Fortune has released its list of the world's 50 most respected companies and once again Apple Inc. (AAPL) tops the list.

This is the fourth year in a row that the Cupertino based company has grabbed the top slot. Apple's respect comes mainly due to the company's ability to release new products at an amazingly quick pace, often updating its main product lines at least once a year.

The mayhem in the media industry continues. The Wall Street Journal, a News Corp (NASDAQ: NWS) property, is closing its Boston bureau and sending nine employees into the wind. The newswire and MarketWatch operations are going to stay open in Boston, however, with no headcount impact.

The Journal doesn't have any plans to close other offices, according to a memo by managing editor Robert Thomson: "there are no plans, nascent or otherwise, to close any other U.S. or international bureau." The WSJ will still support an "investigative function" in Boston, but the New York-based Money and Investing team will cover Boston's mutual fund industry, which boasts such heavy hitters as Fidelity.

At the same time, magazine company Time Inc., owned by Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) is looking to cut $100 million in expenses, and layoffs will undoubtedly figure into the equation. The company that owns Time, Fortune, People and Sports Illustrated – and falls under the same umbrella as AOL, which owns BloggingStocks – is feeling the squeeze of a media recession that's even worse than the regular recession we've all been battling for what feels like decades.

Let's play a game of Do You Know? Do You Know that the same company that produces Jim Beam, DeKuyper, and Canadian Club also produces Moen Faucets and Master Lock? Do You Know that the aforementioned company also houses an expansive golf department, boasting Titleist, FootJoy, Cobra, Pinnacle, and Scotty Cameron? All of these products can be found under one company's roof: Fortune Brands, Inc. (NYSE: FO).

You may not think that spirits, faucets, and golf have much to do with each other - but if you ever saw me play, you would understand my golf ball's affinity for water and the need to drink heavily to make it seem like I have any business on the course.

General Electric (NYSE: GE) may be one of the most admired companies in the world, at least according to Fortune. But, Wall Street hates the company and has driven its stock to multi-year lows. The concerns have been printed dozens of times in the press: GE is too large. It has too many units that do not do well. None of the firm's divisions fit well together.

But, GE now has an attraction all its own. It pays a yield of nearly 5%. The company is still tremendously profitable and has $15 billion in cash.

If the U.S. stock market continues to drop, the successful investing tactics of the last several years, which involve putting money into is stocks because equities in general are rising quickly, may not be a good way to make money this year or next.

There are a handful of companies with iron-clad balance sheets and big dividends. The stocks of these may not go up, but their dividends are likely to stay intact. GE is at the head of this list.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com

Fortune -- which shares parent Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) with BloggingStocks -- provides a clue about how big of a write-down Lehman Brothers Holdings (NYSE: LEH) needs to take in order to account accurately for its Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO) portfolio. By my estimate, that write-down could total roughly $4 billion -- wiping out 20% of Lehman's $20 billion in capital.

How so? I calculated $4.07 billion worth of write-downs -- $1.63 billion of the write-off is from worthless BB and below rated CDOs and another $2.44 billion is from the remaining CDOs that are worth about half their stated value. This is based on Fortune's report that Lehman has $6.5 billion worth of CDOs. The 25% that are rated BB or below it believes are worthless. The remaining 75% it figures are worth 50 cents on the dollar.

But wait, there's more. Lehman has $39 billion worth of Commercial Mortgage Backed Securities (CMBSs) which have lost value. A key index has declined in the last quarter -- but I don't know how much. Assuming the decline was 25%, Lehman would need to write down an additional $9.8 billion. If Lehman needed to take the $9.8 billion write-down plus the $4 billion for the CDOs, its capital would decline 75%.

When I think about how Lehman is not the only one to hold these dodgy securities, it becomes clear that our financial system is resting on a very shaky foundation.

Peter Cohan is President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter. He has no financial interest in the securities mentioned.

Fortune, which shares a parent, Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX), with BloggingStocks, struck out this week. What I mean is that it published three articles -- each of which I think completely missed the boat. I really like when Fortune gets an in-depth interview with interesting business leaders. But sometimes, it goes too far praising its subjects.

That may have been what happened in the three stories where I think Fortune whiffed:

• Providence Equity Partners. Fortune had a cover story praising Providence Equity Partners for closing the biggest private equity deal ever. Unfortunately, as I posted, that $52 billion deal fell apart this week. To be fair, Fortune updated its online version of the article with this information. Strike One.
• Bernanke saves the day. Fortune posted an article praising Bernanke for stopping the slide in the stock market with his fast interest rate cuts and emergency lending. This week that illusion was burst as the Dow lost 507 points. Strike Two.

Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK) shares are trading higher after analysts at Fortune wrote in that NOK's global reach and the strength of the international wireless market should help the company meet earnings targets when it reports on Thursday. NOK is also receiving support from an optimistic second-quarter forecast from Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), which has bolstered the tech sector this morning. If you think that the stock won't fall by too much in the coming months, then now could be a good time to look at a bullish hedged trade on NOK.

After hitting a one-year low of $23.61 last April, the stock hit a one-year high of $42.22 in November. NOK opened this morning at $33.19. So far today the stock has hit a low of $32.90 and a high of $33.62. As of 12:15, NOK is trading at $33.50, up $1.40 (4.4%). The chart for NOK looks bearish and steady, while S&P gives the stock a positive 4 STARS (out of 5) buy rating.

For a bullish hedged play on this stock, I would consider a May bull-put credit spread below the $28 range. A bull-put credit spread is an options position that combines the purchase and sale of put options to hedge risk in case the stock doesn't do what you think but still leverage nice returns. For this particular trade, we will make a 7.1% return in just one month as long as NOK is above $28 at May expiration. Nokia would have to fall by more than 16% before we would start to lose money. Learn more about this type of trade here.

Fortune (which shares parent Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) with BloggingStocks) provides at least two examples which raise questions about whether Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs pushed the Apple board into violating the law.

Two revelations in the article -- that Apple's board decided not to disclose Jobs's pancreatic cancer, for which he delayed surgery because he wanted to try a diet cure, and that Jobs set a backdated options date of January 16, 2001 which the board rubber-stamped, giving recipients a profit of either $1.6 million or $3.9 million -- make me wonder whether Jobs convinced Apple's board to break the law.

As I posted in 2006, Lazard, Ltd.'s (NYSE: LAZ) board may have failed to disclose the illness of its CEO, Bruce Wasserstein, when reports surfaced that he was out of the office with a heart ailment. A lawyer I spoke with said that if a CEO is unable to do his or her job due to illness, the board must disclose it. If Jobs's pancreatic cancer surgery kept him away from doing the CEO's job, how did Apple's lawyers defend the failure to disclose? It surely couldn't have been the lack of materiality -- some estimated that if his illness had been disclosed, Apple stock would have lost 20% of its value.

If you believe an analysis I posted of a Fortune article last November, the answer is probably yes. This is based on a theory that stock prices needed to adjust downward for something called the equity risk premium.

How did Fortune arrive at the idea that the market needs an 18% drop? (I should note that Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) owns both BloggingStocks and Fortune.) Fortune calculates the current equity risk premium by adding stocks' earnings yield -- which it gets by flipping the market's P/E on its head (calculating E/P) -- to the inflation rate and then subtracts the t-bill yield. Then it compares the current value with the long run equity risk premium to conclude that stocks have a long way to fall before their prices align with that long-run value.

Here are the numbers. The market currently trades at a PE of 16, but based on adjustments to remove short term spikes by Yale market guru Robert Schiller, Fortune uses a PE of 22 -- which is the inverse of the market's earnings yield of 4.5%. Investors expect equity returns of 7% -- calculated by adding expected inflation of 2.5% to that 4.5%. To get the equity risk premium of 3% Fortune subtracted the 10-year treasury rate of 4% from that 7% expected return. Got that?

So it isn't every day that you get to ask an investment legend a question -- I would argue that Vanguard founder John Bogle has done more to help the small investor than everyone else in the history of the world combined times 10.

It really isn't even close. Index funds have enabled people saving for retirement to compound their money at a far, far better rate than they could before. Bogle's creation has allowed investors saving for retirement to let their money grow uninhibited, and cut off a stream of billions of dollars in undeserved management fees to poorly-performing mutual fund managers.

Tirade over. Fortune is giving readers an opportunity to submit a question to Mr. Bogle. A few hints: Don't ask him where the stock market is going. A cornerstone of his philosophy is his belief that it's nearly impossible to predict. Instead, ask him questions about public policy and corporate governance. Oh, and read his amazing and underrated book The Battle For the Soul of Capitalism.

I would ask him what he thinks about Social Security and whether it has a future in its current form. I would also want to know what he thinks about the huge improvements in corporate governance that have been achieved by activist hedge fund managers -- and whether enterprising investors might be able to find alpha by piggybacking off their picks.

There are literally hundreds of questions I could ask this legend -- I'm sure you have a few yourself.

Valleywag reports that Fortune's editor, Andrew Serwer, posted a blog entry October 19 about the wedding of Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) co-founder Larry Page to his girlfriend Lucy Southworth. (Fortune and BloggingStocks share the same corporate parent, Time Warner (NYSE: TWX)).

But when Valleywag wanted to write about the post, it had disappeared from Fortune's website. When Valleywag went to Google's cache, the reference to the Page/Southworth wedding was gone. Fortunately for those interested in the details of the post, Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) had a copy of the original.

By the way, the Serwer post said that Page and Southworth were getting married on December 7, and those attending the blessed event will need passports, which suggests it will be outside the U.S. Valleywag now suggests that the wedding could be held on Richard Branson's Necker Island. But one question remains unanswered: if you know why Fortune and Google removed this post from their sites, please comment below.

Peter Cohan is President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter. He has no financial interest in the securities mentioned.

After looking through some web postings internally, there was a very interesting article regarding Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) that can be indirectly inferred to Time Warner Cable Inc. (NYSE:TWC) and all units of the media conglomerate. The article "For Time Warner, a time to break up?" is available on the CNNMoney.com website, but is really a FORTUNE Magazine article. FORTUNE and CNN are both properties of Time Warner Inc.

The article is basically predicting that Jeff Bewkes will soon replace Dick Parsons as the Chairman & CEO of the parent company. It also points to a recent anvil weighing on the transition -- the sagging stock price of Time Warner. The truth is that the first real wave of the transition took hold in 2006 when the company separated Time Warner Cable and used financial leverage to buy back billions of dollars worth of stock. That buyback did continue, but 2006 was the year the buyback was felt the most as the stock rose nearly 50% from its lows.

While the article does not call for major changes, it notes how Time Warner produces more cash flow than its rivals, although News Corp. (NYSE: NWS) and Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS) have outperformed as stocks. The article goes on to mention that Bewkes has noted that other media break-ups may not be yielding much upside, and that he agrees with Parsons for now that the combined entity is worth more than the pieces as unaffiliated entities.

Regardless of the many twists and turns in the article, this seemed odd coming out of FORTUNE. I laid out my own scenario where the company could float a portion of AOL as a tracking stock, a scenario that still seems quite likely. Rather than an entire spin-out of the cable assets, it seems to me that the media giant should at least maintain a large stake (if not an outright 50% plus 1 vote majority) in the cable company, and that any analyst calls to the contrary are misplaced. It is easy to call for break-ups in a bull market to unlock more value, but there are many more defensive and stabilizing strategies for a giant to weather harder times.

Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) disappointing third quarter brought the bears out of the woodwork. In a recent column, Fortune Magazine's Geoff Colvin makes the case that Google is overvalued.

Sure, it's a great company with terrific management and it has generated tremendous value for shareholders. Colvin essentially argues that Google has been earning extraordinary returns on capital and that, just to maintain its current price level, it will need to earn even better returns in the future. As Charlie Munger has said, few businesses have a future as good as their past.

Anyone who owns shares of Google or is considering buying should read Colvin's insightful article. Given the extraordinary returns, thousands of brilliant young minds are working around the clock hoping to dethrone Google's leadership position.

I would be careful with this stock.

MAJOR PAPERS:

• Delta Airlines Inc (NYSE: DAL), sprinting to the start as it emerges from bankruptcy, is expected to order about 125 Boeing Company (NYSE: BA) 787 jetliners by the end of 2007, reported the Wall Street Journal (subscription required).
  
• HSBC Holdings (NYSE: HBC) is preparing to push its banking operations into China as part of a move to tap into the emerging wealthy consumer base in Asia, reported the Financial Times (subscription required).
• The Financial Times also reported that AT&T (NYSE: T) is not considering making an offer to buy British mobile telecom company Vodafone Group (NYSE: VOD), said AT&T's new CEO, Randall Stephenson, contrary to previous speculation.

OTHER PAPERS:

• Fortune reported that Billionaire supermarket mogul Ron Burkle may announce a long-shot bid this week for business news and information company Dow Jones and Company (NYSE: DJ), according to a source.
• The Economic Times reported that Accenture Ltd (NYSE: ACN) is in joint venture talks with Indian telecom operator Reliance Communications, which could have an exit clause giving Reliance the opportunity to buy Accenture in the future.

MOST NOTEWORTHY: This morning's noteworthy initiations included Nokia Corp (NOK), Fortune Brands, Inc (FO), Whirlpool Corp (WHR), Dick's Sporting Goods, Inc (DKS), Kona Grill, Inc (KONA):

• JP Morgan started Nokia Corp (NYSE: NOK) with an Overweight rating, believing the handset market is strong and expects gross profits to rise in 2007.

• Soleil wants to wait on the sidelines of Fortune Brands Inc (NYSE: FO), initiating shares with a Neutral rating, given the potential acquisition of Sweden's V&S Group along with the softness in the home and hardware segment.

• Soleil also started Whirlpool Corp (NYSE: WHR) with a Hold rating based on valuation, which they believe reflects the company's outlook through 2009.

• Nollenberger expects Dick's Sporting Goods (NYSE: DKS) will continue to outperform its peers, starting shares off with a Buy rating, and believes the recent pullback provides a compelling buying opportunity.

• KeyBanc is positive on Kona Grill's (NASDAQ: KONA) differentiated brand, compelling unit economics, positive SSS opportunity and growth, starting shares with a Buy rating...

OTHER INITIATIONS:

• Ceva, Inc (NASDAQ: CEVA) was initiated at CIBC with a Sector Outperform rating.

• Black & Decker Corp (NYSE: BDK) and Briggs & Stratton Corp (BGG) were initiated with Hold ratings at Soleil.

• La Jolla Pharmaceutical Co (NASDAQ: LJPC) was started with a Sell rating at Lazard.

• Aviza Technology, Inc (NASDAQ: AVZA) was initiated with a Hold rating at Needham.

Analyst summaries provided by TheFlyOnTheWall.com (subscription required).