as one of the pioneers of hard rock and heavy metal, but the band's latest gig has a decidedly corporate ring to it: the band's new album, Black Ice, will be available exclusively (subscription required) at Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT)

It's the band's first album of new material in eight years, and will be debut on October 20th at the "everyday low price" of $11.88. AC/DC's music has never been available on iTunes.

Classic rock bands including The Eagles and Journey have made albums to be sold exclusively at Wal-Mart and, while it doesn't exactly have iTunes quaking it in its boots, it is one gimmick that's keeping CD's relevant for at least a little while longer.

Artistically, it's more than a little bit pathetic to see bands that used to be so cutting-edge hocking their wares through an exclusive arrangement with the world's largest retailer.

It's a good thing The Beatles broke up so its rabid fans wouldn't have to endure stuff like this.

Contrary to recent media speculation, leading Indian SUV-maker Mahindra & Mahindra is not interested in acquiring the Hummer brand that General Motors (NYSE: GM) is desperately trying to unload.

Managing director Anand Mahindra told reporters on Monday that his company is not interested in the Hummer, which leads us to one conclusion: Mahindra & Mahindra is not stupid.

In a related story, Reuters is reporting that China's Hunan Changfeng Motor Co. had preliminary talks with GM about acquiring the brand, but it also backed out pretty quickly.

This is another setback for General Motors, but it's not surprising: in addition to being hugely uneconomical in the face of high gas prices, the Hummer is also something of an international symbol of environmental destruction, and masculine posturing at its lowest ebb, as evidenced by this crude bumper sticker.

I'll be fascinated to see who ends up buying Hummer, if anyone. Given the state of the economy, the credit markets, and gas prices, it wouldn't be surprising to see GM forced to keep it.

It was a publicity nightmare for the Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS): Tinkerbell, Snow White, Pinocchio, and Minnie Mouse being handcuffed and hauled away from Disneyland in a police van.

32 costumed protesters were arrested for failing to obey a police order and traffic violations on Thursday. The protest was part of a labor dispute involving 2,300 workers at Disney's hotels: the Paradise Pier, the Grand Californian and the Disneyland Hotel.

The union's contract expired in February, and workers complain that the new offer from Disney management would make health care unaffordable and, according to the president of Unite Here Local 681, workers are comparable local hotels make $2-3 an hour more. You can read the details of the dispute here.

I can't imagine that stuff like this is good for traffic at Disneyland: imagine showing up for a day of fun rides with your family, only to have your 4-year old ask why Mickey and Goofy are being hauled off in handcuffs!

A Disney spokesman told the USA Today that "Publicity stunts are not productive and are extremely disruptive to the resort district."

But won't disrupting the resort district "encourage" Disney to meet its workers' demands? If so, that sounds productive to me!

With the share prices of most of the financials in the toilet, and hundreds of billions in writedowns done and hundreds of billions more to come, UBS has laid out plans for a break-up, the question is being raised about other financial conglomaterates, most notably Citigroup: does the business model of a huge banking conglomerate that handles all aspects of commerce make sense?

From a risk management, it doesn't appear to -- and that was one of the main arguments put forth by consolidation evangelists like Sandy Weil.

The current mess appears to be demonstrating what many skeptical observers have suggested -- and studies have demonstrated -- for decades: mergers and acquisitions and other methods of corporate deckchair arrangements don't add value. In the end, the whole is the sum of the parts.

But that raises the question: why break them up? If stringing them together into a conglomerate didn't change anything, is there any reason to think that breaking up will change anything? I doubt it.

The bottom line is that all the mergers and acquisitions and spin-offs and break-ups are just a distraction from the real business.

One of the most common rebuttals to the naked short selling conspiracy theories is this: Name one company that has been hurt by naked short selling.

In a July 22nd interview with Fox Business, Overstock.com (NASDAQ: OSTK) CEO Patrick Byrne gave an example: Force Protection (NASDAQ: FRPT). "Makes vehicles for soldiers in Iraq. . . stock was at $25, got naked shorted down to $4, canceled the secondary. . . Some soldiers are going to die in Iraq this week because some hedge fund guys need a new Ferrari."

Oops. On August 14th, Force Protection dropped some bad news on its shareholders. In addition to having missed the deadline for filing its 10-K, the NASDAQ is now threatening to de-list Force Protection's stock for failing to file its 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2008. This comes after the company changed auditors and, back in March, disclosed "certain material weaknesses in internal control over financial reporting."

And that is, according to a message Patrick Byrne left on a message board (View the post for a video of the interview) the "easiest way to explain this problem to Congressmen, Senators, and most Americans."

Note to Byrne: I, and I suspect many others, will be more convinced when a company without serious accounting/internal controls problems and/or a failed business model complains about naked short selling. So far we haven't heard anything like that.

Bloomberg reports on the career struggles of former structured finance professionals who have now found themselves unceremoniously dumped on the street as the products they built wreak havoc on the global economy. According to Bloomberg, the investment world has shed 76,670 in the past year.

One former vice president in credit strategy at Bear Stearns is setting up her own company to provide birthday parties and cupcake cooking lessons for children. A Bank of New York asset backed securities trader has left the world of high finance to open a discount hair salon with his wife. Others are becoming teachers.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. Can't these washed up masters of the universe just collect unemployment and live off their investments, and leave the world alone? They've already crashed the housing market and led to hundreds of billions in write downs. Now they're going to go mess with cupcakes? Is nothing sacred?

We can take some comfort in the fact that they're taking a pay cut. Wall Street salaries averaged $399,360 in 2007. That's a lot of cupcakes and $12 haircuts.

Warner Bros. -- a division of Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) -- made the surprising announcement that it's delaying the release of the sixth installment in the Harry Potter saga: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Price.

The release is being pushed back from November 11 of 2008 to July 17 of 2009. Warner Bros. President Alan Horn blamed the writers' strike, saying that "We agreed the best strategy was to move 'Half-Blood Prince' to July, where it perfectly fills the gap for a major tentpole release for mid-summer."

I'm not convinced -- isn't it a little close to the previously scheduled opening for the writers' strike that ended on February 12 to be the reason? Pali Research analyst Rich Greenfield wrote that "We believe TWX is shifting the film to help it achieve earnings expectations in 2008 (moving expensive P & A out of Q4 2008, at the same time that several successful films are set to hit DVD for Warner)."

If that's the case, investors should be concerned. Any time that a company starts messing with its operations in order to improve short-term earnings reports, you have a situation where long-term objectives could be neglected in favor of satisfying Wall Street expectations. In the long run, such a strategy will neither please Wall Street nor set the stage for long-term growth.

Cablevision (NYSE: CVC), one of my favorite corporate governance brothels, met with its disgruntled shareholders and reluctantly agreed to its idea of a shareholder-friendly initiative: a 10 cent per share quarterly dividend.

That works out to a yield of less than 1.3% based on the current share price and, needless to say, the disenfranchised shareholders aren't exactly thrilled. Mario Gabelli, whose fund is a major shareholder and a constant critic of the company's management and governance, told The Guardian that "To pay a 10-cent dividend which is $30 million is nice, but it's not what we wanted. . . They should have authorized a $1 billion buyback and they would use incremental cash flows to fund it. They clearly did not listen to shareholders."

Duh. But here's the thing, Mario: the whole point of having a dual-class voting structure where one family has complete control over the company is that you don't have to listen to shareholders. If the Dolans wanted to listen to shareholders, they wouldn't have adopted that structure in the first place and/or they'd get rid of it now!

I'm all for fruitless struggles based on principles, but it's pretty silly of Gabelli and other activists to be taking on a company where there's no mechanism for holding the board of directors accountable. Maybe they should head over to North Korea and complain indignantly that the regime is not doing a good job representing the interests of the people.

Shares of Liz Claiborne (NYSE: LIZ) tumbled this week on an even weaker than expected second quarter earnings report, but the stock has since moved back to where it was before the release. Still: it's trading at $14.85, compared with the $40+ per share it was fetching in early 2007.

Suffice it to say, investors are skeptical about the company's prospects for a turnaround. The company said it expects to earn $1.40-$1.50 per share for 2008 so the price/earnings ratio is in the 10-range.

But there could be reason to expect tremendous upside over the long-term: back in January, the company signed legendary designer Isaac Mizrahi. At the time, I wrote that "If anyone can save the struggling fashion house, it's the man they just signed to be creative director of the company's flagship brand: Isaac Mizrahi. You can be sure he didn't come cheap, but he's just what they need. After all, this is the guy who actually managed to make Target (NYSE: TGT) a cool place to shop for clothes."

A hot retailer reporting a 4% drop in second quarter profit in the face of a 4% decline in same-store sales might not seem like good news but, in a very tough retail climate, it's a sign of how well Abercrombie and Fitch (NYSE: ANF) is holding up.

The stock's up more than 2% on the company's second quarter earnings, released this morning. The highlights:

• Revenue up 5% to $845.8 million.
• Abercrombie and Fitch same-store sales up 3%. abercrombie (kids clothes) SSS down 11%; Hollister down 9%, RUEHL down 22%.
• EPS down 1% to 87 cents on improved gross margins.

For a company to increase gross margins in the face of soaring commodity costs and timid consumer spending is extremely impressive, and a testament to the company's continued pricing power.

Investors have to be somewhat troubled by the performance of Hollister and the much-hyped RUEHL. Hollister may have been hurt because, as a lower-price point version of Abercrombie (Abercrombie won't call it that but that's what it is), its shoppers may be more sensitive to the economy. The huge plunge in same-store sales at Ruehl indicates that that brand might not have the great future people once thought it did -- but at less than 2% of the company's total sales, it won't drag anything down.

The stock has taken a beating with the rest of the retailers but, long-term, its prospects remain as strong as ever.

Donald Trump, the Clown Prince of Capitalism and Chairman of Trump Entertainment Resorts (NASDAQ: TRMP), is back in the news. The Associated Press reports that he'll be bailing out Ed McMahon, the former Johnny Carson sidekick who defaulted on $4.8 million in loans on his Beverly Hills home.

Trump told The Los Angeles Times that he didn't know McMahon personally and is motivated by "compassion. . . When I was at the Wharton School of Business I'd watch him every night. How could this happen?"

Holy cow! When I read this story, I thought "Finally! I'll have a chance to do a nice piece on Donald Trump." Wrong. I am actually going to make history here and bash someone for helping an old man keep his house. First, why Ed McMahon? There are hundreds of thousands of people facing problems with their homes and, rather than quietly helping average Joe's with mortgage payments, Trump goes and spends millions of dollars to help one old rich guy keep his palace -- and then calls The Los Angeles Times to brag about it. Oh, and he had to remind everyone that he went to Wharton.

This act of charity, like everything Donald does, seems to be motivated by narcissism, grandiosity, and a thirst for publicity.

I'm caving into his desire to have his name all over the place, but I'm also calling BS on this billionaire bailout.

Back in May, Nelson Peltz reported a stake of less than 1% in Starbucks Corporation (NASDAQ: SBUX), and the stock jumped 6% on the news.

I was skeptical: I wrote on BloggingBuyouts that "Most likely Peltz's stake is a non-issue and will lead to no changes. I certainly don't buy that it's a good reason for the stock to add more than half a billion dollars to its market cap in a single day."

Non-issue indeed. Today Peltz reported, in the latest 13-F for his Trian Fund that he has eliminated his stake in Starbucks. Somewhat hypocritically, the market sent shares of Starbucks up more than 3.5% today. Nelson buys? Buy, buy buy! Nelson sells? Buy, buy, buy!

We'll never know why Peltz dumped his stake in Starbucks but, given his track record, you have to think that something spooked him -- he doesn't normally hold stocks for a few months.

Peltz -- whatever his shortcomings -- knows the food service industry pretty well. Given that he just sold Starbucks, I'd think twice before buying.

Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi is not the most intriguing Speaker of the House to come along, and she hasn't carved the high-profile that predecessors like Newt Gingrich did.

But I don't think anyone expected her book to flop this badly. Drudge Report reports that Know Your Power: A Message to America's Daughters sold just 2,737 copies in its first week. That's bad enough to make it the 41st bestselling nonfiction book of the week and the reviews on Amazon have been equally appalling. 131 reviewers have given it an average rating of 1.5 stars, all the more impressive give that it's not possibly to rate a book 0 stars.

Publisher's Weekly's generally positive review sums up why the book hasn't sold well: "Pelosi's book is a simply crafted acknowledgment of the support of her family, mentors and helpful colleagues without rhetorical flourishes, insider scandal or intimate revelations-a gentle account from a tough politician."

Boring! People reading books by politicians want to hear about scandal.

Perhaps the sequel should be called Know Your Limits: Just Because You're a Successful Politician Doesn't Mean People Want to Know Your Life Story.

I've been told that companies that are poised for long-term success operate based on a respect for the intelligence of their customers. In an interview on CNBC, Robert Toll, the CEO of leading homebuilder Toll Brothers (NYSE: TOL) demonstrated his lack of respect for consumers: "When we hold specials, which are not really specials, but just some reconfigured incentives to make it look as though something special is being given away . . ."

That's right, the CEO of a leading homebuilder went on CNBC and announced that the company's heavily-marketed sales promotions are essentially total bull crap -- just "reconfigured incentives designed to make it look as though something special is being given away . . ." Why would he say that? With that one statement, Mr. Toll has told anyone who might have dealings with his company -- either as home buyers or as investors -- that the company's tactics aren't exactly straightforward and honest.

Just as a point of reference, this is the same guy who, back in November, essentially blamed the housing downturn on the pessimistic media. Oh, and by the way, this is the company that couldn't even get the chairman's daughter to close on a deal she'd agreed to.

So, if you're intrigued by an ad for a good deal on Toll Brothers homes, remember: it's just reconfigured incentives designed to make it look as though something special is being given away. The pounding that the market has given the stock over the past few years may be something similar.

With its results benefiting from high gas prices and a renewed consumer focus on bargains, Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) is looking more relevant than it has in years. The company is also redoubling its efforts to make inroads overseas.

In the midst of an effort to acquire a leading Russian retailer, Wal-Mart announced Wednesday it will spend at least $1 billion to expand its footprint in Brazil.

Craig Herkert, president and CEO of Wal-Mart's America's division, met with Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and the company released a statement saying that it would seek to open 80 to 90 new stores and that "The retailer will make its largest investment yet in the country since it started operating in Brazil fourteen years ago."

This seems like a prudent investment in a region where Wal-Mart has enjoyed considerable success. Eight of the 12 foreign countries Wal-Mart has operations in are in Latin America, and the company's concept appears to work there. In other foreign markets, most notably Germany, Wal-Mart's fixation on low prices has met with failure. The developing world likely represents Wal-Mart's best opportunity for long-term growth.