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Japanese Investors Saying 'No Thanks' to Government Bonds

>>The Mainichi Shimbun (original in Japanese) reported early Thursday that Japanese Government Bonds’ (JGBs) popularity is rapidly falling among individual investors.

How did the report arrive at the conclusion made that the bonds popularity is rapidly falling??

Commodities: How to Trade Like Goldman Sachs

>>Goldman likes Summer 2010 NYMEX Natural Gas futures.

Translation: Goldman would like YOU to buy 2010 NYMEX Natural Gas futures.

Whether they would like to buy the same product for their own account is a completely different story....

I hope y'all understand that.

Wall Street Securitizing Life Insurance Policies. Seriously.

Y'all understand what this means
<sarcasm alert>

Wall St will *want* to have Death Panels(*), because the bonds will become more valuable that way.

(*) not that they didn't already. We need to privatize the Death Panels so that they can be run more efficiently.

<sarcam off>

Bill Gross: Dividend Stocks and Bonds Make Most Sense Now

To what extent is this just Bill Gross being self-serving and peddling his own bond products?

Does Bill Gross have a track record of predicting the bubble and making good recommendations when it mattered, around Aug-Oct 2007?

The Wisdom of Half Positions

As someone indicated earlier, one key operation in this system is to decide what constitutes a "full" and "half" position in the first place.

Otherwise the whole scheme degrades into "doubling down", rather than "singling down", which would be the name for Case2 above. And everyone knows that doubling down is "bad" :-)

Another problem with the recipe is that it does not define clearly what "dropping like a stone" means (case2). What time-scale are we talking about? A day? A week? Two weeks? Percentages?

Perhaps the biggest problem with the system is that it is somewhat wooly and vague.

Rosetta Stone IPO: Good Risk / Reward Trade Below $20

It should be illegal to float an IPO until all relevant financial information, are available on a multitude of financial web sites such as Marketwatch, Bloomberg, Yahoo and Google.

The data must include historical revenues, hsitorical earnings, size of offering, share totals and float, and number of unvested options.

The SEC should be responsible for enforcing the above requirement.

People buy into these IPOs without even reading the S-1 registration statement, basically "investing" blindly based on momentum and hype.

Big vs. Little: Bigger Banks Aren't Better

Her's something to keep in mind: If all banks assets consist of slivers of the same CDO paper, they will still all fail at the same time.

The fact that they are all *small* banks is not going to make all that much of a difference.

Upshot: The problem is more the nature of securitization, and not so much the size of the banks.

Another Sign of the Times: Torched Cars in the Desert

Look at it from a resource point of view:

This is an ecological disaster. First we spend tons of materials and energy on building cars, and then some dipsticks *burn* them, all in the name of preserving a *credit rating*.

Talk about obscene waste of resources and money.

Another Sign of the Times: Torched Cars in the Desert

Look at it from a resource point of view:

This is an ecological disaster. First we spend tons of materials and energy on building cars, and then some dipsticks *burn* them, all in the name of preserving a *credit rating*.

Talk about obscene waste of resources and money.

How Do You Buy Spot Oil?

Ferdinand,

But perhaps the ETF funds such as USO do not use (or are not permitted to use) the full arsenal of futures, options and swaps?

Could that be the problem?

How Do You Buy Spot Oil?

Excellent article full of good data and good links/references.

USL, USO and the Contango Collapse

Can you provide some numerical measure of how the contango has reversed?

When I look at the futures prices today the slope of the forward curve does not seem all that different than it did 2-4 weeks ago.

Is there a site that plots a "contango curve" for each and every date, so that we can more easily compare and see for ourselves?

Book Review: Robert Hefner's 'The Grand Energy Transition'

>> Society is transitioning from an unsustainable past based on solid and liquid energy sources (coal and oil) to a future of sustainable life based on energy gases (natural gas, wind, solar, hydrogen).

Yeah, wind is a concerted motion of a gas (or rather a mixture of gases). What's your point? Solar energy emanates from nuclear fission reactions in the hot gases (actually plasma) of the sun. So what? That does not imply that natural gas somehow is the solution to all our energy problems on planet earth. This whole thing that "gas is common to all our solutions" is very disingenuous and totally misleading.

This book and the review is as ill-informed as people who go around thinking that their weight problems are caused by "toxins" in their food, and that "cleansing their body" will fix it. Of course the problem is simply that they ate too much fat and other energy-rich foods (fat, by the way is the human body's form of long term energy storage).

Book Review: Robert Hefner's 'The Grand Energy Transition'

The book (and review) makes it sound we have a choice between burning solid/liquid or gasous fuel, and our problem is mostly that we made the wrong choice.

This is just hogwash. There are limited supplies of all fossile fuels and for the last 100 years we have generally been burning all we can get our hands on as soon as we have extracted it from underground.

Alex Filonov is completely right about hydrogen being only an energy carrier, and not a very good one at that. There are very limited sources of natural gas, just as oil, and there are NO natural direct sources of hydrogen. Separating water into hydrogen and oxygen using a green power source (electric wind power) is literally a waste of energy. One would be better off just sending the electricity directly out on the grid.

Controlled fusion of heavy hydrogen is nowhere near practical,
and has yet to break even in terms of energy in/out.

In summary, all this talk about "gases being better" is very unproductive. Sure it would be better, if only we had abundant or unlimited sources of the valuable gases. We don't.

There really is no substitute for understanding basic physics and chemistry, This book is a perfect example of how wrong the lay-person can be.

Dr. Doom Responds on Wells Fargo

If Roubini had to send a letter to the editor each time someone misapplied his work, then he would be a very busy man.

But when people misapply his work, and then attribute the errant conclusions to him, I suppose he has to take the time to speak up.

Case in point.