User 241672

The $7 Trillion Rally

A reduction in the rate of decline of GDP is not a recovery.

How exactly is the consumer going to get out of this mountain of debt?

I wouldn't get too far ahead of things expecting a return to the good 'ol days of neg-am mortages and mailboxes filled with credit card applications.

People are going to have to figure out a new way forward that involves less imports and more exports, less financial engineering and more mechanical engineering. And I hope sooner than later wind down GM, CITI and AIG instead of throwing tax dollars at them.

Citigroup's Horrible Conference Call

What the hell happened to Sarbanes-Oxley?

Enron screws over California for billions, implodes, we get a huge reporting burden, and then public companies just outright obfuscate, omit and lie!

As a shareholder, I want to see the loan book and know what's hiding on and _off_ the balance sheet.

The Seduction of America

I wonder if we lost a huge opportunity last September to balance the economy. If we had let the "banking system" -- ie. shadow banking system, and American financial oligarchs fail, that graph of financial system profits to regular economic profits would have corrected pretty quickly.

Perhaps the trillions of dollars of obligations assumed by the US taxpayers could have been just mailed out as stimulus checks to restart the _real_ economy. 10 or 20 thousand per household would have been a nice down-payment on a productive economy.

Notes on the Impending Market Reversal

A fool and his money are soon parted. When Larry Kudlow screams at me to buy! buy! buy! I know we're near the top.

Everything I needed to know about Wall Street I learned from Broiler Room.

The Curious Case of the U.S. Dollar

I just don't buy this "risk aversion" trade. There's got to be something more. Show me one scrap of empirical evidence that agents are dumping their local currencies and running to the US dollar.

Such a fundamental thing as the value of the US currency and there's just no discussion beyond this "risk aversion" cliche.

Roubini? Greenspan? Gross? Surely someone with authority will speak to this.

De-Leveraging Is Not Deflation

BS detector -- Is it really true that it would be "the end of the world" if the US defaults on it's debt?

I get really worried when people say something is "unimaginable" - usually it means they don't want to face the prospect.

Let's pretend that the US magically (and uniquely) faced the rapture, and went to heaven, leaving the rest of the world to plod on.

What would happen in your universe of "how things work"?

Would food production and the will to live cease?

Las Vegas & Sacramento Housing Show Big Gains: Is Real Estate About to Surge?

Sure lots of buyers on the sidelines.

But how many sellers on the sidelines? and how many of those have ticking time-bomb liar-loan-option-arm mortgages?

Las Vegas & Sacramento Housing Show Big Gains: Is Real Estate About to Surge?

Lots of buyers on the sidelines yes, but how many sellers on the sidelines, many with ticking time-bomb option arm mortgages?

Bottom Fishing - Cramer's Mad Money (8/8/08)

two words, "pump" and "dump"

The Downside Risk to International Exposure

Implicit in the thesis for this argument is that the US economy will recover before the other major world economies, due to some law of global economics.

Perhaps the US deficits (household, national, trade) will cause a prolonged period of slow growth in the US, and the world will not bother to wait for a US recovery.