Wednesday, December 17, 2008
J D Souther
Video - Chico and Harpo Marx
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Ponzi Schemes
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Building Highway 1 through Big Sur

Just inside the Monterey County line on the magnificent Big Sur coast lies a section of Highway 1 and during the 30's when it was constructed by convict labor from Alcatraz the convicts were housed in camps, one of which is Kirk Creek campground on a bluff overlooking some of the most incredible coastal views anywhere.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
John Jacob Astor - who was he?
The next breakcame when two men who are now known to have been in the Illuminati gave John Jacob Astor a special government privilege. The two men were President Jefferson and Secretary Gallatin--both Illuminati members. The United States government had placed an embargo on all U.S. ships from sailing with goods in 1807. But Astor got special permission from these two men for his ship to sail with its cargo. His ship sailed and made close to a $200,000 profit in that day’s money. Astor strangely profited greatly from the War of 1812, which crippled almost all the other American shippers. Prior to 1817, John Jacob Astor entered into the fur trade and remained the biggest player in the fur trade until he got out of it in 1834. Over the years, he had managed to build up a monopoly. How he managed to push everyone else out is a good question.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Are you a fisherman?
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
The strange case of the Hudson Bay Company at Fort Yukon
Monday, December 08, 2008
So you like beer eh?
Unemployment Reality
“The number of people out of the labor force — meaning that they were neither working nor looking for work and that the government did not consider them unemployed — jumped by 637,000 last month, the Labor Department said. The number of part-time workers who said they wanted full-time work — all counted as fully employed — rose by an additional 621,000.
Already, the share of men older than 20 with jobs was at its lowest point last month since 1983, and very close to the low point of the last 60 years. The share of women with jobs is lower than it was eight years ago, which never happened in previous decades.”
Noblesse Oblige
Sunday, December 07, 2008
Video - Laurel and Hardy clip another one
Baltic Dry Index
Check the chart of this very telling index click here
Saturday, December 06, 2008
Bob Dylan borrowed from the Carter Family library
The need for narratives (or stories)
Media, we know, emphasize 'the narrative'. "The Narrative", in turn, tends to demand reduction to sound bites -- and, also, tends to play out the story to its conclusion. In that sense, the 'narratives' preferred by media have a kind of 'scoop' quality to them -- the hope that those crafting the narrative have 'scooped' the future by telling us what the future will bring.
Unfortunately, narratives are not that helpful when trying to decide on what to do or how to formulate a plan. Why? Because you never know the motivation behind the narrative writer nor whether they have done the proper research to represent what really happened accurately. CBK
Friday, December 05, 2008
Word of the Year - - - - bailout
The velocity of money
Thursday, December 04, 2008
Tanta's passing
Click here
President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board
is to be headed by former Fed Chief Paul Volcker.
The WSJ noted today that the panel is “modeled on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board established by then-President Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, at the height of the Cold War, when officials worried that that the existing bureaucratic structure was inadequate to help the U.S. keep pace with the Soviet threat. The financial crisis has drawn similar worries that the government isn’t properly organized to monitor and respond to modern financial markets.”
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
Rental Foreclosure info
Monday, December 01, 2008
The art of receiving a gift
The first thing you can do to feel better when someone gives you a gift is to realize that the giver put effort into thinking of a gift for you by going through the process if finding and buying it, or perhaps in making the gift. Don’t feel guilty when you think of this! But realize that no one made the giver think of giving a gift and no one made her go out and get it. She chose to do this herself. Many people enjoy the whole gift giving process. So the whole time, up to and including the point when they gave you their gift, they’ve been doing something pleasant and enjoying themselves.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
The National Debt Clock is ticking . . . or is it?
Friday, November 28, 2008
on the drug war front - - - another failure
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Happy Thanksgiving
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Libya is becoming a democracy
Monday, November 24, 2008
GM and Tiger split
Video - Lawrence Lessig on The Problem
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Downey Savings and Loan - - - - GONE!
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Dividend Yields
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
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.''
Monday, November 17, 2008
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."
Friday, November 14, 2008
Common Sense Quotient
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Credit Mobilier - the first great lobbying effort
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)
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Video - Fargo favorite scene
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Veterans Day - show your appreciation to a vet
Monday, November 10, 2008
Friday, November 07, 2008
Back in 2005 I posted . . .
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.
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Good Morning on the day after . . . nice thoughts from my friend Steve See
- Vaclav Havel
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail
"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."
Monday, November 03, 2008
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.
Sunday, November 02, 2008
Bill Fleckenstein's take on the future of jobs . . .
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
Saturday, November 01, 2008
Micro Credit
Friday, October 31, 2008
Happy Martin Luther Day
We do Luther a great disservice if we see him today as a destroyer and an anarchist. Rather, history shows us a man deeply concerned with the state of his own soul and equally concerned over a Church that had become too encrusted with financial and political concerns to do fully the work of God. It was for this reason that Luther sought public discussion on the matters that seemed to him as a cleric most to defile the Church and to leave it most open to ridicule and scorn. He drew up ninety-five distinct points that he found to be in need of amendment and concerning each of which he desired a time of public debate. Then, in a stroke of genius that would do honor to a contemporary media mogul, Luther took his ninety-five propositions or theses to church with him on October 31.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Lower interest rates . . . . hmmmm
I just think it's interesting that the solution to the current economic problem on one hand is the hair of the dog.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Goldman Sachs bonus pool
The Real Economy and the Financial Economy
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Noam Chomsky on risk taking
Their task is to take risks, calculating potential costs for themselves. But they do not take into account the consequences of their losses for the economy as a whole.
Hence the financial market "underprices risk" and is "systematically inefficient," as John Eatwell and Lance Taylor wrote a decade ago, warning of the extreme dangers of financial liberalization and reviewing the substantial costs already incurred - and also proposing solutions, which have been ignored.
The threat became more severe when the Clinton administration repealed the Glass-Steagall act of 1933, thus freeing financial institutions "to innovate in the new economy," in Clinton's words -- and also "to self-destruct, taking down with them the general economy and international confidence in the US banking system," financial analyst Nomi Prins adds.
The unprecedented intervention of the Fed may be justified or not in narrow terms, but it reveals, once again, the profoundly undemocratic character of state capitalist institutions, designed in large measure to socialise cost and risk and privatize profit, without a public voice.
That is, of course, not limited to financial markets. The advanced economy as a whole relies heavily on the dynamic state sector, with much the same consequences with regard to risk, cost, profit, and decisions, crucial features of the economy and political system.
to read more about Noam Chomsky click here
The Wild Trout Section on the Kern River
Monday, October 27, 2008
Where we came from . . .
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Oracle's supreme egotist . . . Larry Ellison
Ellison, who proposed the 38% raise and won approval from a committee of board members, is now the second-best-paid CEO of a public company in the U.S. He received about $1.7 million less than Merrill Lynch & Co. chief John Thain did in 2007. Oracle's market value is almost three times Merrill's.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
State of the takeover market
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Ken Kesey on the 60's
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Presidents and the Economy
Bush II: Came into office after 18 year bull market and crash; Arrived after major deregulation (Glass Steagel, Commodities Futures Modernization act) were already fait accomplis, contributing mightily to the credit crisis
Clinton: Arrived post recession, mid 82-00 bull market. Greenspan Put came about in 1997. Got out before most of the wreckage took place.
Bush I: Bad timing everywhere: Recession was ending during re-election campaign, but not yet felt by election data yet. Mistimed the war, patriotic fervor was cooling before re-election.
Reagan: Came into office at the tail end of a 16 year Bear market.
Carter: Arrived post Vietnam, Post Watergate. Malaise. Inflation, oil crisis were rampant.
That smells too much like dumb luck to me.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Making a Fortune from luck, then going about losing
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Separation of Church and State - - - Sarah Palin style
Not everyone kept what we think they made
XL Capital Ltd. Chairman Brian O'Hara said he was forced to sell about 80 percent of his stake in the Bermuda-based insurer to meet margin calls.
``The forced sale was due to the precipitous drop in XL's share price last week,'' O'Hara said in a statement distributed by PR Newswire today.
``I had pledged those shares as collateral to secure a personal loan used to fund purchases of XL shares in order to avoid the expiration of certain options,'' O'Hara said. ``The sale in no way reflects a lack of confidence in XL's current and future prospects.''
Monday, October 13, 2008
Social Security investing in the S&P 500
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Ultimate comment
Saturday, October 11, 2008
The Ultimate Fallback Postion
No G7 official was sure the plan would work, so deep is the global financial crisis. If it does not, the next steps would be one of two nuclear options: either to guarantee all liabilities of banks, effectively nationalizing the financial system, or for governments to seek to bypass financial institutions by lending direct to companies and households. Officials hope they will not have to contemplate these options.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Comments from Henry Paulson on the G7 meeting
This relieves me a little but the sooner this gets going the better.
Oil
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
Another comment on predicting (or looking forward)
Credit Crisis - Financial Meltdown in simple terms
from Barry Ritholz at Big Picture blog
To repeat my prior arguments, the proximate cause of the Housing crisis were 1) Ultra-low rates; and 2) Abdication of traditional lending standards, thanks to 3) originators ability to resell mortgages for securitization purposes, and therefore not have to worry about loan defaults.
The credit crisis was caused by 1) the above securitized mortgage paper, that was 2) rated triple AAA by Moody's and Standard & Poors, which then 3) Which was then "insured" by credit default swaps (CDS) -- the unreserved for, shadow insurance products whose exemption was made possible by the Commodities Futures Modernization Act. That legislation exempted these derivatives from any supervision or regulation. The lack of reserve requirements is why there is now $62 trillion in CDS, many of which will never pay their counter parties the promised insurance.
If you are going to blame Fannie/Freddie/CRA, or George Bush or Barney Frank, you are missing the big picture.
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
What does the future financial world look like?
Saturday, October 04, 2008
Friday, October 03, 2008
is the S&P still overpriced?????
Can't Take My Eyes Off of You
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Money Market Funds closing / / / / yes
The fund, which was valued yesterday at $1 a share, experienced ``significant redemption pressure,'' the Boston- based company said in a statement. A drop below $1 a share, known as breaking the buck, would have exposed investors to losses.
The fund had no exposure to securities issued by Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Washington Mutual Inc. or American International Group Inc., the company said.
Reserve Primary Fund, the oldest U.S. money-market fund, on Sept. 16 became the first in 14 years to break the buck. Investors pulled 60 percent of their money from the $62.6 billion fund on Sept. 15 and 16 before withdrawals were delayed.
Putnam is a unit of Canadian insurer Great-West Lifeco Inc.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
VIX indicates a bottom is very near
Buchon Brothers update
Monday, September 15, 2008
Don't you love these downgrades???? Their timing is exquisit . . .
Capitulation?
Lehman owes . . . .
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Saturday, September 06, 2008
Aaron Sorkin on the internet . . .
Thursday, September 04, 2008
Buchon Brothers music gets better

Jim Thurman and I, The Buchon Brothers, played 11 songs last Saturday night at a local club in San Luis Obispo (8 of the song were original compositions) and received rave reviews from the audience. It was the first time we've played in front of a serious audience without music stands and we did well, hitting 90% of our marks. Click here and you'll be taken to my website where you can hear two songs from last night's show craigkincaid.com/music
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Monday, September 01, 2008
FDIC needs some bailing out?
FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair said her agency might have to borrow money from the Treasury Department to see it through an expected wave of bank failures. She said the borrowing could be needed to handle short-term cash-flow pressure brought on by reimbursements to depositors after bank failures.
The FDIC issued a report showing that the number of financial institutions on its so-called problem list rose to 117 from 90 which were reported at the end of the first quarter.
That's an increase of 30% in three months, and things look to get worse before they get better. The number of banks on the list is the most visible thing to consumers, but the amount of assets held by those problem institutions is more troubling still. The total assets of institutions on the problem list tripled. That means some pretty big players are in the additions.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Obama's promises . . .
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Housing market at a bottom ????
"The worst of the U.S. housing slump is over, according to the National Association of Realtors . ."
This group is arguably the most optimistic bunch of bozos. I heard some guy say today on CNBC (during the 60 seconds I watched it) about Las Vegas . . . . "The market is great!" oh yeah, he did follow that with "unless you're a seller". Brilliant.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Paul Anka rants
It's called The Guys Get Shirts . . .
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Understanding Graduates
The graduate with an engineering degree asks, 'How does it work?'
The graduate with an accounting degree asks, 'How much will it cost?'
The graduate with an arts degree asks, 'Do you want fries with that?'
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Happy Birthday to Vic Harber
Happy Birthday to my brother Andy
Monday, August 18, 2008
Appraisal Fraud
I found this article from CNN Money from 2005 where people were testifying in congress about fraud but guess what? No one did anything about it. Here's the last line of the article -
"The cumulative effect of appraisal fraud is you may have investors holding mortgage debt that's backed by real estate worth less than they think it is," said Martin. "It's a train wreck waiting to happen."
No one did anything. read more here
How people got into financial trouble
The average person thinks you win the wealth game by acquiring a lot of things. If you have a bigger house and a more expensive car then you are considered to be wealthy. What happens is, the average person attempts to acquire "more and better" by getting deeper and deeper into debt. This is exactly the opposite of what I mean by wealth, but people are psychologically driven to do it.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Real Inflation

Friday, August 15, 2008
Troube right here in ________ City
In New York State, the 16 largest banks sent taxes totaling $5 million in the most recent reporting period; that compares with $173 million from the same period a year ago.
Taxes paid are down an astonishing 97%!
And this is going on throughout the United States . . . . ouch!
"It will be a number of years before Wall Street starts paying taxes again,'' the mayor said at a press conference yesterday in Manhattan. "They will carry forward all of those losses.''Thursday, August 14, 2008
The Way of the World
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Sidney Pollock's favorite line
You think not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth.
Monday, August 11, 2008
quotes from Jamie Dimon, CEO JP Morgan
Buying a house and buying a house on fire are two different things (referring to Bear Stearns).
Problems don't age well.
Saturday, August 09, 2008
Gaining a little control
Nassim Taleb
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Golden Retrievers in the Park

This is a picture of us a few years ago with Brutus, one of two goldens we had for 14 years. The other was Brittany.
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
the World Food Crisis
Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Raj Patel
Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood - Taras Gresco
In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto - Michael Pollan
The End of Food - Thomas Pawlick
Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser
Monday, August 04, 2008
Jack Elam
Saturday, August 02, 2008
Blowininthewind.org

On a hillside between Cayucos and Cambria heading north to Big Sur you will find a memorial to the 4000 soldiers killed in Iraq . . . learn more click here