Malkiel

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    • Fri Jul 18th 10:31 AM
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      The Oil Bubble Will Meet the Same Fate as Tech, Housing
      All of these simpletons in your fan club probably couldn't even find China or India on a map. They probably have no idea of the demographic tsunami buoying up oil--1 billion Indians and 2 Billion Chinese who are becoming automobile owners. The population of the US is 300 million, or 10% of those two countries. Try to imagine the oil used to manufacture and drive A BILLION NEW AUTOMOBILES.

      If oil pricing stays flat at its current level for a while that will be a great gift because it will give us time to develop alternative energy technologies. Spending that time drilling new wells off Santa Monica will be beside the point given what will happen to demand elsewhere in the world. And while those other countries will be clever enough to do some of their own alternative energy development, it's unlikely the fruits of their labor will be anything we can just buy at Home Depot to run our homes.

      It's time to wake up and smell the coffee and stop being a nation of wishful thinkers who enjoy nothing more than bad-mouthing trends we don't like as "bubbles" that must be superficial and will therefore go away if we close our eyes hard enough...
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    • Thu Jul 17th 17:50 PM
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      Just How Terrible Is Housing as an Asset Class? Roubini Weighs In
      It's always amusing to listen to these conservative economists who live in such rarified air that all the fundamentals of life on planet earth can be ignored if they inconvenience pure market theory. The last I knew, economics was the study of how goods and services were exchanged by humans living and dying as humans within the limitations of nature. Shelter is one of those fundamentals that can't be ignored--I suspect that Roubini would consider agriculture a waste of time too, but to what point? People have to eat, and the resources have to be allocated to enable that "unproductive&quo... part of the economy to continue.

      It's been a truism of the last 20 years that consumer activity drove the US economy. Instead of a late-Victorian world where humans lived in squalor so that every penny of the economy could be devoted to production profiting the few, we now have an economy where all the members of the society can use the forces of the market to incrementally improve their conditions. People who owned their shelter have a salable asset that they can sell or barter in old age for medical care and nursing home shelter. Does Roubini have a problem with that? Please Mr. Scrooge, can we have just one more sausage to fill our empty stomachs before we go back to your assembly line?
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    • Thu Jul 17th 12:11 PM
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      Numbers Check on Sears Holdings - It's Cheap
      Lampert hasn't proven his abilities yet in this assignment--and does a guy who's already filthy rich care enough about what people think of him to pull out all the stops to prove his mettle? If this guy's not a driven egomaniac then there won't be a happy ending to this story...
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    • Wed Jul 16th 16:43 PM
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      SEC Moves Aggressively On Short Sellers {Housing Tracker]
      Jim Cramer has been openly confessing to his nationwide tv audience for years that he and other Wall Street Players manipulated stock prices through shorting, practically begged the SEC to come question him so he could unburden himself, but apparently nobody at SEC was ever bothered by this broad hint delivered to the whole nation, like a financial Ruby shooting Oswald on live tv. One can only suppose Bushes' SEC guys weren't bothered by the cheating until the heat came on...
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    • Wed Jul 16th 12:54 PM
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      Speed with Which Financials Have Fallen Is Disconcerting
      At its heart, the problem is this--do you want a steady-state economy where prudent practices prevent high levels of leverage, robbing the hedge funds and investment banks of their opportunity to make big bucks fast, or do you want a wild west show where everyone can leverage up as they see fit, but some will crash hard when a downturn comes? We have the moralizers and puritans in the trenches of main street wanting to punish all leveragers for having taken risk in the last cycle where the amoral market makers on Wall Street want the right to take outsized risk as their route to glory. I suspect the puritans will lose as they always do and leverage will come roaring back in a couple of years, as it always has since the roaring 80's...
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    • Tue Jul 15th 16:55 PM
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      Paulson Doesn't Have the Answer to the Run on Deposits
      There's one standard, universal approach to bank panics, in all eras under all parties: tell the public their money is safe and that nobody will lose anything; go home, people. It doesn't matter whether it's even true or not, it's a required tactic, and Bush should have been on the tube first thing in the morning with Bernanke and Paulsen behind him saying that very thing. The inattentiveness of the Bush plutocrats is costing them all opportunity to keep these problems from snowballing. The markets are substantially a psychological construct requiring proper psychological techniques to manage them...
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    • Tue Jul 15th 16:45 PM
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      The SEC Panics
      Have all free-market conservatives totally lost their minds here? Wipe out all the shareholders in a semi-public entity--and then what, you expect anyone in their right minds to ever invest in stock again knowing that constipated pure-market types are eager to bankrupt them? You need to go have a little chat with your ideological cheerleader Larry Kudlow before you guys go killing the golden goose you worship when good times are making you rich.

      Oh, and by the way, these two entities are not even in any real financial distress, their writedowns are small compared to the rest of the sector; the powers that be are taking action in the fear of a panic against them in the market. Do you think threatening to wipe out their current shareholders is going to instill confidence in the new shareholders?
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    • Mon Jul 14th 17:07 PM
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      The Case for Wiping Out Fannie and Freddie Shareholders
      Oh PULEEZ! Stop with all the righteous posturing about "moral hazard" in its various forms. Does anybody think the US government is going to allow Boeing or Northrup to go down the tubes if they supply all our military jets? Does anybody think Uncle Sam is going to allow GM and Ford to die at the same time if it means we don't have a domestically controlled auto manufacturer? And does anyone think vested interests are going to allow government to scare off all investors by allowing their existing shareholders to be decapitated when the bailout comes? Capitalism doesn't exist in a free market, it is always a partnership of government and vested interests. You can believe in capitalism or you can believe in free markets, but you can't believe in both and still be considered a savvy or honest observer...
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    • Wed Jun 25th 10:55 AM
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      Life After Steve Jobs: Handicapping Apple’s Back Bench
      I disagree that whatever team might replace him would carry on the company's policies. There are two controversial aspects of Apple's policies that seem specific to Job's thinking that would not survive in transition: keeping Apple a boutique operation rather than marketing to the the masses, and holding on to huge amounts of cash rather than using it to expand the business. I doubt any business-school grad is going to stay on those paths once Chairman Mao is out of the picture...
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    • Wed Jun 25th 10:47 AM
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      Oil Price Implications of a Strike on Iran
      If I heard it correctly, there was the astounding statistic recited on CNBC international a couple of days ago that 250,000 new cars are being put on the road every week in China. One assumes similar modernization is going on in India and the Asian tiger countries, so reduced demand seems unlikely in the long term.

      As for Britain, any country in the European social democratic tradition has the political will to use governmental policy to bring effective alternative energy products to the market if they feel the need. Using government research money, taxation benefits, and regulation to get individual homes off the energy grid through wind and solar utilities is so technically feasible that a concerted effort by a central government to pursue that would solve any transport fuel deficit they might be having.
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    • Wed Jun 25th 10:34 AM
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      Is the FHA Effectively Condoning Mortgage Fraud?
      "If a buyer cannot come up with a 3% down payment, they are in no position to handle a sudden rise in taxes or insurance, or any type of emergency repair."

      But of course, if the 3% down payment is all of their saved cash, then making the down payment doesn't put them in any better a position to deal with those things. Perhaps the real issue for these low-end buyers is finding a way to get them started with proper cash flow--like making the loan 0% down and then putting 3% in escrow for the first 3 years. Talking about people who can come up with down payments as having magic powers to hold their finances together when others can't is like our mythical belief that throwing people in jail for long periods of time reduces crime. If you're truly interested in solving a problem you have to get serious about how the mechanics of it work...
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    • Mon Jun 23rd 17:08 PM
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      Why Newspapers Must Embrace RSS
      I'm skeptical as to just how many people are using rss feeds, which seem like yet another minute niche technique for control freaks or people with way too much time on their hands. I don't have any coworkers who really use these although a few have tried them because their webmaster functions require them to. For the casual reader, which most web news readers are, bookmarks do just fine. I expect these to languish like usenet in the graveyard of good ideas that too few really need...
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    • Thu Jun 19th 18:16 PM
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      Two More Homebuilders Go Bust
      Short-covering rallies have been a great source of wealth for shareholders during the bull market and they seem to go on in the bear market, so I say, short away. Investors have gotten used to the credit disaster, losing their AAA ratings doesn't look like the end of the world any more for these companies since everyone else in the sector is taking a hit, and I think these stocks are a good buy. The only possible negative here is whether bond issuers will trend toward going into the market uninsured and we'll see whether buyers care any more, but so far it's not happening...
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    • Tue Jun 17th 16:38 PM
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      Minimum Wage Hikes vs. Tax Rebates - What's More Effective?
      I had to laugh when I read your recitation of Friedman's comment and the description of how people actually behave, which is what popped into my head before I had gotten to that paragraph. Economists must be the only "science" that doesn't require actual analysis of data to confirm a theory, just the backing of a political party that likes what it hears.

      I have a theory that an enterprise that can't afford to pay minimum wage is a marginal enterprise that's probably parasitically drawing money away from healthy enterprises, and if increasing the minimum wage drives some of them out of business that's better for the overall economy because the money flows instead to the good businesses paying higher (over the table) wages and taxes. I don't have direct evidence for this theory, but if Friedman doesn't need evidence why should I?...
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    • Thu Jun 12th 11:40 AM
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      Homeowners Have Record Low Equity In Homes [Housing Tracker]
      It's not clear how useful the data about homeowner's equity is when it was created by a disastrous downturn in estimated value of the housing; we're not entitled to make any inferences at all about debtor behavior from them, and it may well be that behavior hasn't changed at all, just the estimated value of the property.

      As for property tax, state governments which would presume to interfere in the right of local governments to collect the only tax they have available to, among other things, meet state-mandated minimum spending requirements for schools, had better be ready to pony up the money to cover the difference. To do any less is sheer hypocrisy and abdication of responsibility...
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