swaps

Wall Street: Dumb as It Ever Was

I am a student of psychological warfare and I am still amazed that simply rounding up prices on a menu can cause such psychological angst and suffering when a diner does not see the odd $9.95 price tag for a salad.

And they walked out without ordering? I really need to find out why the human mind is now so strongly conditioned to only expect a fractional price. There is something very deep at play here, somethng the manipulators have now embedded in our stimulus - response conditioning.

And this is just one of the mind control triggers among countless unknown ones..


On Nov 07 09:03 AM americanincanada wrote:

> From my experience the reason why consumers like a price of $9.95
> rather than $10.00 is the impression that the former price is carefully
> calculated, the best possible deal that gives the store a minimal
> profit to survive, while the latter round number looks like it was
> picked out of the air and probably has a built in too generous profit.
> Announcing a 10.2% or 9.9% unemployment rate seems to reflect careful
> gathering of statistics, while 10 % sounds like a number pulled out
> of a hat and probably not valid. Foolish yes, but I saw the disaster
> that happened when a menu at a restaurant I owned was replaced by
> the exact same menu with the prices changed up or down by slight
> amounts to become round numbers. The new manager made the change
> because he thought the previous prices were silly. There were lots
> of complaints, some people got up and walked out before ordering,
> and revenue plummeted.

Breaking Up the Banks: How Likely Is Legislation?

Sheila Blair should be terminated. Ask a couple of MBA classes how to best break up the banking system - and reward the winning group with million dollars jobs as czars of the financial restructuring.

To say the banks can't be broken down into smaller parts doesn't consider how the Soviet Union broke down into smaller components and emerged as a stronger Russia.

Dumb people in charge in the U. S.

Charlie Gasparino: Another Crash 'Has to Happen Again'

Insightufl post. Except that ulitmately Citi did not benefit from the abolition of Glassman - Steagall. Look at its stock price.

I agree the financial industry is destroyed. But like poker players they are trying to outbluff the world and win the pot with a pair of deuces, backed up by trillions issued by the privately owned Fed and backed up by I guess the public....but that is not clear when it comes to fiat money.

For Your Perusal: The Glory of Free Market Oil Supply

That chart looks like declining non-Open oil production to me. T Boone Pickens has been saying for years the big oil pools are found. Sure, some more are popping up now in Brazil and elsewhere - but India and China are boosting demand.
I recently drove from Colorado to North Carolina and back. Prices at the pump seemed higher than in the summer. No winter price decline yet. Oh, I only buy he highest octane gas because that is better for my car's engine. I will not economize there.

Finance's Changing Playing Field

The dumb money won't complain yet because the big banks led the broader market up from the edge of the abyss that your charts show was forthcoming. Disclosure. Still long.

Congress clearly still does not understand central banking, investment banking - or should we say inwestment banking, cute tv ad.

Congress understands that money comes to it from the financial sector. Maybe that is why they bailed out the banks and turn their heads away from the obscene bonuses being paid to bankers who would be on the street if their holdings had not been bailed out by fiat money.

The uptick rule is still abolished. No get-tough agency has been formed to oversee that FDIC and SEC enforce laws on the books already.

GS rules. Congress follows. The regulators look at porno on their computers during the work day, I guess. They are accountable to no one.

No one.

As Paulson warned last autumn. If Congress gets tough, if Congress does not authorize a private bank to print all the money it wants, if Congress audits the Central Bank - then "we" will take the country down.

As if they haven't already.

Will the New York Times' San Fransisco Edition Make a Difference?

Interesting commentary. No one can really predict how this will turn out. But give the Times a thumbs up for thinking outside the box.

It could develop into a national print powerhouse with numerous local affiliates. But it should have held onto its tv stations too. Those damn incompetent investment banker advisers......

Disclosure: Long NYT.

California's New Budget Already $1B in the Hole

This essay plays into my personal belief that institutions are too big to manage.

For a start, perhaps Californiai should break into three states, with each area trying to fix itself.

A major problem for California is that its elites have numbed Californians to accept hordes of illegal cheap laborers, with a resulting huge drain on state resources and a destructive rise in crime rates that makes decent people want to flee or just stay indoors.

There are so many Hispanic and socilaist subversives in Californiai government at all levels there is no easy way to fix the problem.

Actually, when Jeff writes about the upper 20 percent hoarding their money this is similar to the Mexican economic model. I have read Mexico has the highest number of per capital millionaires in the world, but also a huge peasant class. The elites refused to tax themselves to improve the education and opportunities of theiri Indian blooded citizens. Opting instead to force them to migrate to the U. S. where corrupt leaders welcome them as an instrument to destabilize and destroy the U. S. middle class.

An impermeable border - to also protect us from alleged Islam terrorists - would have penned in the admittedly sympathetic Indian Mexicans to put revolutionary pressure on the Mexican elites to act more responsibly.

Former U. S. Senator Ken Salazar of Colorado, a dual citizen if there ever was one, was a blue dog Democrat. He, like his Mexican fellow elites, wants Mexicans to flood into the U. S., but at the same time he did not want to raise taxes to pay for the inevitable subsidies that unfunded labor requires for health, housing, education and incarceration. This is the same strategy that ruined California.

We need to keep taxes low in the U. S., but we also need to stop the corporate, immigrant and defense contractor welfare programs that bankrupted us. Fraudulent banks should have collapsed into the void.

Following the same deficit spending course as the U. S., California has failed because it did not have a state federal bank that could just print fiat money to keep the balls juggling in the air for a little while longer.

Why Exxon Should Significantly Increase its Dividend

One of the factors contributing to dividend yield also is how high or low the price is bid up or down to by the market cogniescenti...My latest oil buy was based on yield alone. Fundamental and emotional factors affecting the price of low dividend stocks can change as well as it can for higher yielding ones.

And buyer sentiment can fluctuate wildly too. How often do we see a stock priced at $45 now and then $32 six months later and that does not mean there was a sudden 30 percent hole cut out of the company.

Years ago I interviewed the head of a public corporation who said his master's thesis was on whether or not dividend yield influences stock investing decisions. His thesis concluded that overall it did not. Of course, that applies to the macro and not the mico.

On a given day I might buy into RDS.B because I want higher yield and others will pile into XOM confident that the latter will give them a higher total return over the time frame they have in mind - which for most traders seems to be a few days.


long: CVX, MUR, RDS.B

The TARP Deadbeats

A list of the non paying TARP borrowers can be found here

www.businessinsider.co...

The TARP Deadbeats

TARP was a big success for the banking industry. Without TARP the DOW would still be probing for a bottom and there would be so many closed banks by now the government would be paralyzed and unable to deal with all the deposits the FDIC would be trying to find a home for.

Foreign troops would be in our streets, instead of on the drawing board as part of UN protocols and all those internment camps Halliburton built in recent years would be filled with refugee bankers and their families seeking protection from angry crowds.

TARP has staved off a lot...so far.

Moody's Luck of the Irish Has Run Out

Right, the wrong Moody's rating lulled me into AIB and I am down 50 percent still even with the bounce back. I know. Use stop loss.

Doesn't the astute Buffet own Moody's too? If so, then Moody's cannot be allowed to fail. Buffet is too big to not be catered to by the lap dogs of international banking elites.

Is the Dollar in Trouble and Does it Even Matter?

Your comments are totally logical. But during the crisis the elites were making self serving emotional decisions on the fly.

A cover of Forbes years ago had a large print text that simply said something like capitalism is always deconstructring and reinventing itself.

After deconstructing countless businesses for short term gains the investment bankers could not accept deconstructing and reinventing themselves.

So the class warfare upon the middle and lower classes goes on.

Dan


On Oct 07 08:02 AM logicalthought wrote:

> What Paulson and Geithner have done to us is absolutely disgusting.
> (I don't blame Bush because he's an idiot, and Obama-- while smart--
> is a socialist who never saw any sense in studying how business and
> economics really work.) Clearly, all of those "too big to fail" banks
> should've been put into orderly bankruptcies, with the debtholders
> crammed down to equity, and the U.S. taxpayer providing nothing but--
> if necessary-- some short term DIP financing. Instead, we've got
> a system of crony capitalism (as opposed to TRUE capitalism, which
> should be "Hey you want to lever up 60x? Great, when you lose, don't
> come looking to us for a bailout!") that absolutely disgusts me and--
> I'm willing to wager-- tens of millions of other Americans.

New 'Crash' Warnings for U.S. Markets

The scariest fact in Jeff's essay is the relentless insider selling. No question it bodes badly for the future. Hopefully they are just diversifying assets to protect themselves from having a single asset - their company - getting trashed by any future GS predatory short selling. (My contribution to name calling).

However, today, my modest IRA is surging as nervous nellies flee to gold and oil stocks. They are seeking tangible assets that can be re-priced and hopefully hold on to some value after the dollar collapses to its lowest level of equilibrium. We can thank the Fed and the GOP war party for dollar destruction. Borrow borrow borrow spend spend spend, interest interest interest.

So today at least the stocks market is not collapsing, but rising in response to a looming dollar collapse. That is the major threat. A stock market collapse would be in response to the confusion that would temporarily cloud what business enterprises and their underlying assets are worth in barter.

High Yield Bond Rally May Be Coming to an End

For those who bought COY at $3 they have a doubler and will probably want to cash out, rather than wait around four years to collect their effective 24 percent annual yield from their original purchase price.

I bought months ago and so far have an 8 percent gain, plus an almost 12 percent yield from my purchase price. My plans are to hold but sell if the price gets back to what I paid, for I will have at least collected interest at rates much higher than money market or CD's/. I am using COY as a proxy for money market, and not as a trading vehicle, but the traders are the ones who make the money and conserve capital.

You are correct to be cautious and think about profit taking for the yield in junk bond funds is offset by the falloff of bonds that go bad within the portfolio, a hit to the capital base.

Long COY

A Radical Solution for America's Insolvent Financial System

Interesting plan for an orderly liguidation and reorganization of the financial system.

My only unanswered question is how do you create the additional dollars (inflation) that is a required component of any banking system which charges interest? Adnthe reorganized and new banks will be charging interest.

Right now, the Fed's role is to continually create surplus money (inflation) so that wages can be increased to help borrowers (wage earners) keep up with the treadmill of compound interest.

Since the creation of what CNBC empty suits call the "inflation fighting" Fed, the value of the 1913 dollar has dropped 95 pecent. When the Fed gets so stretched it can't inflate any more, as at the end of the realty bubble, its battle plan collapses into chaos.

Your plan is so radical there is no way the banking establishment will let it see the light of day. And there is no way the banking establilshment will ever let the government just print money for its projects and needs, for then it would not be in hock to and under the control of the same banknig establishment, as is clearly the case today.