Today I'm going to make my annual post about finance, which I know everybody loves. Three items:

1. Another day, another alarmist article about hedge funds. The one in this week's Economist is the best I've seen, by far. (Hey, look at me, I read The Economist!) I can't really disagree with anything it says, although, of course, I don't believe that any of it applies to my company.

2. Here's a sleazy story: a company goes bankrupt and is acquired by a big private equity fund. Because it no longer qualifies for bank financing, the private equity fund forces the company to sell a lot of unsecured debt to unsophisticated blue-collar investors, targeting them through misleading newspaper ads and mass mailings. The result? A bunch of uninformed people lose their life savings when the firm defaults on its debt, including K., my secret best friend from high school, who lost all the money that she had been planning to use to pay off her student loans. Sigh. I guess some private equity firms are evil. Who would have guessed?

3. Finally, in my last finance post, I rattled off a long list of asset classes that people should consider before investing in hedge funds, including timber. I wrote: "Believe me, I'm looking forward to the day when I finally buy my own timber fund." Guess what? I'm now the proud owner of a few shares of Plum Creek Timber. Timber's a fun asset class, as Andrew Tobias helpfully explains, and it's apparently a big favorite of the Harvard endowment, which allocates a big chunk of its portfolio to timberland. Wanna buy some wood?