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    • Sat Apr 12th 23:42 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Regional Bank Failures: The Next Shoe to Drop
      I got a Bauerfinancial report at work a few weeks ago. I don't have their release in front of me but they said there has been some deterioration in bank quality ratings the past quarter.

      I seem to recall that only 71 out of 7,000 banks were in the one star range, which signals pending liquidation or sale due to wipe out of equity.

      The smaller local and regional banks can just be absorbed by a money center or larger, healthier bank.
      I do not see a chain reaction yet.
      Though Jefferson County is threatening to file bankruptcy in Louisiana. The county, or parish, has 3.2 billion in complicated derivatives rung up. While this is a rating agency and investment bank problem most likely, it would rattle the financials sector some more if it comes to pass.
      If the Fed runs through its last $800 billion this year it will not be regionals or small banks but the Fed that will register a chain reaction bankruptcy.
      And I don't see how Republicrat free-market advocates can turn to the bankrupt US citizenry (factoring in their share of the US public debt) for help. If a steel company can be allowed to fail due to free market pressure from overseas, a central bank will have to fail too from pressure due to corrupt financial practices.
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    • Fri Apr 11th 23:24 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      The Fed is Terrified
      So even the privately owned Central Bank is bankrupt?
      May I quote a newsletter:

      The most frightening forecast so far comes from the Global Europe Anticipation Bulletin (GEAB), available for 200 euros - about $300 - for 16 issues annually. Its prediction is quite specific.

      Where my warnings never spelled out an exact date, this think tank has it pegged precisely. Here are its very words:

      "The end of the third quarter of 2008 (thus late September, a mere seven months from now) will be marked by a new tipping point in the unfolding of the global systemic crisis.

      "At that time indeed, the cumulated impact of the various sequences of the crisis will reach its maximum strength and affect decisively the very heart of the systems concerned, on the front line of which (is) the United States , epicentre of the current crisis.


      The Fed should be abolished. First Greenspan wowed Wall Street by rates down to near zero.

      At that point the criminals issued tons and tons of ticking timebomb ARMs.

      Then the Greenspanke brothers from the same ethnic and cultural pool began to ratchet interest rates back to "stop inflation."

      The Greenspanke brothers got the disaster they were seeking. But now you say the Fed may soon be bankrupt, which it would be if the increasingly homeless Americans have to pledge their blankets and buckets as collateral for the debt Americans will have to assume on behalf of the Fed.

      The Fed, the open borders, the war on Third Countries, free trade with China has busted America. If America goes broke, it should take its central bank down with it. It deserves to die.




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    • Sun Apr 6th 19:16 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Backroom Bear Stearns Deal Exposed
      Correction
      It was Arthur Koester who wrote the Thirteenth Tribe.

      I mis typed.
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    • Sun Apr 6th 19:14 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Backroom Bear Stearns Deal Exposed
      Lots of emotional reaction to this posting, so the original post is to be commended.

      Thanks Tom for reminding me that The Fed is privately owned by the banks themselves, and thus when Sen. Bunning and Sen. Melendez opined during the hearing about the American people facing losses if the toxic waste the Fed took cannot be marketed we realize:
      The senators don't know The Fed is a private, or at least quasi private central bank at the core of the financial beast system.
      Or the American people are indeed having to absorb losses while investment banking profits stay privatized. That is not only hazardous but immoral.
      To the person who called Deacon an anti-Semite, I recall when I reminded Bob Bjork - and copied the Wall Street Journal - that Bjork was intellectually dishonest for calling Pat Buchanan an anti-Semite back when Pat was running for president.
      Certainly the Jews know that the Arabs are the Semites and most contemporary followers of Judaism - 95 percent according to Thirteenth Tribe author Arthur Liester - descend from a Turkish sub tribe with Mongol genetic infusion, the Khazars. While Bjork did not acknowledge my criticism of his intellectual dishonesty, the Wall Street Journal a few months later printed a front page piece on the Khazars and a map of the area north of the Black Sea, where they lived when they converted to Judaism around 700 A. D.
      The I guess Semitic Jews of the Old Testament times were almost virtually wiped out by the Romans in 70 A.D by the Romans because they would not assimilate. Everyone knows that, but have just conveniently forgotten it. The survivors of the Roman holocaust later surfaced in the European courts of the middle ages and then some of them migrated to what became the United States soon after the Mayflower, arriving from Portugal, Spain by way of south America. Stephen Birmingham writes about the sephardic branch, if that is the correct term, in the Grandees. Most of them seemed to have died out in the U. S. due to inbreeding. Though some of them also married into the WASP establishment.
      As I have shown dogs and owned horses I clearly understand that Springer Spaniels do not look like Vizlas and Thoroughbreds do not look like Shetland ponies. And most Jews in the U. S. do not look like the Arabs. Just as the Semitic Arabs do not look like the Persians of Iran.
      Anyway, the intellectually dishonest use of the racially charged words "anti semites" really needs to be replaced with something more accurate.
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    • Thu Apr 3rd 00:41 AM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Housing Bust Puts the Squeeze On Retirement Plans
      When I lost my job 18 months ago I was offered another one 200 miles from Denver in the outback. It was quite a cut in pay, but with my back to the wall and unable to retire at 62 I made the move (my wife is in a nursing home as quad due to m.s. and my kids are raised).

      I bought a 700-square foot cottage for $18K, the seller taking a $15K mortgage that will be paid off in 3-1/2 more years. I could retire now, but will wait until I get some dental work done first, which my employer offered dental insurance is helping with quite a bit.)

      People need to cut their overhead and be willing to give up some of the comforts of city life, which has made all of us too soft.

      I fear this current financial mess is more than just an unpleasantness. It could be the Big Collapse or at least the 10-year Japanese style muddle.

      I only wish I had been converted by Gene Logdson's cottage farmer concept 35 years ago. He thinks everyone should have a small landholding, grow their own food, and have a business or job on the side, with the population more evenly dispersed across the American landscape, instead of being clustered in cities. Think Amish.
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    • Thu Mar 20th 20:10 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      The Coming Crash of 2008: A Result of Overleveraging
      IOver leveraging through derivatives. Warren Buffeet said this in 2002:)


      I view derivatives as time bombs, both for the parties that deal in them and the economic system.
      Basically these instruments call for money to change hands at some future date, with the amount to be
      determined by one or more reference items, such as interest rates, stock prices, or currency values. For
      example, if you are either long or short an S&P 500 futures contract, you are a party to a very simple
      derivatives transaction, with your gain or loss derived from movements in the index. Derivatives contracts
      are of varying duration, running sometimes to 20 or more years, and their value is often tied to several
      variables.

      Unless derivatives contracts are collateralized or guaranteed, their ultimate value also depends on the
      creditworthiness of the counter-parties to them. But before a contract is settled, the counter-parties record
      profits and losses – often huge in amount – in their current earnings statements without so much as a
      penny changing hands. Reported earnings on derivatives are often wildly overstated. That’s because
      today’s earnings are in a significant way based on estimates whose inaccuracy may not be exposed for
      many years.

      The errors usually reflect the human tendency to take an optimistic view of one’s commitments. But the
      parties to derivatives also have enormous incentives to cheat in accounting for them.
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    • Sun Mar 16th 23:02 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      News That Moved Friday's Market
      More immoral corporate socialiasm. Free market forces apply to everyone but the big banks and investment banks. The broader publilc should see through this hypocrisy - and throw a tantrum. A lvel playing field should require that free market forces applies to one and all. No one is too big to fail, because shoring up the big multi-million dollar bonus babies is bankrupting everyone else through runaway inflation and monetization of the financial f - up.
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    • Sun Mar 9th 18:25 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Freefall Fed Policies?
      Actually, the long statements by Rush and York pretty much demolish the short opposing statements which offer little substantive counter argument, just emotion.
      View article »
    • Sat Mar 8th 14:33 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Mortgage-Backed Securities Market Rocked by Thornburg Default
      I'm not too sure any investor should start looking for opportunity just yet. In January I bought into the fallen Brandywine REIT, only to see it plunge further. I had tried to catch a falling knife. The New York Times and other papers this morning are painting a dark scenario that will get only darker, much darker, before it is morning in America once again.
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    • Sat Mar 8th 14:27 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Here's Why the Fed Has No Credibility
      How can anyone on this board even assert that the Fed has credibility..or competence. I will not waste my time attacking the detractors of this post, but about 25 years ago when Malcolm Forbes Jr. was in charge of Forbes the magazine viciously pointed out that the Fed is constantly destabilizing markets by first accelerating money supply beyond its need, then hitting the brake, thus erring on the down side as well.
      No matter how many times guys in $2,000 suits tell CNBC audience that the Fed is an inflation fighter, we all have to live with the reality that the value of a dollar in 1913, when the Fed was imposed on us, had dropped to a nickle. Some inflation fighter. And don't argue that deficit government spending causes inflation because the Keynesians couldn't do their deficit spending thing if the monetary side did not accommodate them.
      This latest chapter is just one more example of why The Fed must go out of business.
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    • Sat Feb 16th 21:59 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Has the "Comcastrophe" Come to an End?
      If Comcast starts to rally big for the specific reasons here, it is possible the herd may look around and then jump onto other cable stocks even though they may not have comparable developments.\

      So would a more speculative play like Charter which is down to $1 from $3 be a bigger bang for your buck?
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    • Sun Feb 10th 20:06 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Straight Talk from Warren Buffett
      The pundits on CNBC were also surprised at when housing crashed last summer it did not immediately impact unemployment rates. That's because such a high percentage of the construction workers in high growth coastal areas were illegals from Mexico who could not file for unemployment. Which brings to mind that in Aurora Colorado about four, five years back the city let a contract to develop a wide drainage channel behind our home into a more landscaped greenbelt. The contractor for this project used only illegals. One Saturday I walked the dog up to the ball park and from there I looked back and watched one guy actually working over an hour, while the 18 others just stood around and looked at us in the distance. They were not picked up until 5 p.m. that night. I clearly saw that as social engineering more than anything else to bring illegals up here and help them to build a base. That project, by the way, got done a year late and they had to redo the grading at least once.

      Senator Salazar of Colorado -( a hyphenated American, who as a blue dog Democrat - clearly wants to help keep the Mexican rich untaxed and unbothered by the Indian blooded citizens they are racistly deporting to the U. S.) -- then led the fight last summer to give these illegals amnesty so they could immediately consume the assistance programs that their employers here had not funded.

      So this housing thing was playing out on many levels - absolute criminal behavior by the investment bankers as they sliced and diced imaginary CDO-s - imaginary because the collateral wasn't there. Absolute fraud by the rating agencies. Absolute greed by the mortgage origiinators. Absoulute fraud by some mortgage applicants, especially the ones who were just buying to flip, Absoulte incompetence by the Federal Reserve, yet again, which should be shut down.

      Free markets is the mantra of the Republicans and the limousine Democrats - so why won't they and the Fed just let the free markets fall freely until equilibrium is restored? Banking is the only industry that is guaranteed life support at all times. Any other industry can export all of its local jobs and just become a shell. Look at the industries, from steel to shoes, that have seen its domestic production matrix absolutely collapse into nothingness.

      Now that the banks have screwed up so royally, let's outsource all our banking applications and fundings operations to China and India and Brazil. Let the bankers flip burgers, if an illegal doesn't outwork them and out push them.

      If we can't abolish the Fed, let's at least fire all the domestic Federal Reserve staff and give the job to the Chettiars, the Indian caste that is highly gifted in banking and money lending. In fact, the Chettiars reportedly invented double entry bookkeeping and they have flourished in several settings around the globe.

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    • Sun Feb 3rd 11:40 AM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      News Corp. Scrambling to Bid for Yahoo?
      After overpaying for Dow Jones and then launching a cable business news channel that is a flop, News Corp would seem to have lost some reserve buying power.
      View article »
    • Sat Jan 19th 12:30 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      The Oversold U.S. Market Gets Even More Oversold
      I agree that bashing in some of these posts is unwarranted and reflects opinion and emotion more than any reasoned counterpoint. The guy who posts for peer review is commended for courage. I found the analysis interesting even though the caveats made it clear a bound or further decline can't be determined.

      View article »
    • Sun Jan 6th 17:14 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Do Pickup Truck Sales Make Any Sense?
      In Colorado, most trucks I see on the highways around Denver are just commuter vehicles for going to and from work. I never see any cargo in them.

      Most construction site workers could commute to and from work in a VW bug with their tools in the trunk.

      Dan
      View article »
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