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