Emptying my burgeoning browser tabs of "end is nigh" material:

• Russia looks at using oil money to buy U.S. companies (Times)
• Japan's food shortages becoming more dire (TheAge)
• Food shortages -- okay, rice shortages -- have spread to the U.S. (N.Y. Sun)
• U.S. faces recession recovery alphabet soup: V vs U vs the dreaded L (FT)

This year for the first time the collective oil appetite of emerging markets -- many of which don't pay the market price for oil -- will exceed that of the U.S. It is striking stuff, as evidenced by the following figure:

Among other points of the piece is that, as a result, while recent recessions have produced double-digit percentage decreases in oil demand, this one will be different. It is, pace my friend economist Jeff Rubin at CIBC, more likely we are headed through $120 oil on our way to $150.

Interesting stuff.

[via Bloomberg]

[Update] And more figure, this time via the fine folks at BCA. This one shows the moonshot of Chinese oil demand:

From a few months back, a table of gas prices at the pump around the world:

Note that among the countries with the heaviest subsidies -- that is, that are cheaper than the U.S. -- are most of the fastest-growing emerging economies in the world.

[via Fast Company]

Yahoo delivers earnings later today, so here is a quick cheat sheet of things to watch for. I will be on the quarterly call as well.

In general, I'm not buying the interpretation of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's price comments today, that Microsoft offer price isn't changing either way no matter what numbers Yahoo produces tonight. That's not what he said, and I remain steadfast that Microsoft can and should take a pragmatic approach and simply close discussions down by going to $31 cash, and dropping the equity component of the bid. Proving that it can bully Yahoo into taking a lower effective offer serves to effective purpose, other than convincing more Yahoo employees that they need to leave sooner rather than later.

[Update] Henry says something similar over at SAI. Notice also that Google's  stock is doing a sympathetic run today on expectations that Yahoo will have a strong quarter tonight. And what's good for Yahoo is great for Google, right?

The good people at S.Pellegrino have out their annual list of the 50 best restaurants in the world. I've been playing with the data, which goes back to 2002, to see if there is anything interesting in there.

Here is the top Ten from 2008, and you can go the site for the remaining 40. After the chart, some questions.

So, some questions:

• Has the U.S. percentage of the top 50 restaurants gone up, down, or stayed the same over time?
• Has the French percentage of the top 50 restaurants gone up, down, or stayed the same over time?
• Which country has the most Top 50 restaurants on a GDP-adjusted basis?
• Which country is most under-represented on a GDP-adjusted basis?
• How many restaurants do BRIC (Brazil/Russia/India/China) have? How has that changed over time?
• How many entrants do frontier markets like Africa (excluding South Africa) have?

If you notice anything else interesting feel free to toss it in, including that you've eaten at all of these places. Among the top ten, I have eaten at a grand total of 1: The French Laundry.

More here.

[Update] Here is another way of looking at the data, this time via a time series of restaurants per year per (selected) country:

Interesting data via the ever-amusing Google Trends on comparative consumer interest in Apple's iPhone and iPod over the past twelve months. Looks like iPod is in decline after a seasonal bump, and iPhone has flatlined at lower levels.

And just for fun, here is one more on Apple's Macbook. I put it on a different graph as, given the pricepoint, interest is at a much lower level.

Roger Lowenstein has a massive, must-read piece on mortgage markets in next weekend's NY Times magazine. Clocking in at more than 5,000 words, the piece is, well ... long, but it is Lowenstein, so it is worth reading in its entirety. Roger's walk-through of how Moody's explained mortgage ratings to him via a real case is worth the effort alone.

And for those of you who can't stomach the idea of reading something this long on a Tuesday, here is a tag cloud of the most common words in Roger's piece. At least you can sound smart: Agencies! Borrowers! Triple-A! And my favorite: Moody Mortgage!!

My current favorite snippet from the piece is actually a quote from an S&P executive who says mortgage-related credit markets broke down because of consumers' "ahistorical behavioral modes" (which is a great name for a blog). That's right, it's those darn buyers who messed up the mortgage market. As far as obfuscatory prose goes, that's right up there with comScore being "directionally correct".

Names aside in this latest list from Alpha Magazine of the highest paid hedge fund managers -- okay, John Paulson led the way with a $3.7-billion 2007 take -- I'm more bemused by the related factoids. Here are some directly from the article:

• Five of the managers on this year’s list each made more in 2007 than the $1.2 billion that JPMorgan Chase & Co. agreed to pay for the almost failed 85-year-old Bear Stearns Cos.
• When we published our inaugural list, in 2002, Soros led the way with $700 million, a showing that this year would have put him at No. 9. Back then it took $30 million to crack the top 25; this year, $360 million.
• The grand total earned by the top 25 in our 2003 ranking, almost $2.8 billion, was less than what any of the top three managers made this year and less than one fifth of what the top ten made altogether ($16.1 billion).
• Though we doubled the size of our list from 25 to 50 this year, longtime New York–based star managers Mark Kingdon of Kingdon Capital Management and Raj Rajaratnam of Galleon Group both miss the cut, despite each making about $200 million. This year’s minimum: $210 million.

More here.

Now this is a strange story. Apparently Craigslist's founders, never ones to follow the orthodox economic path, did something back in January to dilute Ebay's 28.4% minority stake in their fast-growing company. Here is a quote from the NYT:

In a statement released Tuesday, eBay said that in January, Craigslist’s two directors, the founder Craig Newmark and the chief executive, Jim Buckmaster, took actions that unfairly diluted eBay’s economic interest in the company. eBay did not specify what those actions were.

What could Craig, et al., have done to piss off Meg and company back at Ebay HQ so much that they would take Craig & Co. to court? Did they sell a stake to someone else quietly? Did they bring about some sort of poison pill? A new class of shares? Sell Craigslist stakes on Craiglist?

Yahoo's first quarter results are now out. I'll have more color later, but here is the gist in tabular form:

It is, as the numbers suggest, a beat across the board. Good for Yahoo, but not unexpected either. The Street consensus was that YHOO would be slightly ahead on the main metrics as the company sold everything not bolted down to beat the quarterly numbers.

But this isn't a big beat so the stock isn't doing much in afterhours. It's kind of a "If this is the best you can do, then ..." reaction. Or, as someone put it in a message to me just now, investors are implicitly accusing them of padding sales with paperclips, snow globes, and purple foam YHOO fingers, and still not being to blow away the Street. And that's just not good enough in the circumstances.

Quinlan: Come on, read my future for me.
Tanya: You haven't got any.
Quinlan: What do you mean?
Tanya: Your future is all used up.

    - from Touch of Evil (1958)

The Yahoo Q1 conference call is underway. I'll give Jerry et al., credit for at least trying to talk futures, which they're doing at some length. But when the afterhours market reacts to news from Jerry that Yahoo is guiding cash flows higher by flatlining, then you know that investors have largely checked out.

Short of announcing a major deal with AOL, GOOG, or someone else -- which could admittedly still happen in this strange and drawn-out affair -- this is rapidly becoming corporate kabuki theater. It is a costume drama that is all surfaces, one where no-one is talking about the only thing that matters, which is the Microsoft offer that has not been successfully fended off by today's results.

So, is Yahoo's future all used up? No, I'm exaggerating to make a point. After all, this is a company with great traffic and strong properties. But its future has irrevocably changed.