Do-It-Yourself Memorial Day Linkfest
I hope everyone is enjoying their long holiday weekend -- I have the iPod charged up, the burgers ready to for the grill, some SPF 8, and lots and lots of weekend reading.
Since the linkfest is on hiatus, here's a fun suggestion: Use the comments to suggest your favorite link from the past 8 days (Sunday to Sunday). I'll see if I can't massage something together over the weekend out of them.
The rules are simple: Post the Headline, source name (in parens), a paragraph or two, and the full link. -- Be sure to put the link in the space marked URL; this way, your name will be the hotlink to the article. Those of you comfortable with HTML can use this code <a href="URL-GOES-HERE">Title</a>
The rough proportions of content should be approximately:
70%: Anything Market, Economic, Investing/Trading, Federal Reserve, Sentiment/Psychology, Earnings/Valuation, Credit/Derivative or Housing related.
20%: Technology, Science, Media, War & Defense, Politics
10%: Music, Film, Books Fun!
Bonus points goes to those who find really cool but overlooked articles. The trade-off is content quality always trumps obscurity of source (meaning, some junk is unknown for a reason).
That's the formula for my linkfest -- let's see if our crowd-sourcing do-it-yourself experimental fest generates anything interesting.
>
LINK AWAY !
Saturday, May 24, 2008 | 04:30 PM | Permalink
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Adult Entertainment Hit Hard by Gas Prices (FirstCoast News)
The rising prices of gas, food and travel are having a major effect on the entertainment industry on Florida’s First Coast district near Jacksonville.
Posted by: RB | May 24, 2008 4:45:46 PM
I found the following of value: http://www.financialsense.com/Market/daily/friday.htm
Posted by: Winston Munn | May 24, 2008 4:55:30 PM
Since you added those recent interview CNBC clips with David Walker and Pete Peterson, I thought you guys might also be interested in this Charlie Rose interview with Peterson (April 2008).
http://www.charlierose.com/shows/2008/04/02/1/a-conversation-with-pete-peterson
Posted by: David | May 24, 2008 5:02:12 PM
A Weekly Listing of Future Corporate Downsizings...
http://www.costar.com/News/Article.aspx?id=856E86AE4F9CBAF83823FCE2212E8508
Posted by: Ian leNobel | May 24, 2008 5:09:52 PM
Weddings scale back along with economy (AP story in The Honolulu Advertiser)
The fairytale weddings that many couples have yearned for are starting to come back down to earth — leveled by everyday problems like house payments and rising gas and food bills. "Every girl dreams about their wedding day," said Rebecca Stamilio, who braved the February chill and the crowds at Filene's Basement's bridal sale in Manhattan to find a gown. "But at the same time, you're like, 'Oh, my gosh — I could pay off this much of my mortgage.' "
Posted by: evanesce | May 24, 2008 5:13:34 PM
Buffett sees "long, deep" U.S. recession (May 24, 2008)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080524/bs_nm/buffett_us_recession_dc
Posted by: Stephen Falken | May 24, 2008 5:39:02 PM
david einhorn's (greenlight capital) speech on lehman....a must read if you want to know why the credit crisis is not over!
Posted by: pjfny | May 24, 2008 5:44:16 PM
sorry here is the url:
http://mrmortgage.ml-implode.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/david-einhorn-ira-sohn-speech-5-21-08.pdf
Posted by: pjfny | May 24, 2008 5:45:48 PM
Einhorn questions Lehman's first quarter numbers.
"In the quarter, Lehman said it had a pretax gain of $695 million related to hard-to-value equities. In the previous four quarters, the average, unrealized gain from such holdings was $69 million."
"In his speech, Mr. Einhorn also questioned the values Lehman put on many other financial assets. In particular, he said Lehman hadn't sufficiently written down $6.5 billion of complex debt securities called collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs.
He added that these holdings were only recently disclosed, even though other banks and Wall Street firms disclosed similar holdings months ago and took massive write-downs on them."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121150995261316479.html?mod=todays_us_money_and_investing
Posted by: Joe | May 24, 2008 5:46:04 PM
"He's Dead, Jim!" (Political Calculations)
We had a USB flash drive go belly up on us, and got word back that the files on the drive could not be recovered. We noted the occasion with a bit of pure silliness, with Star Trek's Dr. McCoy delivering the official diagnosis....
A Less Distressed U.S. Stock Market (Political Calculations)
This post falls just a few days outside the past eight days window, but the insight hasn't changed. Using analysis methods pioneered at Political Calculations, we evaluate the current state of the stock market as of mid-May and find that it's just not getting worse.
Posted by: Ironman | May 24, 2008 5:49:20 PM
PJFNY beat me to it so:
More on the useless credit rating systems:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/09a762ee-2699-11dd-9c95-000077b07658,dwp_uuid=5fd271ee-61f6-11dc-bdf6-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1
"In a time of ever shrinking returns from investments in credit at the height of a raging bull market, early versions of these highly structured and complex deals promised to pay 200 basis points – that is 2 percentage points – over Libor, or the “risk-free” rate at which banks lend to each other. And that spread came with the top-notch triple A ratings that indicate an incredibly low probability that investors could lose their money."
Posted by: Joe | May 24, 2008 5:50:19 PM
Good article on WSJ about the mortgage crisis. Well-written and researched by William Isaac.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121141155101312315.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries
Posted by: JHunt | May 24, 2008 6:11:38 PM
Tom Whipple is a retired CIA person and has a regular feature in the Falls Church News. His latest column makes an interesting point.
Most realists watching the numbers believe that petroleum exports as opposed to production are going to go away real fast. Experience with major exporters that already have peaked – Indonesia, the UK and Mexico for example – suggests that in about 6-9 years after an exporter’s oil production peaks, they cease exporting. As Russia already is giving off peaking signals and the Saudis are not too far away, the evidence, whether we like it or not, is screaming that we will be importing a lot less oil and gasoline ten years from now than our current 12 million barrels per day.
He goes on to discuss the creation of the "Secretary of Transition"...
http://www.fcnp.com/national_commentary/the_peak_oil_crisis_...
Posted by: NancyM | May 24, 2008 6:13:45 PM
"The Commodity Bubble" report from the BBC. (Sorry, no transcript, audio only).
Worth a listen.
Posted by: Chuck | May 24, 2008 6:16:04 PM
"Index Speculators have now stockpiled, via the futures market, the equivalent of 1.1 billion barrels of petroleum, effectively adding eight times as much oil to their own stockpile as the United States has added to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve over the last five years."
http://hsgac.senate.gov/public/_files/052008Masters.pdf
Posted by: Stephen Falken | May 24, 2008 6:18:02 PM
The world awash in money? (Brad Setzer's comments on this week's The Economist article on global monetary policy)
"The Economist reports that the average global real interest rates is negative (”global monetary policy is now at its loosest since the 1970s: the average world real interest rate is negative”) largely because of very high rates of inflation in the emerging world."
Posted by: Estragon | May 24, 2008 6:45:50 PM
I am studying for Level II this weekend. Good luck to anyone taking one of the exams in 14 days!
Posted by: cap | May 24, 2008 6:51:23 PM
What is the true state of the consumer? Lots of charts to make the points.
Cool, Clear Water (Financial Sense WrapUp)
"....but I’m convinced that over the last few decades, increasingly the conceptual lines between real liquidity means and access to credit availability for US households has blurred. The equity line of credit has become thought of more as access to cash as opposed to what it truly represents – access to debt. We've often heard the term "cash-out" refi's. Shouldn't that really be debt-out refis? You get the point. It's only when asset cycles turn down, as is now the case with US real estate and in good part US equities, that the true nature of liquidity stripped of the conceptual relationship to further credit availability begins to become a bit more clear. As the ability of debt driven monetization of household asset values begins to subside, the true character of liquidity means reveals itself.
So as we look ahead and consider the financial/liquidity circumstances of US households, and ponder the trajectory of the true US and global economy post the financial market relief interlude of the moment, we need to address the question, will the current character of household liquidity lend itself to broader credit market and real world economic healing? Yes or no? Or maybe more importantly, will US households feel the need to increase their balance sheet liquidity circumstances in what has been a recent deflationary environment for their two largest asset holdings - residential real estate and common stocks? I suggest this question especially applies to the boomer generation who is necessarily going to need real liquidity in retirement years. Certainly a lot depends on employment circumstances ahead for the near retirement boomers as the real US economy continues to deal with macro credit cycle reconciliation issues near term."
http://www.financialsense.com/Market/daily/friday.htm
Posted by: Winston Munn | May 24, 2008 6:58:53 PM
Smooth take-off for Bangalore’s new airport (Hindu Business Line)
"The new airport smoothly slipped into business on Friday night. Air India did the honours for the first landing at 10.37 p.m. AI’s Airbus A320, IC 957 with 144 passengers, took off to Singapore at 12.05 a.m. on Saturday signalling Bangalore’s smooth and historic transition to Devanahalli."
Having flown into the old, horrific airport last November and facing the prospect of repeating that, this is fantastic news. The fact that such a major changeover took place without a hitch is testament to Indians' tolerance for chaos. Now all they need is some real roads...
On the lighter side...
The Perry Bible Fellowship gave me an hour of unparalleled, twisted entertainment today. The grim humor seems to fit the mood around here, so I thought I'd share. A few of the comics are NSFW.
Posted by: Darkness | May 24, 2008 7:13:53 PM
This is what happens when you buy an enormous & complex business over a weekend.
"Update 3:45 AM: Alert reader Steve wrote to tell me another shoe has already dropped, and has been curiously gone largely unnoticed. JP Morgan's option to buy the headquarters is being contested by the ground lease holder. This is a huge oversight. I can't imagine someone at Bear didn't know that this is the sort of thing that its acquirer would want to know, but hey, you pay a knocked-down price in haste, it's your obligation to know what exactly you are getting. At a minimum, this is pretty embarrassing. I assume that the bank will have to pay the plaintiff to go away. Wonder if they'll be able to avoid disclosing the amount."
From the naked capitalism blog.
Posted by: SRQ | May 24, 2008 7:26:01 PM
I'm not putting a favorite link but I do have a suggested topic. How do you pop an Asset Bubble? Looking back it's apparent that Housing was in a bubble and to give credit to a lot of different people, there were many that saw that was the case. There were metrics like rent equivalence that gave us hints, plus the fact that many people would not qualify for mortgages without No Doc loans.
Lets' take what appears to be the next Asset Bubble: Commodities
First off, how do you tell if it's a Bubble? Some things like Gold should track to the strength of the Dollar, but if we take Oil how do we know if it's a Bubble?
Everyone points to the fact that it only costs the Arab Nations X amount per barrel to pull it out of the ground, where X is in the $20 dollar range if I remember right. Of course it only costs Apple $200 bucks or so to make a iPhone and they sell it for much more, it doesn't matter Supply and Demand sets the price of what people will pay. Plus with Oil, there is no definitive agreement about Peak Oil, so if your economy is entirely dependent on one type of export you need to maximize the pice of it until you can build another economic model.
Let's limit the discussion to Oil then since it's easiest.
A) How do you determine if it's a bubble?
B) If it is a bubble how do you pop it?
Posted by: Hugh Watkins | May 24, 2008 7:38:06 PM
Here is the original story from Reuters about the ground lease troubles.
Posted by: SRQ | May 24, 2008 7:38:59 PM
Who is this person really? Thoughtless and heartless come to mind.
"May 23, 2008 --
"Hillary Clinton today brought up the assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy while defending her decision to stay in the race against Barack Obama.
"My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California...".
http://tinyurl.com/5sa5zm
Posted by: Strasser | May 24, 2008 7:40:33 PM
Who is this person really? Thoughtless and heartless come to mind.
"May 23, 2008 --
"Hillary Clinton today brought up the assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy while defending her decision to stay in the race against Barack Obama.
"My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California...".
http://tinyurl.com/5sa5zm
Posted by: Strasser | May 24, 2008 7:42:45 PM
Since energy/ethanol/peak oil/global warming is a popular topic: how much solar energy would we need to replace it? This map shows how much of the earth would have to be covered with solar panels to replace ALL of the energy used worldwide. Note: the caption says they are assuming 8% efficiency in converting to electricity. Elsewhere, wikipedia says 15% efficiency is typical for solar panels and solar hot water heaters are about 60% efficient. Thus, this map probably overstates the area required to be covered. Click here. It doesn't look like very much needs to be covered, but as my sister says, the world is a small place, but I wouldn't want to have to paint it.
By my calculation, it might take two to four trillion $ to cover the 7% of AZ needed to replace ALL US energy. Details.
Posted by: DaveInSeattle | May 24, 2008 7:47:04 PM
