H.J. Huneycutt

Is This the End of 'Too Big to Fail'?

"We must not only end "too big to fail" we must also end "too bribed to give a damn", which has permeated the entirety of Washington DC over the last three decades."

Great phrasing --- and dead-on.

Dow 30 Overbought / Oversold Edition

This is a completely useless article --- it's just some bars and some completely meaningless metrics. There are absolutely no explanations.

In fact, this article appears to be an advertisement for the author's product ("one of our most closely followed customizable products"). Not sure why anyone would be willing to waste their money on this; any moron can look at a chart and see whether a stock's being going up or down over a certain time frame. The author's comment that many of these stocks are trading near their "theoretical highs" exposes how completely useless most technical analysis is.

How to Spend $700B and Actually Solve the Problem

Gingrich has been thumping on getting rid of Sarbanes-Oxley:

blogs.abcnews.com/poli...

I'm a bit mixed on that, but it's a better idea than what Paulson is floating. If, as the advocates of the Paulson plan claim, the problem is that mark-to-market rules have required writedowns to an unnecessary extent, then the solution would seem to be to repeal or modify those rules. I don't buy into mark-to-market being the main culprit here, however. And even if it is, the institutions that own the assets are probably going to have better knowledge about which assets are "overvalued" and which ones are "undervalued" on the books --- hence, they're going to get rid of the former and keep the latter.

I would like to see SarbOx get re-evaluated, though, mostly because it imposes too high costs on small businesses.

How to Spend $700B and Actually Solve the Problem

I like these ideas. I've read a lot of blogs over the past few days on the Paulson plan and I'm seeing so many ideas that are better than what we'll probably end up doing.