Last week someone asked me to go on TV to talk about the future of newspapers based on my comment on how to save the Boston Globe. It's clear to me that there are many people who like to read a newspaper with their morning coffee. 50 years ago, there were plenty of people who used to read that newspaper with a coffee and a cigarette. Today, fewer people take all three at breakfast time. (In 1944, 41% of Americans polled were smokers, 21% were in 2007). Will dead-tree-news (DTN) go the way of the cigarette? In some ways, yes.

Cigarettes and DTN are different. When cigarettes are used as directed they kill their users. When DTN is printed and distributed, it kills its owners -- or to be more precise, it loses money which is increasingly forcing its owners to choose between closing DTN down or absorbing its losses. Another difference is that the generation that's addicted to DTN will not keep reading forever; whereas cigarette makers are skilled at recruiting new addicts to replace the ones it kills.

But cigarettes and DTN also will likely have something in common. As the number of smokers has steadily declined in the U.S., the cigarette makers have skillfully raised prices to cover the higher unit costs and profit expectations. In 1960, a pack of cigarettes went for $0.35, today the price is up as high as $9. As I posted, DTN is clearly a money loser so its owners are going to have to raise its price if they hope to at least cover the costs of printing and distributing it to people.

The global economy is imperiled because of toxic waste. But what exactly is that? Simply put, it's securities backed by loans backed by assets like houses, shopping malls, office buildings, and credit card debt. Just jam 4,000 mortgages into a trust, pay a credit rating agency to wrap them in a AAA coating, find an investor hungry for higher yield at low risk -- and voila! You've created a vampire that sucks the blood out of the global financial system.

How so? Because what I've just described is securitization -- and the $13 trillion in mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) and collateralized debt obligations (CDSs) that remains on banks' books and in institutional investment portfolios has lost much of its value. $12.8 trillion in taxpayer money has gone to try to prop up the financial system as a result.

That's why it would seem to me that we ought to end securitization. So is that what the U.S. is doing about securitization? Of course not! Instead, it's spending $1 trillion of taxpayer money on Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) -- a way to revive a market which is practically dead right now -- having dropped from $906 billion in 2006 to $152 billion in 2008. 2009 deal volume? $16 billion. TALF would lend $1 trillion to investors so they'd start investing again in these securities.

If I could be reincarnated, I would come back as a banker. The world revolves around them. They get multi-million dollar bonuses, live in Fifth Avenue apartments, own spreads in Greenwich, CT, and summer in seaside cottages in the Hamptons. When their money-making schemes go awry, taxpayers bail them out -- and even pay their bonuses!

But we already knew that. What I did not know, until I read this, is that banks also get the kid glove treatment from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) when it comes to audits. In fiscal 2008, the financial services industry got audited at a 9% rate -- less than half the 19% audit rate for all other industries that fiscal year.

Is banking getting off easy because it's so much more virtuous? Not at all. In fact, recent IRS audits reveal that banks under-report taxable income at a far higher rate than IRS audits of the four other industry groups. And this doesn't even include Swiss banks like UBS (NYSE: UBS) which have been helping clients dodge U.S. taxes for years -- it just paid $780 million in fines for those sins.

Just when I think I have heard it all, they come up with something even more eye-poppingly incredible. That's right folks. First they sucked you into the dot-com boom; then wiped out your tech stocks. Next they urged you to buy houses with money you couldn't pay back -- and those houses plunged in value while the global stock markets lost half their value -- further decimating your net worth.

Now they want to give you the once in a lifetime opportunity to buy the very toxic waste that is sinking the entire global financial system. And if you have a job in state government, your pension fund may be enticed into this financial sludge as well.

In what surely must be the PR move of the decade, Moody's Corp. (NYSE: MCO) has downgraded Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.A) from AAA to AA2.

Why is this a great PR move? Well, Berkshire owns 20% of Moody's. And what could be a better demonstration of Moody's independence and objectivity than its decision to downgrade the financial strength of its biggest shareholder?

Pretty clever, no? Sure -- unless you start to consider that Moody's and the other ratings agencies gorged on fees from investment banks to rate toxic waste for years -- using their AAA credit ratings to convince investors to buy the securities. Now that the ratings agencies have no fees to earn from rating toxic waste, they are studiously trying to rebuild their reputation for objectivity.

Jim Cramer has earned the ire of Jon Stewart for touting stocks while the rest of the world lost $50 trillion in their retirement accounts. Now New York University Professor Nouriel Roubini, who is among those who predicted the financial crisis, is suggesting that Jim Cramer has lost the right to talk.

Roubini called Cramer a buffoon and gave a talk in Toronto from which AP quotes Roubini talking about Cramer: "He was one of those who called six times in a row for this bear market rally to be a bull market rally and he got it wrong. And after all this mess and Jon Stewart he should just shut up because he has no shame."

Roubini, who may have flaws of his own, including decorating his apartment with plaster sculptures of a portion of the female anatomy, seems quite taken aback by Cramer's anti-Roubini comments which included "insulting me [Roubini] personally and saying a bunch of lies." I say that Cramer and Roubini should continue this public sparring.

I am not sure whether it will shed light on what investors should do with their money. But it could offer an entertaining distraction.

Peter Cohan is president of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College. His eighth book is You Can't Order Change: Lessons from Jim McNerney's Turnaround at Boeing.

A Congressional panel headed by Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren is suggesting it's time to fire bank CEOs and liquidate the banks they ran. As Jon Stewart would say, "Me likey."

The panel is not suggesting that the firing and liquidation happen en masse. Rather, it simply argues that the Treasury's approach denies the reality of just how bad the banks' financial condition is and leaves those sick banks in control of the very people who got them into the toxic-waste business. The panel suggests that CEOs of sick banks have a too-rosy view of their institutions' prospects.

Yesterday, in his speech to the Council on Institutional Investors, Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) CEO Lloyd Blankfein spoke about Wall Street pay. As a fellow who made $43 million in 2008 -- to be fair, Goldman actually made a $2.3 billion profit in 2008 -- Blankfein obviously knows a thing or two about the Wall Street pay envelope.

And he gets points for trying to balance Goldman's interests with those of the public -- but he still missed the mark. I think Wall Street needs its pay in escrow -- if its deals pay off after three years, bankers get the escrow cash; if not, that escrow pays the deals' investors.

Have we reached the bottom yet? That's a question that people ask me from time to time. I haven't got an answer yet, but today I have some numbers that may give us an idea. And the preliminary verdict is: No!

Why? Because the commercial banking industry in the U.S. is likely to be bankrupt -- by which I mean its liabilities could exceed its assets -- as we approach the bottom.

Just how bad will it get? It could see 41% of its core capital wiped out by loan losses alone. And when you take into account all the toxic waste and derivatives on the banks' books -- its capital looks mighty thin.

So far the U.S. has committed $12.8 trillion to bailing out Wall Street. Does this mean that Wall Street CEOs made mistakes? Apparently not. Because if it did, the Wall Streeters who cost taxpayers all that loot would be out of their jobs.

A few have moved on -- consider Merrill Lynch's former CEO Stan O'Neal, who, after leaving the investment bank with a then-record $2.24 billion loss, received a "kick in the rear" amounting to a $161 million retirement package. (O'Neal is just one of the Harvard MBAs whose destruction of the global economy is prompting some navel gazing at HBS.)

Most, though, are still at their desks, gamely calling the shots. Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner suggested it could be time for that to change.

The newspaper industry is in deep trouble. How so? It costs a lot to write, print, and deliver a newspaper, and with more people getting their news for free online and a plunge in advertising, costs are higher than revenues. The New York Times (NYSE: NYT) bought my local newspaper, The Boston Globe, in 1993 for $1.1 billion and is now threatening to shut it down unless its unions agree to $20 million in cost cuts. I don't think this is a viable plan -- instead The Boston Globe should stop producing its paper version and charge for access to its online content.

The Boston Globe is suffering from drops in circulation and advertising, and it has 13 unions propping up its costs. How bad is the pain? Its average weekday circulation fell 10% to 323,983 for the six months ending September 2008. Advertising revenues across the industry declined 16% in 2008. And the Boston Newspaper Guild -- whose members include 700 editorial, advertising, and business employees -- is being asked to take pay cuts and put an end to company pension contributions and lifetime job guarantees.

With all the gloom in the global economy, I got to wondering whether there is anything else going on in the world of business. I'm looking for growth because I think that's what will ultimately bring the economy out of the doldrums. Not surprisingly, that growth is coming from technology companies. In Growth Matters, I look at consumer technology companies that point the way to growth trends -- and in the process introduce services and products you may want to explore.

With all the magazines and newspapers shutting down these days, it came as a surprise to me that some companies are making money by retailing content online. One of Europe's leaders in this business is HDS Digital. I interviewed Aymeric Bauguin, HDS Digital's Managing Director, who said "HDS Digital is an e-commerce platform dedicated to the retailing of digital magazines and books, and operating under a white-label strategy on Relay.com and on major French e-commerce websites like 3suisses.fr, RueduCommerce.com, VirginMega.fr."

There could be an opportunity to tweak the way we pay CEOs of big public companies. I hope this doesn't sound too harsh. But when you consider that the average 2008 compensation for the 10 highest paid public company CEOs was $40.7 million, while their companies lost half, or $30 billion, worth of their stock market value -- I wonder whether some change may be in order.

The year 2008 put a big exclamation mark on, hopefully, the end of an eight-year sentence of stabbing common shareholders in the back. Of the 10 highest paid CEOs, here are the four who destroyed the most stock market value while getting well above average pay. The companies are listed in descending order of the percentage destruction in stock market value, along with the CEO's 2008 compensation and loss in stock market capitalization:

• Citigroup (NYSE: C) paid CEO Vikram Pandit $38.2 million while its stock fell 78% destroying $124 billion in stock market value
• Motorola (NYSE: MOT) CEO Sanjay Jha made $104 million while overseeing a 75% stock plunge which wiped out $27.9 billion in stock market value

By caving into pressure from Wall Street, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) just single-handedly added at least 20% to the value of major banks burdened with formerly toxic waste. What just happened is that FASB passed an accounting ruling that allows the banks to decide the value of its toxic waste rather than letting the market set a price.

In January, I posted on netbooks -- paperback book-sized computers that now go for under $300. To me, the netbook looked like a powerful growth trend that was boosting sales at makers by as much as 55%, even as the rest of the PC industry shrank 12%. 11 million netbooks were sold in 2008 and 22 million are expected to fly off the shelves in 2009.

Netbooks are popular because many people spend a lot of time dealing with online services and want a cheap, light device they can use on the go.