Faith and The Future (3)
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1 day, 15 hours
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Earlier this year Paul Krugman noted that the U.S, economy is suffering from “a crisis of faith”, implying that we had lost trust in the institutions of capitalism. The word “credit” comes from the Latin root–Credo–”I believe.” When we don’t believe our President or Hank Paulson or the CEO of Citibank, the whole edifice of contemporary American economics begins to crumple. Much of this edifice has been built on the theories of Milton Friedman and ...
Hard Times (3)
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2 days, 9 hours
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The Wall Street Journal reports that the plutocrats are cutting back on their payments to mistresses. According to a new survey by Prince & Assoc., more than 80% of multimillionaires who had extra-marital lovers planned to cut back on their gifts and allowances. Still, only 12% of the multimillionaire cheaters said they plan to give up on their lovers altogether for financial reasons…The most surprising stats in the study relate to gender and what might ...
Scary Records (2)
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3 days, 10 hours
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Today’s market left some ugly records. The Journal chronicles the moment on the trading floors this afternoon. The late-day implosion probably sparked more than a few corner-office types storming onto the trading floor and shouting to nobody in particular, “What the hell just happened?” The collapse of major financial stocks — Citigroup finished down 23.4% — served as one catalyst, along with massive widening in credit-default-swap spreads, an indication that the credit markets have bugged ...
Cost of Business (2)
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3 days, 12 hours
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When the dogs won’t eat your dog food, what do you do? Advertise. According to Nielsen Research, GM spent $1.24 Billion in the fist six months of 2008 on advertising to sell 2 million vehicles. What a business model. Tagged: Advertising, GM, Recession
Irrelevant Al Qaeda (2)
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3 days, 17 hours
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For 7 years Bush and Cheney have used Al Qaeda as the Boogie Man to frighten the American public into the political submission of their liberties. Former CIA operative Bob Baer speculates that Osama Bin Laden is dead. The last relatively reliable bin Laden sighting was in late 2001. A video that he apparently appeared in last year shows him with a dyed beard. More than a few Pakistani intelligence operatives who knew bin Laden ...
Where Are The Customer’s Jets? (1)
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4 days, 10 hours
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A stockbroker named Fred Schwed wrote a book in 1955 called “Where Are The Customer’s Yachts?”, which leads me to the tale this morning of the Big Three auto execs flying into Washington on their private jets to plead their case of poverty to the U.S. Congress. Democrats and the new Obama Administration have to be very mindful that there is very little sympathy abroad for either the managers of the car companies or the ...
Beware of The Restoration (1)
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4 days, 11 hours
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One of the first posts I ever wrote was about Sid Blumenthal coming to Hollywood to remind liberals that a Clinton Restoration was at hand. Since we fought a bitter primary battle to make sure the restoration did not occur, I think Barack has to make sure that the Clintonistas don’t dominate his administration. I know its hard to find experienced Washinton hands without dipping into the Clinton administration talent pool, but new thinking is ...
Unrepentent Phil Gramm (1)
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5 days, 11 hours
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Ideologues are often unburdened by the lessons of history. Exhibit A is Phil and Wendy Gramm. Phil, currently UBS vice Chairman and formerly a key member of the Senate Banking Committee defended himself in the New York Times this morning. His wife Wendy presided mover the deregulation of derivatives. As I pointed out when Gramm was John McCain’s chief economic advisor, Gramm singlehandedly did more to damage the American ecomnomy than anyone now living. He ...
Forget The Conventional Wisdom (4)
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6 days, 15 hours
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The Sunday New York Times Opinion Section is the gathering place for what John K. Galbraith termed “the conventional wisdom”. Conventional wisdom (CW) is a term used to describe ideas or explanations that are generally accepted as true by the public or by experts in a field. The term implies that the ideas or explanations, though widely held, are unexamined and, hence, may be reevaluated upon further examination or as events unfold. Tom Friedman weighs ...
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Zaki said:
completely disagree. Reducing us defense expenditure is the quickest way to a world war
Never allow a crisis to go to waste (3)
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Those are the sage words of Rahm Emanuel, the designated Chief of Staff of the Obama Administration. It’s amazing how behavior can be modified by the approach of the apocalypse. Case in point is hedge fund regulation. As I have pointed out in the past, the hedge fund industry, with the help of Senators like Phil Gramm, fought any attempt to regulate them from the inception of the industry. But as Joe Nocera points out, ...
Capitalism and Credit (3)
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1 week, 2 days
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There was a time, a few weeks ago, when I thought Hank Paulson was the right man for the job of rescuing the economy. Now I don’t think so. Which leads me to worry about who Obama will put in to head the Treasury. Paulson is a creature of the trading desk and his every move has been to save the skins of his fellow traders on The Street. But as he has gotten deeper ...
$5 Trillion Bailout (3)
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If you were as pissed off about the $700 Billion bank bailout, get this. According to CreditSights, a research firm in New York and London, the U.S. government has put itself on the hook for some $5 trillion, so far, in an attempt to arrest a collapse of the financial system. Thursday’s stock market will probably test the 840 low on the S & P 500. If it breaks through to the downside, all the ...
Dinosaur Graveyard (3)
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1 week, 3 days
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Memo to Nancy Pelosi re GM Bailout:Slow down. I have placed the pictures of two men who should be placed in the stocks in a central square in Detroit so we can have a ritual venting on the stupidity of the American Auto Industry. Hopefully, rotten tomatoes will be supplied. On the left is John Dingell, Michigan Congressman who has time and again fought fuel efficiency standards and carried the water for Detroit, no matter ...
Bushwhackers (2)
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1 week, 4 days
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Mosby In Jay Winik’s magnificent history of the end of the American Civil War, April 1865, he contemplates the major decision that Robert E. Lee chose not to take, thus assuring the survival of America as a single country. The Confederate President, Jefferson Davis, driven from his capital in Richmond by Grant’s Army, urges Lee to follow the example of John Mosby’s Raiders, breaking his Army of Northern Virginia into small guerrilla bands of “bushwhackers” ...
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Dan The Plumber Conover said:
What happens to the GOP is significant to all of us (and a viable conservative movement is important to the country), but as I wrote last week, things might get worse in the party before they get better.
Green New Deal (2)
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1 week, 5 days
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Googleplex President-elect Obama needs to be more ambitious. Now that I’ve got your attention, here’s what I’m thinking about. The Chinese government has just announced it’s going to spend about 7% of its GDP on infrastructure investment in the next two years. Obama has mentioned numbers like $100 billion on infrastructure investment. If we spent 7% of our GDP in two years, it would come to $910 billion! As Paul Krugman reminds us this morning, ...
What Now? (5)
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1 week, 6 days
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The New York Times asked 7 economists to advise the Obama administration under the title of “What Now.” With one exception they all seemed to be addressing what they thought was a given assumption:How can we get back to where we were before the crash? This seems to me to be singularly unhelpful. If the only task of the Obama Recovery is to restore America to a state in which 70% of GDP is consumer ...
Steve Schmidt Comes Clean (3)
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McCain’s campaign manager gave a pretty honest interview yesterday to Anne-Marie Cox. Here are a couple of highlights. When did you know it was over? The moment that I will look back at as the moment deep in my gut that I knew, was September 29th when I was flying on a plane with Gov. Palin to Sedona for debate prep, watching the split screen on the TVs, because she had a Jet Blue charter, ...
A More Perfect Union (1)
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2 weeks, 2 days
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The New York Times has a fascinating Interactive Map which lays out the profound transformation wrought by this election. On a county by county basis, the move from Red to blue since 2004 is pretty startling. This was the outcome Howard Dean and Barack Obama committed to with their 50 state strategy. Enough of this “Divided America” nonsense spewed by Limbaugh and Fox News. Tagged: Barack Obama, Democratic Majority, divided America, Howard Dean, Politics
America Renewed (2)
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2 weeks, 3 days
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In Los Angeles County, where the polls closed after Obama’s election was a foregone conclusion, 81% of registered voters marked a ballot. When year after year voter participation rates hovered around 50%, I often felt like our democracy was losing its essence. But not this morning. Or as a New York Times correspondent writing from the Gaza Strip in Palestine put it, From far away, this is how it looks: There is a country out ...
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Jonathan said:
"From far away, this is how it looks: There is a country out there where tens of millions of white Christians, voting freely, select as their leader a black man of modest origin, the son of a Muslim. There is a place on Earth — call it America — where such a thing happens."Yes.
