Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Quantitative Easing and its Affects in Three Sentences
"[The Fed's] Treasury purchases reduce the quantity of risk free assets, forcing investors to buy riskier assets. Commodities are among those risky assets.
By monetizing the debt, the Federal Reserve is debasing paper money and investors are seeking for tangible assets, things that hurt when you drop them on your foot, as one colorful commentator put it."
-- Marc Chandler, here
Why Quantitative Easing is Here to Stay
It looks like in saving the banks from drowning, the Fed, the dollar, and the country are headed for Davy Jones' Locker.
From Michael Pento:
The truth is that without the ability to fully withdraw prior liquidity the Fed is incapable of significantly raising interest rates. After all, the Fed can't raise rates by fiat. It must sell assets to do so. Similarly, to support the dollar it must take money out of circulation, which is also accomplished by asset sales.
But the Fed's arsenal is no longer stocked with high grade weaponry.
As the rest makes plain, here, its stockpile is full of duds.
Monday, June 13, 2011
Why Hold Bonds in Tax Protected Accounts and Stocks Outside Them?
"Bond coupons are taxed as ordinary income. Stock dividends are taxed more lightly."
-- Brett Arends, here, on a completely different topic.
The Turning Currents of Sarah Palin's Vulgarized Mind
Even after a very long relationship, John Ziegler can't quite seem to put his finger on Sarah Palin's problem in the essay excerpted below. There's hardly a man alive who can diagnose the feminine disease, blinded as men are to women by their own passions, but Jonathan Swift came close: "The current of a female mind stops thus, and turns with ev'ry wind."
Ziegler didn't realize it, but he was on to it, here:
“Hi, John Ziegler, this is Governor Sarah Palin,” said the familiar voice on my phone message. There was a pause. “From Alaska,” she added. It’s typical of Sarah’s underappreciated sense of humor to pretend this needed to be clarified. “I just sat down and watched your movie about 9/11,” she went on, “and it’s unflippin’ believable”—”flippin’” is one of her favorite expressions—”I would like to talk with you about this next documentary. Could you give me a call?”
At this point, Sarah and I had met only once, but we were already developing a bizarre relationship. Over the almost three years that followed, we would often act like friends—while at other times she would act like she barely knew me.
The Current Shape of the 78 Year Emergency
Robert G. Wilmers, a defender of community banking, doesn't explicitly mention the abolition of Glass-Steagall, but he lays out some of the consequences of that nonetheless, one of which is that the FDIC is now on the hook for the mistakes of speculators, something it was never intended for:
In 1990, the six largest financial institutions accounted for 9 percent of all U.S. domestic deposits. As of Dec. 31, 2010, the six biggest banks accounted for 36 percent of deposits. ...
In 2010, the six largest bank holding companies generated $56.1 billion in trading revenue, or 74 percent of their $75.7 billion in pretax income. ...
The Big Six institutions earned more than 93 percent of the trading revenue generated by all American banks during the past two years. ...
The major Wall Street banks operate under the taxpayer-backed umbrella of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and, as we saw in 2008, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve. To pay for the cost of such protection, legislators and regulators have forced thousands of Main Street banks like the one I run to absorb a larger, more expensive set of regulatory costs, including higher capital and liquidity requirements. ...
Regulators have failed to distinguish between trading activity and traditional banking, or to recognize that the activity of an institution, not its form, should be the proper focus of oversight.
New Rules Needed
Main Street banks are heavily regulated -- and have been for generations -- to ensure their safety, soundness and transparency. A new generation of regulation must now be applied to what has become a virtual casino. ...
Those financial institutions that engage in trading should live and die by the pursuit of their fortunes, rather than impose a burden on the whole economy.
It’s time to disentangle the trading of big financial institutions from their more traditional commercial banking operations and put an end to this unsafe business model.
Make sure to read his entire op-ed at Bloomberg, here.
Will 'Buy and Hold' Soon Mean Just Minutes?
Jack Hough wonders in a fascinating little story about high frequency trading, here, in which we learn that program trading by some estimates now accounts for more than 75 percent of the volume.
Just one of the reasons I remain out.
'High Frequency' or 'Program Trading' is on the Rise in Asia
So says a recent story from Reuters, predicting it will take only three to four years for Asia to catch up to the US:
Japan is the only market that comes close right now to the HFT seen in western markets. ... [T]he proportion of trades classified as high frequency [is] around 30 percent . . ..
High frequency trading now accounts for as much at 70 percent of turnover in US equity markets, where have HFT systems are dealing with up to 2.3 million messages per second in some cases.
Read the full story here.
Sarah Palin: The Vulgarian Streak Runs Deep
If Sarah Palin is supposed to represent a resurgent social conservatism, her fascination with all things 'WTF' speaks against it.
I had forgotten this one, which Toby Harnden of The UK Telegraph recalls here a couple of days ago, breezing right over it:
The notion of Mrs Palin as White House kingmaker would have seemed wildly improbable if anyone had raised it before August 2008.
It was then that she was catapulted to international fame by Senator John McCain’s surprise decision to make her his vice-presidential running mate. Her reaction? “Can you flippinbelieveit?!”
Cleaning out the alcohol from the Alaska governor's residence was easy by comparison.
"Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man."
-- Matthew 15:11
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Addison on criticism
A critick is a man who, on all occasions, is more attentive to what is wanting than what is present.
-- Joseph Addison
ObamaCare's High Risk Pools Flop, Only 18,000 Sign Up as of March
So says Megan McArdle here:
I've predicted that lots of parts of Obamacare will not work the way they're expected to. But here's one I wouldn't have predicted: the high-risk pools, which were meant to tide people over until 2013, have signed up just 18,000 people as of March.
There were supposed to be millions of people who were uninsurable because of pre-existing conditions. We heard lengthy testimony about their terrible plight. I don't think it's too strong to say that this fear . . . was one of the main reasons offered for the health care overhaul.
Which just goes to show you that fear is a lousy reason to do anything, except run like hell from a bureaucrat wielding a butcher knife against your way of life.
The budgeted amount for the program was $5 billion to cover about 200,000 enrollees until ObamaCare kicks in in 2014, even though the Medicare actuary predicted there would be 400,000 enrollees (doesn't this tell us that we ought to wonder about everything else the Medicare actuary predicts?).
Now they're changing the rules to make it easier and cheaper to sign up for the high risk pools so the regime can say the program is a success.
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Top 5 Radiation Hot Spots of 50 Air Measurement Points Inside Fukushima 20 km Zone
Okuma town is the hardest hit at points 2.5 to 5 km distant from the nuclear power plant:
Koirino 93.9 microSv/hour
Ottozawa 68.4 microSv/hour
Kumagawa 41.2 microSv/hour
Shimonogami 35.6 microSv/hour.
Futaba town, 5 km distant, also has many points with high readings, the highest of which is:
Nagatsuka 30.8 microSv/hour.
The measurements were made June 3 and reported here.
Normal readings would be more like 0.11 microSv/hour.
It's been three months since the tsunami and meltdowns.
Normal readings would be more like 0.11 microSv/hour.
It's been three months since the tsunami and meltdowns.
A Vote for a Mormon is a Vote for the Flip-Flop as an Acceptable Principle
And Mitt Romney epitomizes this ethos already.
From Warren Cole Smith here:
Mormonism is particularly troubling . . . because Mormons believe in the idea of "continuing revelation." They may believe one thing today, and something else tomorrow. This is why Mormons have changed their views, for example, on marriage and race. Polygamy was once a key distinctive of the religion. Now, of course, it is not. Mormons once forbade blacks from leadership roles. Now they do not. What else will change?
Your Healthcare Future: Door Number One, Door Number Two, or Door Number Three?
Shikha Dalmia chooses door number three:
ObamaCare is the worst thing that could happen to seniors in their old age; inaction is the next and RyanCare is the least bad. As a senior in the making, if those were my only options, I would ignore Democratic demagoguery and take RyanCare in a heartbeat.
ObamaCare, however, I’d avoid like the plague.
Follow the link here to find out why in "Medicare's Least Bad Fix."
Main Street, Obamaville: All Bumps, No Road
From the inimitable Mark Steyn, here:
The American Dream, 2011: You pay four bucks a gallon to commute between your McJob and your underwater housing to prop up a spendaholic, grabafeelic, paramilitarized bureaucracy-without-end bankrupting your future at the rate of a fifth of a billion dollars every hour.
In a sane world, Americans would be outraged at the government waste that confronts them everywhere you turn: The abolition of the federal Education Department and the TSA is the very least they should be demanding.
Cutting Spending: Tea Party's Meession from G-d
As reported by Howard Gold here:
Congress has raised the debt limit 74 times since 1962 so the federal government can meet its obligations.
Usually it’s just a rubber-stamp exercise. But this time a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, which swept into power on the back of the Tea Party movement, is preparing to take a stand against too much federal spending and picked the debt ceiling as the battleground.
[Greg] Valliere [chief political strategist of Potomac Research Group] called the 87 freshman Tea Party House Republicans “unlike any group I’ve ever seen in my career. These people don’t give a damn about being re-elected. They feel they are on a mission from God to cut spending,” he told me.
Guarantees Implicit Under Dodd-Frank Hand Big Banks Billions in Borrowing Advantages at Taxpayer Expense
So says John Carney here, calling Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo, among others, our new Fannie Maes and Freddie Macs.
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