Archive - Oct 2010 - Blog entry

Rough rice has skyrocketed by 50% since July, to $14.50 a hundred pounds. Rice is the primary food stuff for 3 billion of the world’s 7 billion population. Many of the disaster scenarios for the global food supply revolve around Asia. Crisis shortages will hit the rice markets there first, then spill over to other foodstuffs here. (CORN), (WHEAT), (SOYBEANS), (AGU), (POT), (MOS).

Prosecute or perish ...

The Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis (the uglier, less douchey stepsister to the B(L)S) released their first take on Q3 GDP this morning and it was unsurprisingly relatively more benign than a testicular mole or even Henry the IV of France.

If you are sick and tired and need somewhere to go, here is the place...

Hundreds of thousands of Britons have taken a holiday from their personal pension contributions, in further proof of the severity with which household budgets have been squeezed by the economic downturn.

Heck of a job ...

Please allow me to introduce myself--
I'm a man of wealth and taste--
Ive been around for a long, long year--
Stole many a man's nest egg and faith...

It looks like we've lost nearly trillion dollars in housing value and credit since the recession ended. With recoveries like this, who needs a depression?!

Who would have thought that Burrito Bowls and Red Envelopes would be hotter than the I-pad in 2010? Sounds crazy but it’s true. By looking at the YTD performance chart from Yahoo! Finance you can see that the stocks for Chipotle Mexican Grill (NYSE:CMG) and Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) have significantly outpaced Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) stock price so far this year.

They Would Have Been Pissed ...

Sadly only about $4Tn of our debt is owed to China, Japan and our other foreign creditors. While we may be stealing $1Tn from them, at least they get to sell us stuff. The rest of the debt, $11Tn, is owed to ourselves - to all the widows and orphans and pension funds that bought US bonds as "safe" investments as well as the poor suckers who worked their whole lives socking away 12.5% of their wages into a Social Security program whose "lock box" was raided by simply forcing retirees to lend their money to the government at unreasonably low rates and will now be paid back in dollars...

In light of all of this, I am officially going on record and forecasting that the Fed will be dissolved within five years. This latest decision to reveal to the public that the Fed takes orders from Wall Street is the beginning of a major PR move in which the Fed sets the stage for its own dissolution.

The Fed and smart money see the writing on the wall, and they’re already preparing the lifeboats for themselves. They know the system is busted and will eventually fail. They’re simply trying to start positioning themselves to make it look like they knew what they were doing all along (and in a way they did, if you count “plugging a sinking ship” as “knowing what you’re doing”).

A note to those banks that have blocked the access to popular blogs. Wall Street has been BLINDED by the “revenue at all costs” mentality! These deals, products, services and structures are a lot more than potential bonus checks and wide girth swinging dick bragging rights! They are life lines for the mentally disabled, widows retirement funds, potentially life saving programs for AIDS victims, domestic abuse victims, orphans, etc. Hey, I’m all for making money (a lot of money even), and I know that in order for you to make money someone else has to lose it, but there must be boundaries drawn. Attempting to block employees access to my blog (in vain) does little to improve things...

Far too many people equate the pursuit of advanced educational degrees with intelligence and an increased likelihood of success. I know this is conventional thinking, but I highly disagree with this theorem. As an entrepreneur, it is my sincere belief that the much safer route for young adults to seek during the next decade will be realized through the entrepreneurial pathway versus the traditional pathway of “climbing the corporate ladder”. This means skipping the traditional business academic process may become in vogue in future years.

But taking into consideration the somewhat disquieting news from China, I am wondering just how fast is a petaflop, exactly how fast is a high frequency trade (take automated scalping for example) and how does one visualize it in comparison to the processing speed of the average SEC porn surfer.