Thomas J. Gordon

Priceline: Are Shorts Grasping at Straws?

Mark, One of my motivations in shorting another momentum type tech stock when we were all looking into the abyss in march 2009 was kind of a hedge. When the markets going in the tank you needs shorts to have some green on the screen. High p to e stocks seem like as good a short as any. And if the market went up my other investments would do well. You and I are similiar, patient shorts. We are hard to find and maybe we shouldn't be paitent shorts. But take from a guy who as been shorting since netscape in the early 90's, you have to be patient or you never win. I look at it as a tidal wave. You have to guess where you are in the tidal wave and you have to be a little right. And if you panic out at the first up move, you are never going to make any money.

Still the Worst Deflation in U.S. History

David, So if we have "chrystal meth monetary policy" (I like it, I'm a contributor too, I like colorful writing) why isn't tbt going up?

Understanding the AIG Decision

I think Felix makes some good points. I remember when gs was trading (I think it was like 50 or 60) and it wasn't a given that it would survive. If gs goes under then there's another investment bank you have to go into another counter party exercise. but big bonuses coming from gov't bailout money or counterparty payments, if that's really where they are coming from, is hard to swallow.

Since When Does the 10-Year Yield Move Inversely to the S&P?

It's great that a person with David's following is talking about the inconsistency between an inverse correlation between stocks and treasury yields. I just posted this on yahoo finance: "This is how I see it. Gold going up in the past has been a "bunker down' play or people expect inflation. Treasury bond price increasing (rates down) in the face of greater Treasury supply means people expect low inflation (inconsistent with gold direction) or they think the world is coming to an end and treasuries are the only safe investment (not likely in current environment). Stock market going up means world isn’t coming to an end and capitalism as we know it will continue. So gold going up while stocks/bonds are going up seems inconsistent. Stock market going up while Treasury prices rise seems inconsistent in the current environment. If we’re not great depression II then we don’t need 4% long panic low treasury rates. Maybe this thing about foreign central banks (India, China) switching to gold for reserves is a new exogenous demand variable that swamps any U.S. centric considerations and that’s why gold is going up."

Saving the Global Economy: Try a Dollar Peg to the Renminbi

Andrew Butter, I am a free market person for most things. But on immigration I equivocate. If we opened u.s. borders I think people from places that have less the rule of law would flood in. I don't want that for crowding and environmental reasons. When I grew up there was a 2 lane road from L.A. to San Diego. The u.s. has had plenty of growth and we will have more growth. But I would like to keep the natural beauty we have here in the u.s. from being overwhelmed.

Will Mobile App Pricing Fall to Zero?

a4ism, I'm not saying the system doesn't work. I'm saying there's tremendous downward pressure on software prices on all delivery platforms and asking if iTunes apps are next. Economics states that pricing moves towards MC = MR (Marginal Cost = Marginal Revenue) and the marginal cost of producing another unit of software is very low, so that's not a surprising result. You bring up an interesting point that there are smaller ecosystems of interested buyers and willing developers and they may a healthy ongoing phenomenon on the iTunes store. I don't particularly have any visibility into those ecosystems and in my mind the only people who have visibility into that are successful developers in that space and Apple.

Will Mobile App Pricing Fall to Zero?

Sheldon1, I hope you're right and I think some people are able to charge for content now (wsj premium, barrons, ?). I'm tired of advertising. I think a good micro payments system would help the cause of those who want to "pay for what they value and value what they pay for". I think one of the reasons iTunes works for payment is most people keep a balance and can buy whenever they want without pulling out a credit card or typing in their paypal id.

U.S. Dollar: Time for Deeds, Not Words

Derryl, your comments about global standards of living are interesting. I've thought about that a lot. If globalization means the income gets spread around a little more, who can argue with that kharmically? If the u.s wants to have 4 times the living standards of other countries they have a very good understanding of economics and have an incredible work ethic. I think we hit our peak of that in the 50's or 60's. Now congress has figured out nothing happens to them if the budget doesn't balance. If you saved a 1/3 of your income over your life you are well disciplined. I'm not sure with compound interest, it needed to be that much though.

U.S. Dollar: Time for Deeds, Not Words

Dudley, I read David's article more carefully. He was a little snarky in his comments about social security. "As for Social Security, it becomes means-tested and becomes an old age welfare program, complete with stigma. “If you are receiving Social Security, you couldn’t have done that well.”" I can see how you could react to that comment. I have read David a long time. I think he is a compassionate man who wants to get things right. Maybe he was just in a bad mood when he wrote this.

U.S. Dollar: Time for Deeds, Not Words

Dudley, If you think the budget should balance, you are one of us. I agree whole heartedly about people paying into a system and then having the rug yanked out from under them. I remember thinking about old people in the Soviet Union who had no opportunity to build wealth and then suddenly the Soviet Uniion fell and they were at the mercy of state. I think Merkel is trying to talk about entitlements. Medicaid says "I will pay for all the open heart surgeries for people over 65 that occur in the United States this year." I don't know how you even budget for that. If you and I agree the budget has to balance, how do you enforce that if there are these huge, dynamic, no limits, entitlements coming at you from all angles. I think David is saying you have to say "no" sometimes.

Will Mobile App Pricing Fall to Zero?

Jack Dee, My apologies. The pricing I mention was from the 80's not the 90's. My point still stands and 1980's dollars are woth a hole lot more than 2009 dollars.

Will Mobile App Pricing Fall to Zero?

Jack Dee, I remember very specifically Word Star, Word Perfect, Lotus 123 being sold for over $400 and the media they were sold on being copy protected. I view ms office as word processing (word) plus spreadsheet (excel) and powerpoint (didn't exist in the early days but is valuable). Home and Student Office Upgrade which contains these items can be bought by anyone, not just students, for slightly over $100. I stand by my statement and those were 1990 dollars which are worth more than 2009 dollars.

U.S. Dollar: Time for Deeds, Not Words

Dudley... has it ever occurred to you that so many people aren't prepared for retirement because they think that social security and medicare will bail them out? To me it's simple mathematics. There is some percentage breaking point where the people who can't take care of themselves overwhelm those who can pay for themselves and pay taxes to support everyone else. When that point is reached, society collapes. No system, capitalism, communiism, socialism, democracy can deal with a society where 1/2 the people can't take care of themselves and need the other half of society to take care of them. There are no economic needs.

U.S. Dollar: Time for Deeds, Not Words

Many have lamented the lack of a balanced budget. The problem is assigning causality for the problems associated with a balanced budget. Lead times for economic decision making are months and years. Voter attention spans are days at best. Unless voters get the causality right, we won't solve this problem. I guess another funny thing is that the people in Congress figured out nothing was going to happen to them if the budget didn't balance. Then the cat was out of the bag. I would submit another solution. The next Reagan we get focuses on one issue. Federal money spent has to equal tax take. It's a constitutional amendment and can't be circumvented. I'm sure the founding fathers would have put it in the constitution but they couldn't have imagined how complex and circumvented gov't financing and fiat money would get.

Oracle: EC Has 'Profound Misunderstanding' of Database Market

The EC is destroying Sun by this action. Oracle would probably lay a lot of Sun people off but at least the healthy parts of the company would continue and everyone who works for Sun would know where they stand. But delaying the merger is killing Sun as a company. They are just a bunch of gov't Bureaucrats so they don't care, but they are ruining a lot of people's lives and making the world worse off by destroying all of Sun's intellectual property and the products they have that are successful in the market.
I'm a free market person but I think it's disingenuous to say the mysql doesn't compete with oracle. Facebook uses mysql, certainly got their start with mysql. That's big, enterprise database work, which is Oracle db's work. I'm not sure where open source fits into free markets but it's pretty obvious to me that Oracle wasn't going to spend a lot of money developing free mysql.