Archive - Nov 6, 2009

The concentration of ownership in the financial services industry has resulted in higher bank fees and interest rates that consumers are forced to pay for credit cards, mortgages and other financial products.

No single financial institution should be so large that its failure would cause catastrophic risk to millions of American jobs or to our nation’s economic well-being.

No single financial institution should have holdings so extensive that its failure could send the world economy into crisis.

We believe it is time to break up the banks and insurance companies which are too big to fail.

LEBOWSKI: Did I urinate on your rug?

DUDE: You mean, did you personally come and pee on my--

LEBOWSKI: Hello! Do you speak English? Parla usted Inglese? I'll say it again. Did I urinate on your rug?

DUDE: Well no, like I said, Woo peed on the rug--

Not spinning. On a Friday. It's going to take more than four decrepit bank failures to keep me off the decks.

Our test broadcast begins, well, now.  Live stuff from yours truly? Think 10:15ish ET.  The heat of the party?  You'll know it when you hear it. 

Uh-oh...

As Marla may or may not be spinning tonight, we leave you with this until such time as she decides what she is doing.

One sometimes wonders why the idiots in Washington have still not bailed out the private equity industry. After all, for the low, low price of about $100 billion (which is about how much keeping Fannie on life support will cost US taxpayers in the first quarter of 2010 alone), Congress can ensure that thousands of PE associates, VPs and MDs can once again frequent Hustler Club, order dozens of bottles of Cristal at Lotus, and eat sushi straight off geisha bodies at Bar Masa. In other words, a return to those oh so difficult days of 2007. Furthermore, looking at the track record of PE, especially as characterized by its 10 largest deals in history, one can make the mistake that KKR, Apollo, Bain, Carlyle and Providence are all employing exclusively government workers: therefore the government would in essence be bailing out itself.

For those who are interested in more information, Moody's has compiled a useful report, entitled "$640 billion & 640 days later: how companies sponsored by big private equity have performed during the U.S. recession."

Investors are basically rational, right?

In fact, as many studies have demonstrated, the answer is no.

It is your friend for a while... until....

Did you ever wish for a crystal ball that can tell you when the market is going up or down? How about a personal trading advisor that can recommend when to enter a trade? If you said yes to either one of these, you are not alone. Imagine if you had a trading platform that did both and was easy to use. A trading platform with no complex portfolios, no difficult software and no expensive data feeds. After a few brainstorm sessions and lots of coffee, we built Quant Trader EOD (End of Day). We also added simple portfolio building, easy to use software and a free data feed. In fact, Quant Trader is so effective and easy to use that a trader with literally no experience can be up and running in one day...

Yep. Sure enough. Refresh this thread for updates as they come.

Following up on the Kanjorski news earlier, it is now Senator Bernie Sanders who is set to anger PETA with his desire to disembowel pristine examples of cephalopodean vampyrrhic perfection. The Senator has revealed legislation which requires the AIG-bailout mastermind Tim Geithner to name banks "whose collapse may shake the economy" and break up these firms in a year. Look for some serious flight or flight sympathetic/parasympathetic ganglia to be going like gangbusters in the dorsal column of various bloodsucking marine creatures. After all who'd a thunk that the willing victims of daily monetary rape would have the guts to stand up for themselves (and if things are accelerating now, wait until Main Street learns that the average Goldman employee is getting paid about $750,000 for 2009).

True, we did hear catatonic murmurings through the bathroom door before the announcement last Friday as Sheila Bair bobbed her head left and right rhythmically on the floor of her shower, knees pulled into her chest, rocking back and forth, hypnotically repeating "...absolutely safe... ...fully protected... ...ever lost a penny of insured deposits... ...none ever will... ...none ever will..." over and over again as the soothing hot water concealed the tears that would otherwise be streaming down her face.

Forget Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. Those crazy financial gangsta rappers are at it again. After privatizing their gains while handing their losses to us, N.W.A. (Nationalizerz with Attitudes) shares the homemade tunes which served as anthems during their reign.The crew -- (clockwise) Tim Geithner, Stan O'Neal, Johnny Thain, Dick Fuld, Hank Paulson, and Joe Cassano -- truly brought their best stuff in this freshman effort. The opening song and instant classic "Straight Offa Wall Street" was infamously heard echoing down Upper East Side streets as several black bulletproof GMC Yukon Denali XLs cruised the early morning hours in 2006-07.

Rep Kanjorski is out with a simple recommendation: give the council of regulators the power to unwind any bank deemed too big to fail (of course, if the council is made up of the Federal Reserve subsidiary of Goldman Sachs alone, this is probably a moot point). With Goldman set to spend massive lobbying dollars this and next year, don't expect much traction, and/or enforceability of this action. More relevantly, Kanjorski acknowledges that repealing Glass Steagal and replacing it with the worst bill in history, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, that set us on our course of certain destruction, was a not a "good" idea.

It is time to immediately end Gramm-Leach-Bliley before it is too late.

In order to understand the present state of the U.S. economy you have to understand that there are two things happening at once. For the most part they are in conflict with each other, in that one track can negatively impact the other. Lest I be accused of putting out conflicting information, there is evidence that the economy is recovering in some fashion, but not because of the reasons most economists and politicians think. There are still substantial prevailing winds blowing against the kind of recovery most commentators are hailing as fact. But economies have a tendency to repair themselves unless the feds derail the process.