FourBrane

Google's Eric Schmidt: The Fox Promising to Help the Chickens

Whether I lambast Google as my Hegemonic Monster of the Hour or (as I have now been doing for close to twenty years) Micro$oft, we are really just exercising our inbuilt American fear of unbridled power. Two hundred years ago, it was Kings. A hundred years ago it was Railroad Barons. As the French say, "plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose" (the more things change, the more they are the same).
I'm worried about the destruction of trusted news sources as our media world explodes into fragments, but I am quite sure that monks felt the same way when they heard about Gutenberg. No one knows what it will be, but there will arise a way for us to get reliable information. It probably won't look like anything being done today so we all need to put on our thinking caps and try to be first to invent it.

Cramer's Stop Trading! The Bears' Big Bluff (4/17/09)

I'm no Cramer fan, but even a stopped clock is right two times a day. The bears here sound too confident and certain that they "know" what's going to happen and that's an alarm bell.

Unemployment numbers don't matter as much as some here seem to think. 90% of the newly-unemployed were barely making a living to begin with as, sadly, the first to go are always the ones who can afford it the least. Fat cats never lay themselves off, so the impact is always disproportionately directed to low-pay jobs. Hence, the economic impact is less than you might think.

The consensus appears to be that we'll be seeing an upturn in the economy by the fourth quarter, even though unemployment won't come down until much later next year. But the unemployed don't buy airplanes, new co-generation units, etc.

A summer pull-back, if seen, will be nothing more than the usual "everyone's-away-at-th... thing that happens every year.