user225084-justme

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.

Acknowledging Our 'Animal Spirits'

Keynes was a clever man, but I really wish he had come up with a more serious name than "animal spirits" to describe the psychological/behavior... component of human economic activity.

I would have expected Robert Shiller NOT to pick such a title of his new book, but perhaps the publisher thought "animal spirits" would play well with the more new-age "spiritual" type of consumers. It is a business to sell books, after all.

Pay Attention to Divergence Between Oil Price and ETF

Where do I find graphs and data for the rolling $WTIC index?

In Praise of Suze Orman

Suze Orman is a master of the very obvious basics of financial sense.

However, when she gets into the deeper end of the pool I'd not be inclined to follow her example (or advice).

Bond Expert: The Emperor Has No Clothes

On Feb 11 04:23 PM dieuwer wrote:
(...)

Good explanation! Basically it is a multi-lateral money-printing agreement that hides the printing behind the smoke and mirrors.

Rahm’s Doctrine and Breaking Up the Banks

Rahm doctrine? I thought it was the Bush doctrine that one can use disaster and distress as a smoke screen to start a war that is completely wrong and has no relation to the problem it is purported to "solve".

Rich Like Them

>> ...traveling through the 100 wealthiest zip codes in the US, getting stories from the wealthy that would give him time.

Heeeellllo. Do you really think people are going to tell you how to get rich? What they will do it is to serve up a load of self-serving drivel.

You are more naive than people that think that a Jack Welch business book *really* tells you what Jack Welch did to become CEO of GE. I'm quite sure that whatever he does NOT tell was very ugly indeed.

The Heretics of Finance

The problem with technical analysis is that it is neither technical nor analytic.

My take is that by choosing the time scale or diddling with some parameter one can get a technical analysis to support (pun intended) a wide range of outcomes that are mutually exclusive.

In plain English: It is all rubbish and vodoo.

The Short Case for JPMorgan

On Jan 17 08:35 AM Did U Think The Ponzi Scheme Would Last? wrote:

> CEOs pissed away trillions so that they could personally make hundreds
> of millions. We should just have given them 50 billion and told
> them to do the right thing.

Right on, I somewhat tongue-in-cheek suggested this a few months ago. Think of it as a sort of "protection-racket" or "Wall St private tax", where the I-banks promise not to destroy value if we give them a handout of a few billion a year.

Much cheaper than going through all the gyrations of pretending that there i something useful getting done and then losing trillions from it in order to get a few billion in bonuses.

Madoff sort of had it right. He just forgot to return 49B of the 50B.

10 Ideas for Newspaper Survival

How about QUALITY, RELEVANCE and TRUSTWORTHYNESS?

The reason I no longer subscribe to a newspaper is mainly related to the quality of the content.

After the national media essentially gave George Bush a free pass before the 2000 (and 2004) election, as well as showed their utter cluelessness or menace in allowing uncritically the lies and propaganda that led to the Iraq war, I no longer trust any of our major newspapers with the job of informing me about the world.

It is that simple.

Instead of printing balanced and critical news reports, the papers were i busy prattling on about the endlessly rising housing market and pandering to their advertisers from the National Association of Realtors.

Those are good enough reasons for me, and they are just the tip of the iceberg of omission, incompetence and misinformation that has been passing for 'news" the last 20 years.

The papers

1. Missed the Iraq war fraud
2. Missed the housing and economic bubble entirely

Does anyone need additional reasons not to subscribe to the newspaper?

With 75bp Cut, Fed Becomes the Most Aggressive Central Bank

Kathy Lien always gets excited when there is an opportunity to argue that the USD is going down.

Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with that, but on the other hand be aware that she has never posted an argument that USD would rise, even in the last 3 months when it rose 20% against some currencies.

In other words: Bias alert !!

Cisco Valuation So 'Silly' It's Time to Buy - JMP

What? Cisco has been going essentially nowhere for 5 years. And now, in the middle og a huge downturn, the analysts suddenly thinks Cco is a screaming buy, by looking backward?

I think not.

Time for Global Coordinated Easing

I'm not surprised ;-)

Time for Global Coordinated Easing

Translation: Kathy Lien is short dollar and wants Bernanke to reduce the interest rate to 0 so that she will get a chance to cover her position.

This article contains an extraordinary amount of mumbo-jumbo and nothing concrete about anything. I'm nor surprised.

Fannie and Freddie Did Not Cause This Crisis

It would be wiser to use the term "commission issue" or even "agent issue" (not "agency issue") when talking about commission/agent issues and FNM/FRE in the same gasp of air.

The problem with the terminology used in this article is that the reader can be confused because FNM/FRE loans are commonly referred to as "agency loans", in the sense of "via government agency". Although we all know that FNM/FRE are not really (or supposedly) "government agencies", the terminology seems to be very common.