Ed Whitacre has solved the problem I noted last month of finding a chief executive who could work under him at General Motors - he has adopted the Dick Cheney tactic of appointing himself.

This solves one problem but it leaves me with an uneasy feeling about the way that Mr Whitacre, the former chairman and chief executive of AT&T who was appointed by the Obama administration to oversee its own investment in the restructured GM, has interpreted his mandate.

This is not a criticism of what Mr Whitacre has done so far at GM. Fritz Henderson, the former chief executive, did not handle the potential sale of Opel in Europe adroitly and 68-year-old Mr Henderson is correct to have reshuffled GM’s senior ranks.

But the idea that Mr Whitacre would be content as an “interim chief executive” never seemed that convincing. He always looked unlikely to share power well with anyone else.

Frankly, if I were in the Obama administration, I would be a bit concerned. Although Mr Whitacre talked of the GM board urging him to take the job permanently for stability’s sake, it feels like his decision.

It is a telling contrast to Ford, where Bill Ford has found a way to work amicably alongside Alan Mulally and shift the company’s trajectory.

The last thing GM needs is for one compliant board, which backed Rick Wagoner’s strategy and resisted any criticism of it, to be replaced by another dominated by Mr Whitacre.

Perhaps the auto industry can learn something from Steve Jobs, in addition to building pieces of technology that attract admiration and premium prices.

David Carr discusses in the New York Times this morning Apple’s ability to build suspense before one of its launches, typified by the commotion over the unveiling of its tablet on Wednesday.

One of the reasons this works is that Apple used to have a strict rule that it only revealed new products on the day they were ready to be sold. More recently, it has let that rule slip a little, with the tablet reportedly only going on sale in March.

Still, it is a lot better than car companies, which routinely unveil “concept cars” at auto shows that are very far from being built, and sometimes never are.

At the Detroit auto show earlier this month, Toyota unveiled its FT CH concept car, intended to be part of a Prius family, but warned photographers not to get too close or try to open the doors.

Carr quotes John Gruber of Daring Fireball on this subject:

“When I was younger, I used to love to go to the Philly car show, but I learned after a while that the coolest cars at the show — the prototypes — never get built,” he said. “Apple builds and unveils actual products. They don’t do prototypes.”

In fact, some people in the auto industry are coming round to that view, including Sergio Marchionne, chief executive of Fiat and Chrysler.

Interviewed by the FT in Detroit, he too complained about the shift towards concept cars, the car equivalent of “vapourware” in the technology industry:

“This is a biz that wants novelty all the time, what’s new. We showed the [Jeep] Grand Cherokee in New York last year two years before its launch and that is bound to hurt you because by the time it launches, people say now ‘So what?’ We have taken the novelty out of the business.’”

Steve Jobs’ example is clearly having an effect.

I write in my news column for the FT on Friday about the “Volcker rule” - Barack Obama’s attempt to repeat some kind of Glass-Steagall structural reform - that Goldman Sachs would almost certainly be caught by it, along with commercial banks.

But I had second thoughts after listening to CNBC interview with Barney Frank, chairman of the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee, and reading what my colleagues Krishna Guha and Paul Murphy had to say.

In my column, I say:

The “Volcker rule” that would not only limit proprietary trading at deposit-taking institutions but stop them from “owning, investing or sponsoring” hedge funds and private equity funds has some ambiguities.

On the face of it, it might allow holding companies such as Goldman and Morgan Stanley to evade the restrictions by shedding their relatively small deposit-taking activities.

Yet so great is the unpopularity of Goldman and Wall Street that it seems inconceivable that Congress will allow them to escape, while deposit-taking “Main Street” banks such as JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America are caught by the rule.

Mr Frank, however, was much less clear. He suggested that Goldman could escape by giving up its New York state bank charter, through which it raises retail deposits:

“With regard to Goldman, they will probably sell their bank charter and that’s an artificiality anyway. Give it up, I don’t mean sell it.”

I agree that, if Goldman has a choice between giving up its bank charter and divesting its private equity and hedge fund operations, there will be no contest. But it strikes me as extremely strange, not to say wrong in principle, that it could shrug off the rule so simply.

Goldman would, after all, remain a financial holding company, regulated by the Federal Reserve and with access to the Fed discount window in emergencies. It would also stay a systemically important financial institution (aka too big to fail), like large commercial banks.

Mr Volcker appears to be most worried about not permitting deposit-taking institutions to own “casino” operations - proprietary trading desks, hedge funds and private equity funds.

But Mr Obama clearly cast the reforms in a wider context - not allowing any institution that implicitly depends on US taxpayers for support - to take excessive risks:

“Never again will the American taxpayer be held hostage by a bank that is too big to fail . . . When banks benefit from the safety net that taxpayers provide, which includes lower-cost capital, it is not appropriate for them to turn around and use that cheap money to trade for profit.

“We cannot accept a system in which shareholders make money on these operations if a bank wins, but taxpayers foot the bill if a bank loses.”

Note that he kept referring to taxpayers, not to depositors. That did not sound like a pledge to rein in JP Morgan and Bank of America while letting Goldman and Morgan Stanley go free.

The Wall Street Journal’s story, for example, assumes that Goldman and Morgan Stanley are among the institutions affected. We shall see.

Anyone who is really, really interested in online paywalls can find my reply to Felix Salmon’s extensive critique of my column this week in the comments on his blog post.

Before Barack Obama said anything today about his second Glass-Steagall, the story was evident from who stood next to him, and who was banished down the row of public officials.

To President Obama’s right was “this tall guy”, the 6′ 7″ Paul Volcker, who has until today been a lone voice in his administration calling for structural reform on Wall Street. Further along was Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, who has until now resisted it in favour of tighter regulation.

If Mr Obama is serious, as he appears to be, he is enacting a reform that will strike at the heart of Goldman Sachs’ business model - a combination of advisory, financing and asset management, and co-investing of its own money alongside that of clients.

The question is whether these restrictions would apply to all bank holding companies - including Goldman and Morgan Stanley - or only to deposit-taking institutions.

If it is the latter, then Goldman and others would be able to get around it by divesting their deposit-taking subsidiaries. If it applies to bank holding companies, then they could not. In either case, banks such as J.P. Morgan face sweeping changes.

The “Volcker rule” is far more radical than simply stopping banks such as Goldman operating proprietary trading desks. Instead, it addresses conflicts of interest at the heart of Wall Street.

Indeed, when I suggested a radical reform along these very lines in October, I wrote:

The final step would be to force investment banks to halt pure proprietary trading and to divest their asset management arms. Everything from management of mutual and hedge funds to private equity would be done independently.

Investment banks such as Goldman would, of course, scream blue murder if they were told to shed asset management (although Morgan Stanley might well choose to be an asset manager rather than a bank) but it would have several benefits.

To start with, it would reduce the risk profile of investment banks by removing proprietary trading. They would still be taking capital risk in market-making but the high octane trading desks would be gone.

It would also end the conflicts of interest in investment banks managing an opaque cocktail of their own and other people’s money while simultaneously being advisers and financiers on private equity deals.

Last, it would create an asset management sector in which large firms could co-exist with hedge fund managers and even boutique proprietary trading desks (if they could raise the capital outside the fold of investment banks).

These could take whatever risks they chose with investors’ money, provided they were honest about it, and pay themselves what they could get away with. The government would know that these gamblers would bear their own losses.

Stand by for Wall Street screaming blue murder.

Back to Irene Rosenfeld, who despite her degree in psychology, appears to have upset an awful lot of people with Kraft’s £11.6bn takeover of Cadbury.

Having made herself unpopular in the UK by acquiring the maker of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk and the Curly Wurly, she has alienated Warren Buffett, her biggest shareholder, who regards it as “a bad deal”.

When pressed in a CNBC interview about his views on her, he damned her with faint praise:

“I think Irene has done a good job in operations.  I like Irene.  I mean, she’s been straightforward with me.  We just disagree.  She thinks it’s a good deal.  I think it’s a bad deal.  I think she’s a decent person.  She could be a trustee under my will.  I just don’t want her making this particular deal.”

Ms Rosenfeld has put herself far out on a limb - Mr Buffett’s objections extend not only to the price she paid but her sale of “a very fine pizza business” to Nestle to raise money.

His calculation of the lack of value for Kraft in the deal is worth reading in full because it gives a good idea of how a true value investor thinks.

“Now they mentioned paying 13 times Ebitda for Cadbury, but they’re paying more than that.  For one thing,  Ebitda is not the same as earnings.  Depreciation is a very real expense.  But on top of that, they’ve got a billion-three they’re going to spend of various rearrangements of Cadbury.  They’ve got 390 million dollars of deal expenses.  They are using their own stock, 260 million shares or something like that, that their own directors say is significantly undervalued.  And when they calculate that 13, they’re calculating Kraft at market price, not at what their own directors think the stock is worth.  So, the actual multiple, if you look at the value of the Kraft stock, is more like 16 or 17 and they sold earnings at nine times.   So, it’s hard to get rich doing that.  And I’ve got a lot of doubts about the deal.”

Ouch.

As Mr Buffett says, he is not getting a chance to vote on the deal as a Kraft shareholder, but I cannot think this is the last Ms Rosenfeld will hear of it.

Determination is a good quality, but ignoring the world’s most venerable shareholder is not what I would call wise career tactics.

My Thursday column in the FT is on the travails of newspapers.

One can hardly fault Irene Rosenfeld of Kraft for her nerve and tactical sense in what looks like a successful effort to take over Cadbury.

Ms Rosenfeld has yet to demonstrate, however, that she knows how to meld disparate corporate cultures and soothe the bitterness caused by a hostile takeover battle.

If an £11.7bn deal between the US and UK companies is announced on Tuesday, as expected, it will bring to an end an extraordinary battle in which Cadbury made little secret of its distate for Kraft.

From Ms Rosenfeld’s initial blunt approach to Roger Carr, Cadbury’s chairman, to the rebuff she faced from Warren Buffett halfway through, it has been a contentious affair.

I wrote a column defending the UK’s openness to foreign takeovers, and emphasis that a company must allow its shareholders, rather than its management, to decide on bids.

The prospect of Cadbury being taken over, however, has raised many hackles, and even prompted a semi-rebuff from Lord Mandelson, the UK business secretary.

Now Ms Rosenfeld has to avoid the kind of post-acquisition culture clash that has plagued many mergers. She may have a degree in psychology, but she will have to prove it.