stock_creeper's  Instablog

Memorial day is for paying homage to America's fallen soldiers, but for Obama it's just another stop on the campaign trail to flaunt his supposed patriotism and divert media attention away from the economy. In true Obama spirit a boring, platitudinous speech is to be expected with extra-long pauses between words and evocation of struggle, hardship and how we have 'a long way to go' until America is molded into Obama's likeness.

In the final months of the 2008 campaign the media over-hyped the stock market collapse to get Obama into office. Now the media is trying to turn JPM and Facebook into the next Lehman so Obama can win on economic issues. Obama's 'economic plan' is to soak the rich, impose choking regulation on businesses and Wall St., and fritter tax payer dollars on useless job creation programs. This is not an economic plan.

Romney has business experience and is unemployed; Obama is a community organizer, career politician, and scholar. This not only makes Romney more relatable to average voters, but more qualified. Obama wants to make the one percent pay their fair share, which is too much money. Boehner is right. Why should the one percent who are the most productive members of society pay higher taxes for economically unproductive social safety nets? Let's cut the waste, but leave the tax cuts and defense spending unchanged.

Sometimes cognitive dissonance is justified it's in the best interests of the economy and national security. It's better to hold two contrasting views if one of them is correct than to hold the wrong ones. Sometimes we need more exotic financial instruments because they help the economy in some way, and if they fail the taxpayer should feel obliged to bail it out, out of a sense of selflessness to the good of the economy. Mortgages on supposedly dubious terms is part of the American dream of home ownership; it's the personal responsibility of the borrower to read the fine print. Too big to fail isn't so bad, if we have the support structure to prop it up should the unthinkable happen. Bailouts help the free market function more smoothly.

Obama is alienating the Latino vote by failing to implement immigration reform or a pathway to citizenship, through his attacks on the Catholic church, the contraception mandates, gay marriage endorsement and a general lack of hard working values. Populism sounds good on paper by pitting the haves against the have-nots, but this doesn't work because you can't talk down to the American people; instead you have to dangle the carrot of the American Dream to win the swing state votes. Voters want to think they can be rich, if they work hard enough. A Quinnipiac University poll out this week found Mitt Romney with a 6-point lead over President Obama in Florida, meaning there is still hope for Romney to win swing states by converting minorities on social issues. Obama has hopelessly lost the hard working white vote; but he still retains the slacker vote, the freeloader vote, and the single women vote. Too bad for Obama these groups don't have reliable turnout numbers on election night.

Admittedly, if Romney or McCain had won in 2008 we would still be complaining about the same stuff we are now like pain at the pump, debt and the weak housing & labor market. A Romney presidency won't make much of a dent in the aforementioned problems, but it will be bullish for stocks and & economy which is why I endorse him. Congress will be more accommodative if Romney wins, meaning uncontested spending for pro-growth things like defense, homeland security and tax cuts and, best of all, no more debt ceiling standoffs.

Bernanke or Geithner would make a better president than Obama. They deserve credit for the present economic & stock market boom, not Obama. Obama's specialty is taking credit for the work done by more competent people.

One of biggest mistakes of the administration is using Keynesian policy to try to forcefully reverse autonomous structural shifts in the labor market. The greater trend towards automation and globalization and

ultimately a shrinking , but a more productive and useful labor force,

is irrevocable.

In a recent column Robert Reich is still bemoaning inequality. The good news: growth will always supersede fairness. It's better to have a dynamic, competitive economy with fewer jobs than a bloated, ineffective one that resembles a DMV office.

The left insists that without more equality economic growth will stagnate. To the contrary the economy is not stagnating. US GDP growth has been positive since Q1 2009 and the economy is growing faster than any country in Europe. Increasing inequality is a byproduct of a successful economy and not a cause for concern, but is to be embraced.

Facebook is under assault by the litigious left over failure to disclose certain statement during the roadshow. It's laughable to believe that having that extra morsel of information would have affected the IPO when retail investors were blindly buying into the stock. Nasdaq is also being sued because of trading errors that somehow prevented investors from knowing when bought or sold. I hope the next time I lose money I can complain to the exchange that somehow I couldn't see my order. Instead of the dog ate my homework, I did my homework and the answers vanished! How lame does that sound. Nervermind that too much Facebook stock was issued or that the S&P 500 had its worst week since August 2011. If Facebook deserved to close at $50 it would have done so, errors not withstanding.

The Ron Paul revolution was DOA but that didn't stop liberals and libertarians from writing pro Ron Paul articles on sites like Business Insider while scorning real conservatives such as Romney or Santorum. These supposed delegates are like Loch Ness Monster sightings; the true believers think it's real in defiance of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

The 50/50 trade is still working. Risk-on stocks like AAPL and PCLN are up a lot and treasuries are flat.

The world is awash with so much liquidity that TLT is flat today even as stocks surge. The slightest hiccup in Europe will provoke a kneejerk flight to safety treasury rally, but on the other hand, booming BRIC economies are producing large surpluses which is helping to keep rates low; hence TLT rises in bullish and bearish macro economic conditions.

Romney embodies pro-growth patriotic values just as TLT is a proxy for American exceptionalism regarding it unshakable reserve currency status. The left predicted that USA debt rating downgrade would pummel treasuries and that GOP was alienating women voters. The opposite has happened; Romney's polls have surged among women and treasuries keep rallying.

The left is unloading their full arsenal against Romney with no success, including:

War on Women? dud

Manufactured outrage contraception? dud

Anti-Bain attack ads? dud

24-7 scorn directed at JP Morgan by the liberal media? dud

I wonder if the liberal media is trying to invoke another Lehman by spreading misinformation and fear about JPM to drive its stock price lower and make Obama look like the good guy? Probably.

Now the media is trying to turn Facebook into the next JPM. The left loves failure and crisis because the they win voters through fear and class warfare, not optimism. Stocks crash. People get scared. Blame the 1%. Promise retribution against the 1%. Obama wins.

How about the ad narrated by Bill Clinton that implied that Romney, if president, would not have launched the raid on Bin Laden? It was a dud. You can't pretend to be tough on terror when your name rhymes with Osama, sorry.

Romney effortlessly deflected those attacks, just like during the primaries. In most instances, simply ignoring the ads without issuing a rebuttal was sufficient because many of these ads actually backfired, especially among Catholics and swing voters.

Maybe Obama is suffering from Oxygen deprivation? Cyanosis can cause purple lips and brain cells dying impairs speech resulting in a long pauses between words excess um's and ah's from a derailed train of thought.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDJSVPAx8xc

Doug Kass like Roubini, Peter Schiff, and Paul Kugman is of those people that you can tell is a loser based on their appearance. On May 9th, 2012 the wispy Doug Kass wrote that shorting bonds might actually be the "trade of the decade" Whoops. It bears repeating: a lib and his money are soon parted.

Of any political affiliation, the welfare liberal is perhaps the biggest proponent of fiscal restraint, regulation and frugality at the government and personal level. They want consumers to save more and for politicians to spend less on defense, tax cuts and homeland security, but they also want the government to increase taxes on the most productive members of society (the one percent) to fund social safety nets so these economically unproductive moonbats can hoard more money.

If the penny went out of circulation millions of liberals would be fucked because their life savings would be worthless. The 1974 and 1999 penny shortages were probably caused by liberals and I would estimate a trillion dollars of wealth is tied up in household penny jars, dating back to the Great Depression. Of course, this could be avoided if the liberals used a bank, but they don't trust them because they took bailout funds.

For years the left has prematurely written-off the US consumer as being 'maxed out' due to supposedly nefarious republican policies. If only the stimulus were bigger consumers would spend more. If only Bernanke would raise rates liberals like ourselves wouldn't have to rely on social security to supplement our penny reserves. By permanently keeping interest rates at zero Bernanke is prodding Americans to max-out the credit card and to invest in higher yielding assets like stocks. Without consumerism or investment, companies would have little incentive or lack the financial means to develop new technologies and the economy would stagnate. Fortunately, Bernanke's efforts appear to be working. Quarter after quarter consumer spending keeps beating estimates, and the left is forced to postpone their predictions for the 'consumer Armageddon' that will never come.

American consumer spending last month increased by the most in seven months.

What high gas prices? American consumer spending last month increased by the most in seven months, even though the rise in their incomes was less impressive.

Spending was up 0.8% in February after increasing 0.4% in January, according to the Commerce Department.

Even when adjusted for inflation, much of it gas price-related, spending was still up 0.5% -- the best showing in five months. Analysts had worried that the rising cost of fuel would force consumers to cut back elsewhere.

Full article: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/30/business/la-fi-mo-consumer-spending-income-savings-20120330

This agrees with my earlier predictions that surging gas prices would not hurt consumer spending, but would instead depress the personal savings rate as consumers spend more money on gas without cutting back anywhere else.

The working class is being supplanted by the leisure and creative class due to the rapid development of productivity enhancing technologies. The future is a better one of more structural unemployment, more debt, and risk taking but also less labor intensive. The penny saved is a penny earned era is over. If American middle-class workers want to be competitive they need to be more productive and quit complaining about the economy. Go back to school and improve your skills, but at the same time keep spending.

The liberal strategy:

1. Create a fake crisis or take an existing problem and blow it out of proportion (like student loan debt, maxed out consumers, deficit spending, or JP Morgan's trading loss)

2. Go on a road show writing articles , book TV appearances, and give speeches blaming republicans, the fed, and supply side economics for this imaginary crisis. Choose only facts that agree with your viewpoint or, better yet, make exaggerated predictions of the gloom that will befall society if action isn't taken immediately.

3. Wait for policy makers to capitulate by implementing regulation or taxation. Fortunately, they seldom do. Paul Krugman has written thousands of op-ed columns for New York Times critical of the Clinton, Bush and Obama administration yet none have any effect on policy.