My morning reads:
• How Boehner’s Plan B for the ‘fiscal cliff’ began and fell apart (The Washington Post)
• ICE Deal for N.Y.S.E. Creates Global Powerhouse (NYT) see also NYSE, ICE Deal About Everything but Stocks (The Street)
• Gen Y investors in the driver seat of ETF growth (Investment News)
• Hedge funds: Rich managers, poor clients (The Economist)
• For banks, nothing is illegal (The Physics of Finance)
• The Fed’s Century of Power Started With a Fateful Meeting (Echoes)
• Corporate Short-Termism in the Fiscal Cliff’s Shadow (Project Syndicate)
• Instagram Does an About-Face (Bits)
• Doctors Move to Webcams (WSJ)
• Daily Gun Slaughter in U.S. Obscured by Newtown Rampage (Bloomberg)
What are you reading?
Fed’s $4 Trillion Rescue Helps Hedge Fund as Savers Hurt
Source: Bloomberg
Category: Financial Press
Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off topic discussions, it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
I’m packin’. I turned my flag upside down. Watch out liberals.
I will be DAMNED if I’m going to let other people tell me what to do in a democracy. It’s against the Constitution for liberals to make me do things and not do things.
I will not have my taxes raised by Obama and the liberals. I don’t care if they aren’t raising them and actually cut them. That’s not how I feel about it.
I will do ANYTHING to keep taxes rich on the elite in inhabitants of New York City and LA where most of those billionaires live. I love ‘em. I love Trump. I hate Kenya and Kenyans.
Thank God for George W. Bush.
There is no fiscal crisis. And macroeconomics is not a morality play. (ht BDL)
@VennData, dig your exploration of Poe’s Law.
Apple likes to keep the walls high around the Apple Walled Garden. It appears that Apple is quite afraid of others trying to provide unique solutions to the problems Apple’s customers face, to the point of forcing the cancellation of a Kickstarter project.
How much of this sort of ill-will is simmering in the background for Apple?
Regarding the ‘Economist’ article about the fact that simply, low-cost ETFs outperform hedge funds.
1) No! I want those guys with carried interest tax breaks who can’t even beat the indices! They are stars!
2) The stars! are the ones adding value and creating jobs, I don’t care what the facts are.
3) I don’t care that Warren Buffet bet that indices would beat any ten hedge funds you want to pick, he is a far left liberal who wants to raise taxes on everybody, including his bitch of a secretary.
4) My American flag is upside down. Distress!
Implications of “I am not a member of an organized political party. I am a Republican.” (with apologies to Will Rogers)
http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2012/12/dragged_to_the.html
and off to the cliff??
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ruth-marcus-making-a-b-line-to-the-cliff/2012/12/20/15735646-4ae8-11e2-b709-667035ff9029_story.html
The markets really do not get it.
Lunatics are in charge of the House. We face at least two years of fanatical opposition to modernity. The end of the Empire is staring us in the face, but we cannot even stop hundreds of billions of waste in the military or the medical insurance system or corporate welfare because, well, freedom.
They are all very nice people, I am sure. Very few people who are elected to political office are not charming. Most are smarter than their constituents. But…good grief!
What happened in the House yesterday was an embarrassment to anyone who loves the United States. We are in the hands of angry three-year olds, and we can only hope by the time they turn five they are wiser.
And, with only the certainty that uncertainty persists until after Christmas, the markets bounce off their lows and head up. Go figure.
did we accidentally avoid a take over of our government?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/20/bernstein-murdoch-ailes-petreaus-presidency
another failure of the free market? seems we gave compounding pharmacies a bye on having much regulation. and that seems to have worked out really really well
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/rules-for-compounding-pharmacies-need-to-change/2012/12/20/77863788-4938-11e2-ad54-580638ede391_story.html
Worst columns of 2012.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/12/worst-columns-2012/59720/
The NRA: Gun bans at schools create dangerous places.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/21/us/connecticut-school-shooting/index.html
The NRA must protect the right of people who want to own automatic weapons.
I personally like hand grenades. I will NOT allow you to violate my right to own hand grenades. You will take my hand grenade only from my cold dead, ex-hand.
LIBERAL COMMENTS HACKER: Doesn’t the “Gun bans at schools create dangerous places.” sound like the “tax cuts create more tax revenue” argument to you? Are you starting to see a pattern here?
Why I think the Washington Post is a total milquetoast organization and why Fox news should be seen as a PAC that owns a TV station. I’d love it if Fox would have to register as a political action committee and if Murdoch citizenship would be revoked due to his organizations criminal activities regarding wiretapping and bribery of police officers.
“So now we have it: what appears to be hard, irrefutable evidence of Rupert Murdoch’s ultimate and most audacious attempt – thwarted, thankfully, by circumstance – to hijack America’s democratic institutions on a scale equal to his success in kidnapping and corrupting the essential democratic institutions of Great Britain through money, influence and wholesale abuse of the privileges of a free press
Murdoch and Ailes have erected an incredibly influential media empire that has unrivaled power in British and American culture: rather than judiciously exercising that power or improving reportorial and journalistic standards with their huge resources, they have, more often than not, recklessly pursued an agenda of sensationalism, manufactured controversy, ideological messianism, and political influence-buying while masquerading as exemplars of a free and responsible press…”
http://m.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/20/bernstein-murdoch-ailes-petreaus-presidency
I remember when the NRA was a sporting organization and not a political committee that just happened to be involved with hunting and target shooting. As Louis CK would say Wayne LaPierre is a bag of ……
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-21/nra-calls-for-armed-guards-in-schools-to-prevent-killings.html
those mythical mystical bond vigilantes?
must be on a really long vacation almost 20 years and counting
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/12/20/bond_vigilantes_mythical_creatures_have_haunted_american_policymaking_since.html
one of the earliest reported scam artists with a really big scam. his own country
http://www.economist.com/news/christmas-specials/21568583-biggest-fraud-history-warning-professional-and-amateur-investors
a new way to recreate the 2008 debacle? clearing houses?
tax payer money at risk…again?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-21/swaps-armageddon-lingers-as-new-rules-concentrate-risk.html
DSS10 link,
“The National Rifle Association called for stationing police officers in schools as the proper response to the Dec. 14 school shooting in Connecticut and blamed “blood-soaked films” and video games for the violence.”
Films and video games are distributed Worldwide, high capacity magazines aren’t.
12/21/2012
http://www.gocomics.com/tedrall/2012/12/19
Guns don’t kill, teachers with outguns kill!
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/22/us/nra-calls-for-armed-guards-at-schools.html
Newtown Shootings Could Have Been Stopped If There Weren’t so Many Women Around
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/335996/newtown-answers-nro-symposium#
These are the same guys that tell us tax cuts will raise more revenue, right?
How DARE you call them the anti-science party.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-20/fed-s-4-trillion-rescue-helps-hedge-fund-as-savers-hurt.html
Fed’s $4 Trillion Rescue Helps Hedge Fund as Savers Hurt
This article convinces me that the supply side economics/trickle down philosophy of the last 2 decades is still paramount in the economic decisions of the current US leadership–protect and stimulate the wealth of the 1% so they create jobs for the rest of us.
But the 1% have turned into hoarders and rentiers, not job creators….
BTW – this is an example of the oil and gasoline that is apparently preferable to the “dirty” sources of oil being developed in North america, such as the Oil Sands. Apparently, this is considered acceptable as I have not seen massive protests against Nigerian oil recently.
http://news.yahoo.com/burning-pipeline-fire-sign-nigerias-woes-093149858.html
another take on the fiscal slope?
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-kelton-fiscal-cliff-economy-20121221,0,2129176.story
History tells the tale. The federal government has achieved fiscal balance (even surpluses) in just seven periods since 1776, bringing in enough revenue to cover all of its spending during 1817-21, 1823-36, 1852-57, 1867-73, 1880-93, 1920-30 and 1998-2001. We have also experienced six depressions. They began in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893 and 1929.
Spending is the lifeblood of our economy. Without it, there would be no sales, and without sales, no profits and no reason for any private firm to produce anything for the marketplace. We tend to forget that one person’s spending becomes another person’s income. At its most basic level, macroeconomics teaches that spending creates income, income creates sales and sales create jobs.
Iran’s supreme leader joins Great Satan’s No. 1 social network
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57559632-93/irans-supreme-leader-joins-great-satans-no-1-social-network/
I wonder if all his wives are friends with each other.
The one chart that everyone should see:
http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Energy-Voices/2012/1219/The-one-chart-about-oil-s-future-everyone-should-see?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+feeds%2Fenvironment+%28Christian+Science+Monitor+|+Environment%29
What Sweetnam’s chart tells us is that we must find and bring into production the equivalent of five new Saudi Arabias between now and 2030 in order to meet expected demand even if the volume of tight oil reaches its maximum projected output. (The Saudis currently produce about 11.7 mbpd of oil and other liquids.)
(What some cornucopian pundits have been calling the boom in shale oil, is actually tight oil – light oil can be tricked out from stone formations. Shale oil, which really isn’t oil, is kerogen, solid organic compounds which can be transformed into oil; at a completely/b> unaffordable cost.)
The reality is that one of those huge, almost incomprehensible, challenges to modern civilization is coming very shortly down the road.
Speaking of reality checks. One of the popular memes put out is that we have a hundred years of natural gas. In fact, we have 92 years – how people love to round up – based on current demand and best estimate of total resources. However, that estimate is based on two assumptions: That cost won’t be factor, and neither technological limitations. That we’ll be willing to pay what it costs, and that somehow we’ll be able to do things like drill and produce from places where we don’t have a clue how to.
Using reasonable costs, and reasonable current and future technology, that 92 years comes down to 50-60. Assuming the current rate of demand doesn’t grow. Apply a fairly modest increase in demand, and our supply life slumps down to about 30 years or so.
Then, what do we do?
On hedge funds:
Things haven’t changed much since “Where are the Customers’ Yachts?” was published. This and “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” are two essential reference books for small investors.
http://www.amazon.com/Where-Are-Customers-Yachts-Investment/dp/0471770892
The explosion of hedge funds over the past decade does help the markets by providing more liquidity in some of the various nooks and crannies but I doubt if they help investors beyond that.
When will John Bogle be recognized as the visionary he is?