ariel1935

Will Obama Hurt the Profitability of Payday Lenders?

No one mentioned an actual analysis of the margins for any of these PDL bloodsuckers but Household Finance had a 1% default rate when they were charging 35%. That seemed horrible in 1970 but it was all I could get. It is now mainstream. Doing business with credit unions instead of banks avoids the usury of mainline banks which matches or exceeds the PDLs at times.

Maybe they could next take up bank fees and universal default rules. and then the doubling of fines by local and state governing bodies. And then .....

Why the Fed Can't Prevent a Deflationary Depression

Some banks are lending money to sure bets, there just aren't many of them. Many banks are not sure of their debt and consequent reserve requirements or even sure that old reserve requirements are sufficient.
Money velocity is easier for me to understand in a biological analogy. Credit is blood sugar; market constraints and regulatory agencies are insulin. We've been on a sugar high because of extremely low insulin. Suddenly with sugar cutoff we are indire danger from low blood sugar. Credit (money being loaned, spent, and repayed; ie money velocity) is essential to our survival and without it the economy is rapidly dying. If the banks are unable to provide credit we must bypass them until they are willing to accept a little risk.
Banning bank merges until full disclosure of debts is possible might also be helpful. I might then understand which bank stocks to buy.

Six Ways to Improve Broadcast Television

While I detest strident leftists like Bill Moyers and his alter ego on NOW I find that PBS is my favorite source of viewing except for news. Even they are corrupting their "attractiveness" by running endless repeats and transparent fundraising "specials".
If they actually ran the programs for which we contribute, they would finish off "free" TV.

Obama Insists Cars Improve Fuel Efficiency by 40%

Europeans live on much less of almost every material thing than Americans. Their countries are the size of our states. They drive short distances and their auto companies did not buy up and shutdown their public transportation. They have stick shift diesel cars that get 40 mpg. They walk and bicycle a lot which makes them healthier so they save a lot on medical care and get less of it because they have a government run health system. They live in cooler smaller houses and take better care of what they have, most of which is not disposable. Their auto unions are by and large not a group which makes substantially more than the public who buys their cars. But their socialist governments add enough taxes to make them more expensive than our cars. They save more of what they earn so thay can afford their higher prices when they NEED something.

It is very difficult to compare anything European to us.

Six Companies Poised to Gain from a Natural Gas Auto Mandate

I remember that nuclear was stopped in its tracks by the same "greens" that now propose it. Its the cheapeast way to make electricity (assuming everyone pays for carbon polution) and puts no carbon or radioactivity into the air. Coal burning, on the other hand, does both.

The one good thing that has resulted from the delay is the design of nuclear generators that by design cannot rupture. The bad thing is that unlike France we send 5% of our GNP to people who hate us, rightly or not, and spend a significant part of the money to do us harm.

In addition we bailout the low mileage automakers who bought up mass trasit in order to close it and make us a captive audience to personal transportation which killed our cities and stressed our culture into the sterile suburbs and decaying cities we often endure.

We don't yet make coal pay for carbon pollution so it seems cheaper than wind and we need coal for our baseloading. With nuclear baseloading, recommended, we could use coal mines to supply colocated uranium and shut down the smokestacks.

Which coupled with electric cars, hybrid green diesel cars, and LNG trucks would free us from 700 billion dollars of balance of payments and cure most of what ails the non financial portions of the economy.

Then we try and jail the bad investment bankers and start with a new financial system.

Bond Expert: FDIC Bonds

May the feds/banks will finally determine how bad things really are, which would allow them to 1. determine if the banks now have sufficient reserves and 2. Mandate some lending. The feds can't require lending until the bank examiners determine that the banks can safely do so

Obama Reconsiders Digital TV Transition Date

I retired from the FCC. Believe me that the FCC picks very few things. They mostly referee picks from conflicting choices presented by the business and activist public. If Microsoft, Google, and other non-traditional spectrum users had not pushed for the earliest possible use of the freedup spectrum, the transition might be much later; to the detriment of all off-air users.

Greenberg's Chutzpah

AIG was more than 50% less into bad paper until Greenberg was sent packing only 3 years before the "Great Deleveraging". He seems to be tough but generous on employees. AIG would have been better off if he had stayed despite his occasional penchant for living on the edge.

Paulson: The Exit Interview

Paulson knew before he took the job that it would come to no good end. There was no up side for him except desperately needed public service to minimize the damage he knew could happen. He didn't count on demagogery by congress, chicken little drumbeating by most of the media, and the renegades in the other branches of government. Not even he could have anticipated the speed with which the collasp happened.

Lehman was a shell of its former self after its previous reorganization and was taken over by pirates. No one could save it and it was not necessarily worth saving. The shame is that it traded on the old brand long after it was a sham.

AIG was doing ok with Greenberg in charge. When Sullivan took over they got much more careless with risk and in a short time were id deep water. How could Paulson have known it went south that soon?

IMO he did better than we could have hoped in a thankless job and we were lucky to have him there. I would take him and Ben over Rubin and Greenspan any time.