Warning: Bond Bears Might Be From The Twilight Zone [View article]
One other unique variant to the present timeframe is that sovereign bonds have been issued to such excess outside WWII when the US had the advantage of a far less government-centric economy and a virtual monopoly on manufacturing.
Thus they represent a tulip bulb mania not only in the artificially-induced demand that has driven their prices to peak levels but also in the unsustainability of their valuations by Western nations all of whom have no plan outside of endless rollovers, markets permitting. default or rapid inflation to redeem them even as their "plan" is to issue them in vastly increasing numbers eternally .
How Much Longer Must We Wait On Yahoo? [View article]
As of the last few weeks changes in my Yahoo page tricks the user into accidentally triggering popup ads at the margin of the screen when trying to scroll using the nearly invisible bar at the right side. At the bottom of the screen are ads masquerading as inbox emails which are meant to be similarly triggered accidentally.
Apparently delivering service laden with greater annoyances by any means necessary is the 21st century key to revenue enhancement. For me, it triggers thoughts of possibly switching my email address. Greater page views may result along with higher revenues for the corporation, but users suffer yet another deterioration in their quality of life while the corporation is likely to receive accolades and upgrades for their "brilliant" work.
Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News [View article]
JC - The one thing the poobah's who run this great land of ours will not acknowledge even if they take your "scared straight" tour of Detroit to see the results of their wasteful, corrupt handiwork, is that if Detroit became an enterprise zone freed of excessive taxation, regulation and paperwork (i.e: The vast majority of it), it would quickly become THE mecca of opportunity in the US followed quickly by prosperity that would take it to the top.
The US was intended to be a laboratory of competing states and localities first, not the one-note dirge of top-down mandates and costs from Washington DC that has long hobbled, now crippled, the nation that once prospered as no other.
Then we could take the lessons learned from the inevitable success Detroit would demonstrate, and solve many other social ills through accountability for costs and results that bureaucrats and politicians avoid like the plague, such as healthcare and education.
Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News [View article]
"Japanese machinery orders slide sharply." "The figures, which are a leading but volatile indicator of capex, show that companies are still reluctant to spend despite the government's and BOJ's stimulus policies."
Confidence will be impeded, not improved, for as long as Western governments blow wads of fiat via deficit financing, overtaxation and overregulation in stupid ways while ignoring their only legitimate mandates which are to provide fair and free environments in which their citizens can excel and prosper, and to protect against real, not imagined threats. For example, the millions of potsmokers who are in jail while certain Wall Street financiers and Washington fixers who should fill those cells instead, walk off with bonuses and kickbacks from taxpayer bailouts.
Top down mandates, lies,phony statistics and ponzi financial shenanigans from Alice and Wonderland work wonders mainly to suppress the creative energy which drives the productive to create, build and expand prosperous enterprises.
Ben Gee - China, I believe, does not naturally engage in the sort of short term "winning" and "losing" mentality that the West is prone to, but rather tries to manage events for the long term especially by playing others off against each other so as to leave their Middle Kingdom intact to pursue it's own interests.
Henry Kissenger's book, "On China" discusses the thinking of the Chinese as he sees it from his long experience studying and negotiating with them. He provides a long background that includes discussions of the events of their 19th century difficulties and Mao's ability to earn respect for China when it was still weak militarily and economically. He also observes that no other nation has been so powerful and prominent for so long or come back a second time in such a big way.
eBay: Is It Worth A Look After The Pullback? [View article]
My belief is that John Donahoe does not understand small business and is glad to be rid of the labor-intensive complexities of small seller auctions of unique items. But that is an automatic cash cow and Ebay was positioned as first mover in a very profitable, natural fit for the internet: As a free market platform arriving at market prices for goods and services for a reasonable fee.
Having dispensed with small sellers and auctions as much as possible via rules and onerous fees, Paypal became the "growth engine" for the company by default, forcibly so on the Ebay site. But Alibaba and others outside the West are rising and threatening to eclipse Ebay which had the best opportunity during the world economic crisis to provide THE site for sellers needing to raise cash with buyers needing good deals.
Ebay seems to have become a trading vehicle for speculators in the past year or so as it trended upwards. Now that that is over, now that the stock is in the dump after the pump, quite possibly the potent competition both Paypal and the unnecessarily crippled Ebay site are facing is causing a fundamental reassessment of Ebay's prospects by investors.
eBay: Is It Worth A Look After The Pullback? [View article]
I see a stream of upper-management cliches from business school by CEO Donahoe, such as, "drive the future," "positioning our company," "leading innovator," "positioning our company to aggressively capitalize," "leading that future," and most laughably, "best partner for merchants," all of which are helpfully highlighted in the article.
Despite his antics as Mini-Meg, CEO Donahoe's problem is simply that Ebay is charging fees that are just too high, especially after the last round where Ebay takes an even 10% of final sales INCLUDING shipping charges, while the third required "partner" in the transaction, Paypal, takes 4%.
Blowing The Bubble On Student Loan Debt Crisis [View article]
It is, as the article alludes, the students of middle class parents who suffer the brunt of the spending spree nearly all higher education organizations have embarked on since the government loan programs enabled such high levels of abuse. So, as more TA's teach while tenured professors are AWOL and the campuses and upper administrator salaries become bedecked with frills and excesses, middle Americans foot skyrocketing college tabs during this jobless "recovery" that features fast-rising costs but "no inflation."
The poor have their Pell grants which, as are most of their government handouts, rampantly and flagrantly abused because it's only taxpayer money, and the rich can always pay their way and see doors opened for them while the middle class is handed a bill that has risen faster than even skyrocketing medical care. Amazingly, hardly anywhere in our crony capitalist system so rife with abuses and excesses in favored sectors is the need for reform greater than in higher education.
Confusion: High Public Debt Levels And Other Sources Of Risk In Today's Macroeconomic Environment [View article]
Thanks for a rare illumination of the quandary that mainstream economists face at the present dangerous economic impasse Western economies are in and how the way these events have unfolded and responded to the implemented policy measures has been surprising as compared with theoretical expectations.
And for touching on the incredible dangers still faced because TBTF financial institutions are populated by management that no longer has the personal skin in the game they once did and will in any event, collect bonuses for risky bets now and walk away from much painful personal penalty regardless the mayhem their choices may inflict on our society. Such as, reaching for 3% yield via selling naked options that must eventually result in either overt disaster or even greater financial repression.
The discourse in the US will profit from more candor concerning limits and doubts about policy options available such as this article puts forth.
Ben Gee - I believe in a system closer to the people, more decentralized, more powerful locally and more diverse than the present Washington DC-centric top-down, authoritarian approach that saps local initiative and competitive experimentation by the various states and localities that the Constitution envisioned.
That was the strength that would have allowed the US to adapt to changing circumstances had all of it's financial resources not been committed to preserving the status quo and preventing the powerful from taking their losses. Rights and property are being removed from the private middle class while the elites gather more than ever before even in failure. This is not the way the US is supposed to follow.
The US has been involved in countless wars since the formation of the Federal Reserve and the income tax that same year (1913) which is no coincidence since this is all intended to centralize power and wealth at the top over time and make the citizens into serfs rather than releasing the creative power of the individual as the US was once able to do for a long time better than anywhere else. The future is not bright until the people realize how dangerous the loss of their rights is becoming, wake up and reverse course.
Tesla Motors (TSLA +1.8%) moves forward with a plan to open a store in China, despite doubts from analysts that the automaker can make a strong presence in the nation. Though the Chinese government is getting more serious in offering subsidies for electric vehicles, the price tag on the Model S and the lack of charging station infrastructure are concerns. [View news story]
Insider crony state capitalism supplanted communism with great success for the usual suspects who remained in charge and at the top, mostly. It has nonetheless brought countless Chinese out of poverty. This was more successful than the Soviet Union model where the ruling nomenklatura morphed into the ruling mafia after they took personal ownership of the "people's" assets.
The enterprising Chinese people are hard to hold back, but their rulers have been very successful at that for centuries until the 1980's. Their rulers are still thuggish and authoritarian however, and that plus bad demographics going forward make smooth and sane adjustments unlikely for the Chinese people.
Of course, that their counterparts in the world such as the US are showing themselves to be kleptocratic themselves as they cast aside the nuisance of equality under the law ever more blatantly does not auger well for Western adaptiveness to the changing landscape of the world economy in a way that will benefit their beleaguered, shrinking privately employed middle classes either.
Is The Fed Losing The Battle For A Sustainable Recovery? [View article]
No, the economy still sucks on Main Street. Bernanke's pumping and Washington's preening have only served to raise costs and prices while paychecks continue to shrink against them. Thanks for asking.
Housing Prices Are Being Dangerously Distorted By Big Institutional Money [View article]
High school economics class used to mention supply/demand curves, and here the price is driven higher by taxpayer bailouts and 0% rates supplied to the connected. That's a steep price to pay for this jobless "recovery."
Housing Prices Are Being Dangerously Distorted By Big Institutional Money [View article]
Outside of housing bears, prospective first-time homeowners such as young couples and families might disagree that fake, taxpayer bailout-financed demand by Wall Street institutions raising housing prices out of their reach is a good thing.
Warning: Bond Bears Might Be From The Twilight Zone [View article]
Thus they represent a tulip bulb mania not only in the artificially-induced demand that has driven their prices to peak levels but also in the unsustainability of their valuations by Western nations all of whom have no plan outside of endless rollovers, markets permitting. default or rapid inflation to redeem them even as their "plan" is to issue them in vastly increasing numbers eternally .
How Much Longer Must We Wait On Yahoo? [View article]
Apparently delivering service laden with greater annoyances by any means necessary is the 21st century key to revenue enhancement. For me, it triggers thoughts of possibly switching my email address. Greater page views may result along with higher revenues for the corporation, but users suffer yet another deterioration in their quality of life while the corporation is likely to receive accolades and upgrades for their "brilliant" work.
Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News [View article]
The US was intended to be a laboratory of competing states and localities first, not the one-note dirge of top-down mandates and costs from Washington DC that has long hobbled, now crippled, the nation that once prospered as no other.
Then we could take the lessons learned from the inevitable success Detroit would demonstrate, and solve many other social ills through accountability for costs and results that bureaucrats and politicians avoid like the plague, such as healthcare and education.
Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News [View article]
Confidence will be impeded, not improved, for as long as Western governments blow wads of fiat via deficit financing, overtaxation and overregulation in stupid ways while ignoring their only legitimate mandates which are to provide fair and free environments in which their citizens can excel and prosper, and to protect against real, not imagined threats. For example, the millions of potsmokers who are in jail while certain Wall Street financiers and Washington fixers who should fill those cells instead, walk off with bonuses and kickbacks from taxpayer bailouts.
Top down mandates, lies,phony statistics and ponzi financial shenanigans from Alice and Wonderland work wonders mainly to suppress the creative energy which drives the productive to create, build and expand prosperous enterprises.
China: The Morphing Dragon [View article]
Henry Kissenger's book, "On China" discusses the thinking of the Chinese as he sees it from his long experience studying and negotiating with them. He provides a long background that includes discussions of the events of their 19th century difficulties and Mao's ability to earn respect for China when it was still weak militarily and economically. He also observes that no other nation has been so powerful and prominent for so long or come back a second time in such a big way.
Any thoughts?
eBay: Is It Worth A Look After The Pullback? [View article]
Having dispensed with small sellers and auctions as much as possible via rules and onerous fees, Paypal became the "growth engine" for the company by default, forcibly so on the Ebay site. But Alibaba and others outside the West are rising and threatening to eclipse Ebay which had the best opportunity during the world economic crisis to provide THE site for sellers needing to raise cash with buyers needing good deals.
Ebay seems to have become a trading vehicle for speculators in the past year or so as it trended upwards. Now that that is over, now that the stock is in the dump after the pump, quite possibly the potent competition both Paypal and the unnecessarily crippled Ebay site are facing is causing a fundamental reassessment of Ebay's prospects by investors.
eBay: Is It Worth A Look After The Pullback? [View article]
Despite his antics as Mini-Meg, CEO Donahoe's problem is simply that Ebay is charging fees that are just too high, especially after the last round where Ebay takes an even 10% of final sales INCLUDING shipping charges, while the third required "partner" in the transaction, Paypal, takes 4%.
Blowing The Bubble On Student Loan Debt Crisis [View article]
The poor have their Pell grants which, as are most of their government handouts, rampantly and flagrantly abused because it's only taxpayer money, and the rich can always pay their way and see doors opened for them while the middle class is handed a bill that has risen faster than even skyrocketing medical care. Amazingly, hardly anywhere in our crony capitalist system so rife with abuses and excesses in favored sectors is the need for reform greater than in higher education.
Confusion: High Public Debt Levels And Other Sources Of Risk In Today's Macroeconomic Environment [View article]
And for touching on the incredible dangers still faced because TBTF financial institutions are populated by management that no longer has the personal skin in the game they once did and will in any event, collect bonuses for risky bets now and walk away from much painful personal penalty regardless the mayhem their choices may inflict on our society. Such as, reaching for 3% yield via selling naked options that must eventually result in either overt disaster or even greater financial repression.
The discourse in the US will profit from more candor concerning limits and doubts about policy options available such as this article puts forth.
China: The Morphing Dragon [View article]
That was the strength that would have allowed the US to adapt to changing circumstances had all of it's financial resources not been committed to preserving the status quo and preventing the powerful from taking their losses. Rights and property are being removed from the private middle class while the elites gather more than ever before even in failure. This is not the way the US is supposed to follow.
The US has been involved in countless wars since the formation of the Federal Reserve and the income tax that same year (1913) which is no coincidence since this is all intended to centralize power and wealth at the top over time and make the citizens into serfs rather than releasing the creative power of the individual as the US was once able to do for a long time better than anywhere else. The future is not bright until the people realize how dangerous the loss of their rights is becoming, wake up and reverse course.
Tesla Motors (TSLA +1.8%) moves forward with a plan to open a store in China, despite doubts from analysts that the automaker can make a strong presence in the nation. Though the Chinese government is getting more serious in offering subsidies for electric vehicles, the price tag on the Model S and the lack of charging station infrastructure are concerns. [View news story]
China: The Morphing Dragon [View article]
The enterprising Chinese people are hard to hold back, but their rulers have been very successful at that for centuries until the 1980's. Their rulers are still thuggish and authoritarian however, and that plus bad demographics going forward make smooth and sane adjustments unlikely for the Chinese people.
Of course, that their counterparts in the world such as the US are showing themselves to be kleptocratic themselves as they cast aside the nuisance of equality under the law ever more blatantly does not auger well for Western adaptiveness to the changing landscape of the world economy in a way that will benefit their beleaguered, shrinking privately employed middle classes either.
Is The Fed Losing The Battle For A Sustainable Recovery? [View article]
Housing Prices Are Being Dangerously Distorted By Big Institutional Money [View article]
Housing Prices Are Being Dangerously Distorted By Big Institutional Money [View article]