Johnny Sunshine Maximum Shorties

Before I get too far: Stay classy, Senator!  What was this man thinking?? McCain Showing Respect

Life is not like the movies: Thankfully, given Shorties titles!  But seriously, life is even less like the movies when you are a computer.

Tips for running a small business: particularly in the worst of times.

Leaders must also be servants: Taza, son of Cochise.

The whole truth: “The ‘living beyond our means’ argument, with its thinly-veiled suggestion of moral terpitude, is technically correct….  But this story leaves out one very important fact. Since the year 2000, median family income has been dropping, adjusted for inflation.”  Robert Reich is off telling the truth again. And it’s only going to get worse according to the IHT.

More truth: Underemployment is at a 14 year high at 11%.

May I have some more?: Ok, have some inflation data!

I hope you never need this: Advice for New Paupers.  Unfortunately it’s all too easy a slide into a really bad place from which it’s hard to climb out.

Schneier shows us that conventional wisdom about terrorists is wrong: Terrorist groups are a lot more like gangs (or all those little independent Jewish groups in Life of Brian) than political movements. In fact, there are 7 ways they are highly ineffective.

An interesting view of the bailout: What if Mr. Paulson really started playing hardball with the banks that want to take government money but not really give anything up/back in return?

Another Missing Link: A newly found fossil explores a transition between fish and the land-dwelling vertebrates that followed 375 million years ago.

Anime explained by alien visitors?: Some documents support the idea that in the early 1800s, Japan was visited by strange-featured little people with pink faces, red eyebrows, and impossibly long white hair, who arrived in round, glass covered “boats.”

Iraq wants the United States to follow some rules: Specifically, they want our soldiers to not commit crimes, they want us out of the cities by next June, and they want us out of the country altogether by 2011. So, assuming no catastrophes, whoever is elected President next month can take credit for bringing troops home.  All he has to do is abide by the existing agreement.

Nite, folks.  Stay sane.

A quick stock-trading lesson

At this time, today’s range on the DJIA has been 7882.51 – 8687.11 according to Yahoo Finance. If you panicked last night and put in a market sell order, that order executed at or near the bottom.  On the other hand, if your order didn’t go in until after 10 AM Eastern, that order executed much closer to the top of today’s range.

If you are going to pick stocks, I have an ironclad rule for you.  Never ever place a market order for a stock that is not currently open for trading. Why?  Because you have no idea what that stock will be trading for when it opens, and you have no control over what price you will pay/receive.  If your schedule dictates that you must place your orders outside of trading hours, learn to use stop and limit orders, and use them every time you trade. You may pay a slightly higher transaction fee, but you might save your transaction!

Seriously.

In closing: some thoughts to get you through a tough day; the TSA proposes killing business travel altogether screening private plane passengers too (how do they think they are going to pull that off at the kind of airports such flights generally use?); and fix the credit problem, let the pesky symptoms take care of themselves.

Tomorrow ought to be interesting

A couple weeks ago, I (privately) said that if the Dow punched through 10,000, there was absolutely nothing stopping it from going down to about 8600. And we’ve now dropped below 8600.  I was thinking of more-or-less a 20 year chart.  If we go higher from here, I think it will head right back to the mid 10k range.  If it goes lower, something around 7500.  In the extremely unlikely possibility that the Dow should break below about 7300, there is absolutely nothing stopping it before 4000. However, that would require financial carnage including complete collapse of Dow components — without Dow Jones changing the rules by subbing a more viable player.

By way of disclaimer, this is not financial advice.  My ideas are little more than the office football pool of the stock market.

In closing: why did it take two months to arrest this drunken nutcase?; if you are still somehow confused about the candidate’s issues, MahaBarbara has links for you; support your local animal shelter; the Treasury Department is considering taking an “ownership stake” in banks, and the thing that bothers me is that they even want to own a peice of healthy banks (um yeah, which party are the “socialists” again?); and a couple things about illegal immigration. Now on one hand, I don’t know what to make of these big public raids.  Can you prove you are a citizen with stuff you normally keep in your pockets?  More to the point, they never seem to arrest any company officials who hire these illegal workers.  And it is true that legal immigration is a broken system that needs fixing — and temporarily doubling the INS staff to work backlog if necessary. But what we will find if we are able to get that done is that the employers who are currently “forced” to hire illegal workers will continue to find cheap, easily exploited sources of labor until such time as they are held accountable to laws already on the books.

Goodnight!

Survey Says!

Good morning, readers.

This morning I have a post by special request from a research team at New York University. They would like you to participate in a political opinion survey.  According to the site, the initial set of questions should take 15-20 minutes, and there will be a follow up that might take another 15 minutes.

Please, take the time to help them out.  Here is the link to the opening page of the survey, with more information. You will notice that comments are turned off;  that is by request of the research team.  They don’t want the comments thread to accidentally color the results.

Aw heck, it wouldn’t be much of a post without In closing: you clearly need a cardboard box opening simulator; 100 skills every man should know; a wise open letter to Hank and Benny; a comic that captures my sentiments; The Money Meltdown; the Economist’s View of What The Heck Happened; Ok we have a bailout, but it won’t fix everything; in fact, some think it will only help if the housing market gets better (locally, it’s happening but nationally, even the NAR is guessing); Economists Prefer Obama; parents prefer telling kids the truth about sex; the employment situation sucks, particularly when you include “the underemployed”; peacekeepers in a neighborhood near you?; not to scare you but the presidential election could end in an electoral tie (remember that when you vote for a Representative in Congress, ok?); and Stationmaster Tama is still a cat, but he’s driving tourism to his local Eki (train station).  I suppose he actually runs the local worldgate as well.

Long Hair of Shorties

Word to the new source of titles: If you love horror movies as much as I don’t, you will want to bookmark Doomed Moviethon.

Succinct Scientific Analysis: from Fafblog on Global Warming.

But it’s just a little airport in a big city: Chicago is going to privatize Midway Airport. Midway is, well, Chicago’s Love Field, with slightly smaller buildings surrounding it.

Have you bothered to register to vote? Well how about you BotherVoting too. Nobody says you have to vote for one of the major candidates. You can register your distaste for all of the above, if you so choose, by selecting an obscure candidate or even writing in a favorite cartoon character.

USA Today asks the same question many of us have wondered: Does the Border Patrol single out people who are brown or look “ethnic”?

Evolved: Scientists now think that HIV has been around for about 100 years, quickly and quietly mutating. Yeah, that’s what we call evolution when it happens to germs.

Kudos to everyone who commented: the HHS has had to (temporarily, I fear) back down on new guidelines that would let medical professionals decide not to allow certain medications for women on the grounds that it might cause an abortion in someone who was not yet pregnant.

Overweight people eat differently: Ok, sounds like a missive from the Duhpartment of Research. It turns out that overweight people and normal weight people have very different behaviors at a Chinese Buffet.

I’ve been asked to link: Army of Women is an organization for the prevention and cure of breast cancer.

Strangest story you will read all day, I promise: In Britain, “A road rage driver was burned to death after ramming another vehicle and setting her own car on fire by furiously revving her engine….” Be sure you scroll down to the pictures of the “ladies” involved.

It’s a little late to debunk Dan Quayle: I know, I’m on about the wrong Veep Debates, but do you remember when Danny talked about all the jobs that would evaporate if the proposals in Al Gore’s book were implemented? Well a new study says that renewable energy could create millions of jobs.

Oh, Okay, a few words about the current Veep Debate: Courtesy of Defective Yeti.

Stop using code-words: Conservatives want to argue that all our current foreclosure problems are due to a 1977 law (talk about your time delay) that “forced” banks to lend to “unqualified minorities.” For pity sake, if they came out and said “it’s the fault of black people” — which is what they are thinking — they would be laughed back to 1863. Don’t let them wink-and-nudge us into some kind of Jim Crow America.

Things are tough all over: I guess you’ve probably heard that jobless claims are the highest they’ve been since just after 9/11. Did you also hear that entrepreneurs are struggling? Did you know that many “entrepreneurs” are nothing more than people who couldn’t get a job and so they started working for themselves? And to top it all off, are you aware that the day after voting for a huge financial rescue bill, he said that same bill was “putting us on the brink of economic disaster”?

Not Trivia, or at least Not Trivial: Did you know that one in every 6 Americans has a criminal record?

That’s it for now. Have a great Friday.

O-genki desu ka?

Or, “Are you healthy?”

A lot has been said about Senator McCain’s proposed health insurance reform plan. He says “I want to make sure we’re not handing the health care system over to the federal government….”  Interestingly enough, the federal government has taken care of his health care for his entire life.  But on to the plan.

He wants to take away the tax break your employer (assuming you have one) gets for providing you health insurance, and instead give you a tax credit of up to $5000 for buying your own insurance. The thing is, I honestly believed such a plan would work 5 years ago. I now think that such a plan would have worked perhaps 10 or even 15 years ago, but it’s way too late (and frankly was probably too late 5 years ago). Critics say it will cause companies to drop coverage for employees.  Yes, yes it does.  And that’s the goal.

Senator McCain thinks it will work out to give you $5000 in April to pay for something that costs you $12,000, payable in monthly installments.  That’s only problem one.  Problem two is that in some states, citizens are required to have health insurance.  Talk about raising the cost of living! Furthermore, mandates such as this completely short-circuit the “market actions” that would have brought costs down. Without such mandates, consumers might have demanded quality policies with decent coverage that cost something closer to what they would get out of the tax credit.

The goal — an admirable one — was to bring down health insurance costs by making the insurance industry more subject to the laws of supply and demand.  The actual result of such a plan would be people spending way more of their income on insurance without getting a whole lot more for their money.

Just a few things about the bailout package that failed yesterday (NOT because Republicans were being babies, not because “we just don’t understand” how important it is, but rather because that particular package was BAD NEWS): it’s raining investors; consumer spending dropped last month, probably mostly because consumer income dropped on an inflation-adjusted basis (funny about not spending lots of money when you don’t have lots of money to spend); an all too true chart; Congress is — of course — scrambling to polish that turd revise the bill; and 5 lessons from the Credit Crisis.

In closing: a shout-out to those of you in Fort Worth to check out Sheila Ford, candidate for state House of Representatives; you know it’s bad when the BBC is reporting on Americans who live in their cars; a collection of links to accounts of the Great Depression; My Backpack’s Got Jets! (reference); Koizumi the younger is entering politics; Stupid Republican Tricks (what on earth was she thinking when she said that??); about time they started to investigate those fired prosecutors (does “executive privilege” apply after January?); tomorrow is World Vegetarian Day; on the possibility of a Detroit bailout (Citizen Carrie, if you have anything to say please do); and finally, Snow On Mars.

Interesting Timing

Congress has taken time out of its busy schedule saving the economy from certain ruin to recommend the pardon of a long dead boxer.

That man, Jack Johnson, was convicted under the Mann Act of transporting an unmarried woman across state lines for “immoral” activities.

This recommendation comes in the same year that Eliot Spitzer was threatened with prosecution under the same law.

In closing: what I hope is the last word on the $700B bailout; that’s not the way I would have chosen to solve our illegal immigrant problem; a man who felt overwhelmed.  Enjoy the debate, since it appears to be back on.

RIP WaMu

My rundown is over at my business site.

Month-end retrospective for September 2003-2007: Why Johnny Can’t Make Ends Meet; Renters Need Not Apply; Black Hearts, Blackwater;  Last Call to register to vote — it’s getting to be that time again; Moneyectomy is unfortunately both timely and dated (will we ever see $2/gal unleaded again?); another everything old is new again post, Japanese Economics Lesson; and How To Keep A Job.

The Short Version

Ok.  I have read a whole lot of commentary on the Big Bailout Bill of 2008.  I have been hearing a lot for the last day or so that “the root problem is that real estate prices are going down.”

That is bogus. Since we can legitimately add “because” to the end of that theory and have things to put there, it cannot be the root cause.  Root causes by definition are not results of something else.

“Real estate prices” (by which I am meaning “housing prices”) are going down for two main reasons:  first, prices went up too fast earlier in the decade and we are “reverting to the old trendline” — going down to where things would be if prices had appreciated at normal levels instead of silly bubble levels; second, a combination of stagnant wages and effectively non-existent job growth means that Joe and Jane Average can no longer afford to purchase real estate, and in certain cases can no longer afford payments on real estate they purchased in happier times.  More on the economic pressures faced by Joe and Jane from a little place just outside Hooterville.  More on unemployment rates on a state-by-state from the Economic Policy Institute, and remember these are official government figures that do leave out certain classes of the jobless.

The only reason Joe and Jane were able to buy through most of the decade is inovative mortgage products designed to make them think it was affordable when it was not.  The reasons Joe and Jane wanted to play were that they feared being priced out of the market, they thought it was an investment that would only rise in value, they thought surely their financial situation would improve, they didn’t understand the implications of their creative mortgage product, they kept being told how many benefits there were to owning their own home. See also:  Fannie Mae Wants You to Own a House.

I don’t see anything in any of the various financial disaster averting proposals that does a darn thing to fix those causes of the “root cause”.

In closing: Stonehenge is older that we thought; State of the Blogosphere; speaking of functional (or non-functional) financial markets, Expert Ezra on the Insurance Markets; MahaBarbara on abortion in the world; they’ve been singing professionally for 50 years, The Peanuts are perhaps better known in the West as the Mothra Twins; and the problem with optimism.  I hope to have something posted on BridgetMagnus.com about the state of the housing market in general later today. In the meantime, my top post is about an old solution to high housing prices.

Is there anybody who likes this bailout plan?

Maybe you didn’t notice, but this weekend’s bank failure is Ameribank.  Usual caveats: if you have any business with them whatsoever you’ll need to make a bunch of phone calls in the morning.

So then the $700,000,000,000 bailout plan. Yesterday a lot of people spent most of the day trying to figure out what it meant.  It seems that these are the points to remember:

That $700 thousand million is a minimum number.  Some people say the minimum this plan will take is more like a trillion — a Million Million Dollars.

It will set up an entire government agency.  I suppose that will at least create some jobs, and maybe some of them won’t be given on the basis of party loyalty.

The dealings of that agency will not be transparent, and the agency will only answer to the Secretary of the Treasury. He’s from the government.  Trust him.  Right.

It still won’t help all the lending institutuions — without whom Joe and Jane Average can’t get mortgages or other credit, at all. Yes, hold your nose, but we can’t fix Joe and Jane’s problems without fixing Megabankcorp’s problems.

It is theoretically modeled on the RTC, which did its job and disbanded.  This agency has an initial budget almost 12 times the initial budget of the RTC.

The agency will NOT be limited to purchasing AMERICAN assets, and helping AMERICAN taxpayers.

Nor will the agency be limited to residential properties;  it will also bail out commercial developments.  As a proud Las Vegas resident, I should probably consider it a good thing that they are willing to buy out some of our temporary overdevelopment!

Some smart economists can’t figure out why this is supposed to work, and have already started trying to figure out who is going to profit out of the deal.

The whole darn thing is only 3 pages long — how can you create an entire government agency and fix the economy in 3 pages? —  but it includes raising the ceiling on the national debt to $11.3 million million.

Even with everything that is known, there are still huge, huge questions left to be answered.

So there you go.

In closing: Other ways to enjoy The Wizard of Oz; on Young Adult Literature; we’ll miss Amy (don’t let the new show suck!); the free markets worked so well in banking, let’s do the same thing to health insurance; and somebody doing something about the furry victims of foreclosure. Holy cow, I realize that times are tough, but abandoning a family member, just because they can?  I can only imagine the horrible things running through the kids’ minds.