Although the Dillards aren't single-handedly responsible for bluegrass' migration from Appalachia to California, there's no denying they provided vital transportation. Raised in Salem, Mo., brothers Rodney and Doug Dillard jammed in a string of outfits before forming their own in 1960. The newly christened Dillards soon relocated to Los Angeles, where they made several appearances as the Darlings on the Andy Griffith Show. More importantly, the group became a pillar of the burgeoning folk/country-rock scene, along with the Byrds, Gosdin Brothers, Clarence White, etc. In 1967 Doug jumped ship to team up with ex-Byrd Gene Clark in the now legendary Dillard and Clark.
“The spending binge by colleges and universities was part of the same trend that created the bubble in the rest of the economy,” says Ronald Ehrenberg, an economics professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and author of “Tuition Rising: Why College Costs So Much” (Harvard University Press, 2000). “Now we’re seeing it burst.”
From Harvard University to California’s 3 million-student community college network, the American system of higher education is in turmoil. The economic crash is upending each step in the equation that families use to determine where students will spend four of their most formative -- and expensive -- years. Today is the deadline that most schools set to receive a decision from accepted applicants.
April 29 (Bloomberg) -- Ron Grassi says he thought he had retired five years ago after a 35-year career as a trial lawyer.
Now Grassi, 68, has set up a war room in his Tahoe City, California, home to single-handedly take on Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings. He’s sued the three credit rating firms for negligence, fraud and deceit.
Grassi says the companies’ faulty debt analyses have been at the core of the global financial meltdown and the firms should be held accountable. Exhibit One is his own investment. He and his wife, Sally, held $40,000 in Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. bonds because all three credit raters gave them at least an A rating -- meaning they were a safe investment -- right until Sept. 15, the day Lehman filed for bankruptcy.
“They’re supposed to spot time bombs,” Grassi says. “The bombs exploded before the credit companies acted.”
With home price increases out of the CPI and the price-to-rent ratio rapidly increasing, an important component of inflation remained outside the index. In 2004 alone, the price-rent ratio increased 12.3%. Inflation for that year was underestimated by 2.9 percentage points (since “owners’ equivalent rent” is about 23% of the CPI). If home-ownership costs were included in the CPI, inflation would have been 6.2% instead of 3.3%.
With nominal interest rates around 6% and inflation around 6%, the real interest rate was near zero, so household borrowing took off. As measured by the Case-Shiller 10 city index, the accumulated inflation in home-ownership costs between January 1999 and June 2006 was 151%, but the CPI measured a mere 23% increase. As the Federal Reserve monitored inflation in the early part of this decade, home-price increases were no longer visible in the CPI, so the lax monetary policy continued. Even after the Fed began to slowly raise the fed-funds rate in May 2004, the average rate remained low and the bubble continued to inflate for two more years.”
WSJ - Steven Gjerstad and Nobel Laurelate Vernon Smith
"We cannot have both debt leverage and a hyper-efficient system—the volatility is just too great. What Taleb explains—which no one else does—is that efficiency is already a form of leverage. A highly efficient system removes slack and magnifies small changes. Think of the efficient system as a high-performance aircraft. Each minute of steering input creates a rapid and violent shift of course, speed, or altitude. The system itself is souped up even before you add the debt. Once you do, the pilot is equally jacked up and twitchy, creating an explosive combination. Now imagine that fighter jet trying to fly in a 1,000-plane formation, and you get an idea of the world financial system in the 21st century.
We can’t erase the technology that created the planes, so we’ll have to make sure we fly sober, maybe even with an onboard computer that dampens the controls. That means getting rid of the debt. It’s that simple."
Technically, 7,470 in the DJIA is the 50% retracement of the entire bull market that began in August 1982. At 7,100, we not only cut in half the October 2007 highs of 14,198.50, but we have given back 50% of the 27 year move from the start of the big bull market of the 1980s to yesterday. In addition to a 50% retracement in the DJIA from the 1982, we have also seen a 50% retracement of the move from 1932 low to the all-time high in 2007. 50% retracement of 41 - 14,164 = 7,103. Yesterday’s close was 7,115.
Your tax-deferred annuity is safe. A qualified legal reserve life insurance company is required to meet its contractual obligations to you. These reserves must, at all times, be equal to the withdrawal value of your annuity policy. In addition to reserves, state law also requires certain levels of capital and surplus to further increase policyholder protection. Legal reserve refers to the strict financial requirements that must be met by an insurance company to protect the money paid in by all policyholders. These reserves must be at all times, equal to the withdrawal value (principal plus interest less early withdrawal fees, if any) of every annuity policy. State insurance laws also require that a life insurance company must maintain certain minimum levels of capital and surplus, which provide additional policyholder protection.
The suburban Los Angeles Democrat made the $150,000 loan in 1998, when she was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Through Dec. 31, her campaign committee has used donations to pay Napolitano $221,780 of interest while reducing the principal by just $64,727, a review of her Federal Election Commission filings shows.
There is a time-honored principle called Ockham's Razor, which states that the explanation for any phenomenon should focus only on the essential and relevant elements, avoiding as many unnecessary “second-order” factors as possible. Albert Einstein put it this way: “A theory should be a simple as possible, but no simpler.” From the standpoint of economic stimulus, Ockham's Razor suggests that we will fail as a nation to address the current economic crisis if we fail to address the source of that crisis. Again, this means focusing first on bank capital and mortgage foreclosures.
In short, the essential problem is not “insufficient aggregate demand” but rather risk-aversion and anticipatory saving triggered by fear of financial instability. Ockham's razor cuts straight to bank capital and foreclosure risk. We can address a much wider range of interests in the cause of economic stimulus, but if we fail to address the central cause of the present economic crisis, the attempt to increase “aggregate demand” will predictably fail.
Robert Proctor doesn't think so. A historian of science at Stanford, Proctor points out that when it comes to many contentious subjects, our usual relationship to information is reversed: Ignorance increases. He has developed a word inspired by this trend: agnotology. Derived from the Greek root agnosis, it is "the study of culturally constructed ignorance." We need to fashion information tools that are designed to combat agnotological rot. Wikipedia is one of the solutions: It encourages users to build real knowledge through consensus, and the result manages to (mostly) satisfy even people who hate each other's guts. Because the most important thing these days might just be knowing what we know.
Read the full story on how this word came into being and it's impact on all of us click here
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