Archive - Dec 30, 2012

If earlier media speculation that the cliff debate was seeing some progress would have sent stocks higher (assuming it was not a Sunday), the speaker's just released response to Obama's Meet The Press appearance would have deflated all hope of any progress. Remember: all is fair in political circus and Beltway theater.

Watch as it is clearly demonstrated how a Galaxy Note 2 (Android) serves as a complete replacement for a desktop PC... and to think that many believe this is a race with Apple, a vendor of trendy mobile trinkets! Investment is more than just spreadsheets and numbers!

More GOP-bashing, more scapegoating, more "we need to raise taxes to cover a few days of spending" (and pray America's rich have never heard of Belgium), more hope and optimism, in other words more of the same, yet nothing on the last minute executive order hiking Federal spending, nothing on the myth of what really constitutes the spending "cuts", or why it is all really all about preserving the lie of a fair and efficient market: as if more than 10% of the US population actually cares where the DJIA closed on Friday. The full Obama Meet the Press interview below.

As largely expected, Sunday would be a day marked by rumors, anti-rumors, denials, counter-denials, and much more groundless speculation if zero facts, however without an open market reacting to every single headline like a collocated stung dog. Sure enough, in the first such rumor of the day, we just had Republican Senator - a long time opponent of the Norquist tax pledge - Lindsey Graham, pushing for his agenda in the same way that the Greek finance ministry would unleash perfectly wrong rumors to the FT and Reuters, who said on Sunday that chances for a small "fiscal Cliff" deal in the next 48 hours were "exceedingly good" and that President Barack Obama had won: i.e., taking an opinion and making it fact - something seen so often in the European negotiating tactics. "I think people don't want to go over the cliff if we can avoid it," Graham said on Fox News Sunday. Of course, how Graham views the world, and how potentially filibustering Senators do, not to mention the majority of Congress do, is a totally separate matter.