PhillyDeals: PhillyDeals: Web wagerers put their money on Obama

Last time the nation voted, traders who placed bets on

George W. Bush

and

John Kerry

at

intrade.com

favored Bush for most of the campaign - until Election Day, when so many switched their last-minute positions in response to shaky Internet exit-poll reports that the final odds favored Kerry, leaving a majority of bets underwater, a review by Dartmouth University scholars showed.

This year, intrade showed John McCain and Barack Obama within striking range of each other - until early October, when Obama pulled away.

As polls prepared to close, bets assumed a 92 percent probability of an Obama victory.

Entrepreneurs argued with banks over the propriety of packaging home-mortgage loans into bonds to fuel an expansion of the financial system.

High-tech news outlets took sides, denouncing their opponents with ferocious partisan rhetoric that didn't pretend to be impartial.

Residents whose patriotism was suspect were placed under house arrest, then dragged to cells in far-off places.

Welcome to Jay T. Snider's world - Pennsylvania, in the 1700s.

"It's amazing that life hasn't changed that much," says the former Flyers and Spectacor president and son of Flyers founder Ed Snider.

The younger Snider plans to sell part of his "Americana and Pennsylvaniana" collection at Bloomsbury Auctions in New York on Nov. 19. Some of the items will be vetted for local collectors and institutions - which Snider says own historical items "that rival everything they have in Washington, D.C., if we only had more space to display it" - during a private show next week at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

Snider said he had pruned his artifacts since relocating to Pacific Palisades, Calif., from Bryn Mawr last year to expand his latest company, Cadence Cycling & Multisport Centers L.L.C., to the West Coast.

The online catalog for Snider's collection (which can be seen at bloomsburyauctions.com) lists real estate-promotion tracts by William Penn, mortgage-backed securities printed by Benjamin Franklin, Indian treaties, colored maps and city views, pronunciamientos of the Continental Congress, constitutional musings by James Madison, and letters discussing the movements of house slaves and many other cargoes to and from the Caribbean, among early Philadelphia families such as the Logans, the Norrises and the Dickinsons.

A previous Snider auction, at Christie's in 2005, fetched $6 million, but Snider frets the market has slipped with the times. Bloomsbury hopes to raise at least $2.9 million.

Wells Fargo & Co.'s

chairman,

Richard Kovacevich

, was supposed to have retired by now and left the giant bank to chief executive officer

John Stumpf

, as it absorbs

Wachovia Corp.

and becomes the dominant bank in Philadelphia and dozens of other markets.

But Kovacevich has decided to stick around. Wells issued a statement yesterday saying that Stumpf recommended it, the board asked for it, and Kovacevich agreed. Wachovia spokeswoman Melissa Murray declined to say how long Kovacevich would remain in charge.

Bad idea, says veteran bank analyst Richard X. Bove. Sure, Kovacevich "is an intelligent, combative, charismatic leader," comparable to JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s popular chief, Jamie Dimon, writes Bove in a note to clients of his firm, Ladenburg Thalmann Financial Services Inc.

But by staying past Wells Fargo's former retirement age, "Mr. Kovacevich may be about to make the mistake that Sandy Weill, ex-CEO, did at Citigroup," where both Kovacevich and Dimon earned their stripes, Bove adds.

"Mr. Weill developed such an overwhelming persona that he could not be contradicted and his word was law, whether right or wrong; and in his later years he was mostly wrong," Bove wrote. "Leaders who stay too long lose their bearings.

"Their thinking becomes too rigid. The continuing presence of Mr. Kovacevich shows that the board is weak and it lacks confidence" in Stumpf, who was pushed aside as Kovacevich inked deals with Wachovia and the Treasury Department.