The National Debt Clock is ticking . . . or is it?

The National Debt Clock in New York City ran out of digits in September as the figure ticked over $10,000,000,000,000.

on the drug war front - - - another failure

Mexico accused it's former drug czar last week of taking $450K from a cartel he was supposed to destroy, going public with a scandal that deals a serious blow to the country's US backed drug war. Noe Ramirez is the highest ranking law enforcement official detained yest as part of a Mexico's sweeping effort to weed out officials who allegedly shared police information with violent drug smugglers.

Happy Thanksgiving

Once again we enjoy a proud family tradition in America by gathering with family and friends for great food and give thanks for all that we have and the special privilege of living in the USA.

Libya is becoming a democracy

Libya says it intends to open a new chapter in relations with the US by investing some of it's $100 billion sovereign wealth fund in US companies and sending thousands of students to study in the US. Hmmmmmm why does this sound . . . strange? Neither of those activities sounds like anything other than self serving. The son of the one man ruler of Libya said he expects a constitution providing for democratic elections to be adopted by September 2009 (the 40th anniversary of the 1969 revolution). Blah Blah Blah Blah

Video - Laurel and Hardy clip

In this clip, Stan shows Oliver how to play Neezy Eezy Nozy . . . .

GM and Tiger split

The path to salvation is truly underway at General Motors, today the beleaguered auto company searching for any way to save some cash severed it's relationship with Tiger Woods (or was it Tiger who severed his relationship with a tired old deadbeat company that can't compete anymore? . . . you decide).

Video - Lawrence Lessig on The Problem

Lawrence Lessig, professor of Law at Stanford University during an interview with Charlie Rose last week described the state of the US Economy and here is the video

Downey Savings and Loan - - - - GONE!

When we first bought a home in Manhattan Beach in 1976, Downey S & L was our lender. Back then we used to send our monthly check to . . . . . . Downey S & L. They survived through the S&L crisis of the 80's but not the 2008 one. US Bancorp has taken over Downey S & L. It was the 23rd largest in the US with deposits of $9.7 billion. This brings to "22" the number of bank failures this year.

Dividend Yields

The dividend yield on the S&P 500 is now greater than the yield on the 10-year Treasury. That hasn’t happened since 1958.

Continuing unemployment claims are now at roughly 3.5 million individuals. Let's assume that each week we lose an average of 400,000 jobs (last week the government reported 540,000). That is 20 million jobs a year. That means the US economy for the last year has created 16.5 million jobs (very roughly). So there is some robustness in the economy even as we slide deeper into recession.

Late Day Rally attributed to beer . . . . BUD that is

Index funds, which represent about 10 percent of the stock market, ``got $5 billion from owning BUD.'' BUD is the ticker symbol for Anheuser-Busch, brewer of Budweiser beer. ``The stock that was added was a $500 million weight, so about $4.5 billion has to be put to work,'' said Buek. ``That money was spent across the other 499 names. To perfectly track the close, you'd want to put the $4.5 billion to work on the close.''

Flat Tax, Tort Reform and Term Limits

4 years ago Bill Fleckenstein wrote . . . "I think the party that has won, in this case the Republicans, might want to be careful what they wish for, in that both the stock and real-estate bubbles will unwind on their watch, with them in full control of the House, the Senate, the presidency and the governorships.

"Perhaps we'll all get lucky and the Republican Party will decide to pursue a flat tax, tort reform, and term limits -- the three major areas of reform which I believe could help the country become more competitive and help extricate us from the horrible fix that I see us in. However, if they continue the pork-barrel politics of the last four years, I would think that next go-round, the Republicans will be bounced from office after people's hopes are dashed in the upcoming economic turmoil."

The Nina

Christopher Columbus favorite sailing ship, La Nina was lost many centuries ago but one has been rebuilt to exact specifications and is touring. The ship is moored here in Morro Bay for two weeks but you can learn more about her here

Common Sense Quotient

Each month Bill Gross (PIMCO) posts his investment outlook at the PIMCO website, it's mandatory reading at the Kincaid Hardwood Company office for all staff. This month's is good for anyone just starting out in there career . . . . click here

Credit Mobilier - the first great lobbying effort

Credit Mobilier was a company organized by George Francis Train, the vice-president in charge of publicity for the Union Pacific Railroad Company for the construction of the westward portion of the transcontinental railroad. It was the first limited liability company. Shares of CM were given away to congressmen to influence their votes in favor of the UP in it's efforts. The scandal broke and the collapse of CM caused great financial losses.

click here for more

after reading Stephen Ambrose's "Nothing Like It in the World" I wrote the song CPRR, you can hear it at this link click here then click on CPRR (Central Pacific Rail Road)

Video - Fargo favorite scene

The movie Fargo is iconic for many reasons but one is the portrayal of the Minnesota/North Dakota culture. No scene in the movie does it better than this one . . . . . enjoy.

Veterans Day - show your appreciation to a vet

Take the time to email, write or say thanks to a veteran today. click here for the history of this celebration and ask someone else to do so too.

Wisdom Book

My friend Dan Dominy sent me this link and it's a winner click here

Back in 2005 I posted . . .

I was reviewing some of my oldest posts to this blog and found this from February 2005 . . . .

Today I noted with great interest that CALPERS has decided that it's time to "cash in on real estate profits". They are liquidating 207 industrial buildings, 97 shopping centers and 22 office properties. We're talking some massive selling. The other side of the coin is that all of the property is being gobbled up by investors dying to get into real estate. Now this doesn't having anything to do with housing but it is an interesting occurrence.

Yes We Can

My favorite part of Obama's speech last night . . .

Good Morning on the day after . . . nice thoughts from my friend Steve See

"Either we have hope within us or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul, and it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. . . . Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. . . . Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. . . . It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now."

- Vaclav Havel

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail

Many of you know I'm re reading Hunter Thompson's classic from the '72 campaign during which he covered McGovern, Lindsay and Muskie. Here's a funny excerpt . . . .

"They ran a very tight ship. Nixon rarely appeared, and when he did nobody in the press corps ever got within ten feet of him, except now and then by special appointment for cautious interviews. Getting assigned to cover Nixon in '68 was like being sentencedd to six months in a Holiday Inn. It never occurred to me that anything could be worse than getting stuck on another Nixon campaign, so it came as a definite shock to find that hanging around Florida with Ed Muskie was even duller and more depressing than traveling with Evil Dick himself."

unfunded liability on defined-benefit pension plans

There is one more shoe to drop, and it is a biggie. Stock portfolios, individual retirement accounts and 401(k)s have taken dives. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index is down 35% since Jan. 1. There is one more major component of this country's wealth that will not be reported until late February or early March: the unfunded liability on defined-benefit pension plans.

According to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.'s Web site, 44 million Americans are counting on collecting retirement payments from defined-benefit pension plans. The maximum payment you can get from them if your corporation cannot meet its obligation to you is $51,744. If you are an airline pilot, engineer, senior vice president or chief financial officer thinking you will get a $75,000- to $150,000-a-year pension, you may be in for a rude awakening.

There's no reason to think that your pension plan hasn't lost as much as the stock market. From the estimates I've been reading, by the year's end there will be a $200 billion to $250 billion unfunded pension liability that will have to be made up. That will be $250 billion that will be sucked from net earnings of those companies that last and recover, and smaller pensions for the employees that work for a company that won't make it through this recession.

Do not look for the economy to recover until this $250 billion problem has been solved and you begin to see increases in gross domestic product and corporate earnings. The worst may be over, but I don't expect a meaningful recovery before at least the end of next year's second quarter.

Bill Fleckenstein's take on the future of jobs . . .

it isn't pretty but I believe he's really onto something. I have been asking for a long time "what is going to drive the next economy?"

To review the point that I made in Chapter 7 of my book "Greenspan's Bubbles" and in many columns: In the past expansion, economic growth was almost entirely about real estate. Gross-domestic-product growth, excluding mortgage-equity extraction, was almost nonexistent. In addition, when you consider that 30% to 40% of all jobs were real-estate-oriented, it's clear how hollow the economy is liable to be going forward.

Considering the capital destruction and the credit contraction now under way, I have a hard time seeing where the new jobs will come from to handle all the layoffs that are going to take place. Given that lots of marginal businesses have survived on consumers' wild spending, many of them will not make it as folks retrench aggressively. That's on top of all the carnage in anything related to real estate or finance. click here for more

Micro Credit

Let's hear it for Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank in India and one of the originators of the micro credit movement.

you can learn about micro credit here

and Grameen Bank here