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Frugal Or Broke – Across The Boards

By Dave

From Gallup:
PRINCETON, NJ — Baby boomers’ self-reported average daily spending of $64 in 2009 is down sharply from an average of $98 in 2008. But baby boomers — the largest generational group of Americans — are not alone in pulling back on their consumption, as all generations show significant declines from last year. Generation X… »

Yo! Shrink This!

By Dave

James Hamilton of Econobrowser takes Paul Krugman to task in his telling us not to sweat the national debt since, after all, we where in worse shape in 1945. To summarize here’s the… »

The Great Bond Debate

By Dave

I side with Jim… »


Is GM Stock Worthless?

By Dave

I think so. But Gerry Sullivan at Seeling Alpha has a different take.
Secondly, GM has lost about $69 per share in the last 3 years. That loss is very valuable…. »

Inflation Dove

By Dave

Paul Krugman penned a piece today telling us that all of the inflation scare talk is really just politically motivated so the Obama admin will stop its effort to “rescue… »

More Lies, Damn Lies & Statistics

By Dave

Well, the place is lousy with optimists these days.  The Stress Tests have been released – although I’m highly skeptical of them simply because they grossly understated the derivatives risk… »

Keep An Eye On Bond Spreads

By Dave

Minyan Brandine Rife says that a good tell on the economy is the high yield bond spread over treasuries.
As you can see, since early March, Corporate Investment Grade (subjective, but… »

The Terrible 10

By Dave

According to Bloomberg 10 of the 19 stress tested banks will need additional capital to weather the storm.
he Federal Reserve plans to deliver results of stress tests on U.S. banks… »

Allan Metzler On Inflation

By Dave

AS my regular readers know, I’ve been warning about inflation being a problem at some point in the future.  I don’t know if I’ve written about it, but I also… »

Shorting The Treasury

By Dave

From AFP:
China, wary of the troubled US economy, has already “canceled America’s credit card” by cutting down purchases of debt, a US congressman said Thursday.
China has the world’s largest foreign… »

Look Out Google

By Dave

There’s soon to be a new search in town named Wolfram Alpha that is the internet’s first foray into artificial intelligence.
The real innovation, however, is in its ability to work… »

May Outlook Newsletter

By Dave
personal consumption graph

Greetings,
There’s a lot of optimism out there.  Personally I really appreciated a break from endless bad news – or at least less bad news than what we had for the… »

Burlington Northern A Buy?

By Dave

I’ve taken a whippin’ on Burlington Northern (NYSE BNI) over tha last year.  When it became known that Warren Buffet was buying big chunks of the railroad I followed.  since… »

The Economics Of Wind Power

By Dave

There’s and interesting post about wind energy at The Infrastructurist that points to the fatal flaws of wind power.  He references an article published in Insights, an energy journal, by… »

Treasury To Bail Out Fed for Bear & AIG

By Dave

As I’ve said before, this bailout business is complicated:
April 24 (Bloomberg) — The Federal Reserve took on more than $74 billion in subprime mortgages, depreciating commercial leases and other assets… »

The Second Derivative

By Dave

The Second Derivative test, if you’ll recall your calculus,  is a criterion to see if a given stationary point of a function is either a local maximum or a local… »

Market Euphoria

By Dave

We’ve seen the market rally back to its post March 9th highs and, as always, the question remains if we’re actually in a new bull market or if this is… »

A Crises Of Confidence – For Good Reason

By Dave

BofA chief Ken Lewis believes he was told  by Ben Berneanke and hank Paulson to keep quiet to shareholders about the deteriorating condition of Merill Lynch:
Lewis testified in February to… »

What’s Good For GM…

By Dave

Brace yourselves for GM’s bankruptcy proceedings. Hers’s what ClusterStock has to say:
Members of the Treasury’s auto task force have held a series of calls with the company to prepare for… »

A Look At The Crises And Regulation

By Dave

Eric Falkenstein of Clusterstock argues that leverage was not the cause of the financial crises.  Here are the money quotes:
Anyway, Posner’s book A Failure of Capitalism goes over the latest… »

Better Off Dead

By Dave

The very same banks that the Treasury is holding hostage with refusing to take back TARP money is playing regular hard-ball when it comes to lending.
A group of the U.S.’s… »

Dr. Doom Prescribes Cold Showers

By Dave

And he’s  calling this a “sucker’s rally.”
The emerging consensus among economists is that growth next year will be close to the trend rate of 2.5 per cent.
Investors are talking of… »

It’s Always Coca-Cola

By Dave
ko2

From Bloomberg:
Coca-Cola Co. is using micro-dosing technology from drugmakers, a smart phone operating system from Microsoft Corp. and style tips from Italian auto designers in its latest attempt to revive… »

Moody’s Tars Country – Frank To Hold Hearings

By Dave

Moody’s has decided that it’s too much work to actually rate individual cities and assigned a “negative outlook” to each of the 52,000 municipalities of the U.S. of A.
On Tuesday,… »

FDIC Makes Enron Look Like Ft. Knox

By Dave

Via Marginal Revolution:
Andrew Ross Sorkin has been digging around in the FDIC’s charter, and has discovered that it is barred from incurring any obligation greater than $30 billion. Which is… »

Nervous Ticks

By Dave

Via Clusterstock are the five propsosed uptick rules:
The SEC’s five member governing panel approved five different short-selling proposals today. They will not be put out for a 60-day public comment… »

Conflicting Messages

By Dave

There’s an old saw amongst traders about analysts that goes: “In a bull market you don’t need them.  In a bear market you don’t want them.”
I bring this up because… »

Alcoa, Inc. Reports Fugly Numbers

By Dave

The first Dow component to report in the season (NYSE AA) missed even their lowered expectations:
Alcoa (AA Quote – Cramer on AA – Stock Picks) reported a first-quarter loss and… »

20/20 Hindsight Or Shameless Self-dealing?

By Dave

Lloyd Blankfein is all on board for new regulatory rules. Of course we know that capitalists really do hate competition and now that GS is the last man standing in… »

Recommended Reading

By Dave

Mario Rizzo has a terrific piece on why the current economic policies will only prolong the… »

Consumers Begin Paying Off Their Debt

By Dave

From ClusterStock:
Consumer credit plunged far faster than expected in February, with Americans taking on far less credit card debt.  Credit card debt fell at an annual rate of $7.8 billion,… »

Because Being The Money God Is Fun

By Dave

If you don’t think so look at this:
Treasury will wait until after first-quarter earnings season to release results in order to soften impact on stocks.
Seems a little ironic that, on… »

TALF Under Performs – Update

By Dave

CNBC reported that the TALF auctiion so far had abuot $2.3B in bids.  This is way lower than what the Fed had hoped for and highlights the big freeze in… »

GM Is Looking To File

By Dave

From Reuters:
General Motors Corp is in “intense” and “earnest” preparations for a possible bankruptcy filing, a source familiar with the company’s plans told Reuters on Tuesday.
A plan to split the… »

Another (More) Bullish Call

By Dave

By way of The Business Insider:
Paul Kasriel of Northern Trust was way ahead of the curve in spotting the downturn. In the past month or so, he’s turned more bullish,… »

Meredith Whitney On Bank Earnings

By Dave

I don’t know if I agree that investors will chase bank values through higher capital ratios (maybe that’s wishful thinking on my part given the schnitz of exposure I put… »

Chart Of The Day

By Dave
sp1871onward-084x084

140 years of the S&P

Now, remember that the actual stocks in the index change all the time.  But I think it’s directionally correct.
If I could just get someone to tell… »

Some Upbeat Predictions

By Dave

Just like most of the stuff on this site, they’re worth what you paid for ‘em.  It’s nice, though, to see some smart guys thinking positively .
Doug Cass
James Kostohryz
Just for… »

Dump Banks?

By Dave

Mike Mayo, a solid banking analyst says it’s time to dump banks
U.S. stocks dropped after Mayo gave “sell” ratings to banks including Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based BB&T Corp. and Cincinnati’s Fifth… »

Time For A Bear Market Rally Correction?

By Dave
spsau1

I think so, but hey, I’ve been wrong plenty of times before.  Jeff Saut thinks the market is over-bought:
The call for this week: So far, the buying stampede is still… »

Ford Bond Holders Running For The Hills

By Dave

Ford (NYSE F) is up over 8% today on the news that they have “paid” $9.9 billion in debt.  But there’s a lot more to the deal than meets the… »

The Next Shoe – CRE

By Dave

Mike “Mish” Shedlock reports this about Chicago’s Hancock Building:
The firms initiated foreclosure after the Hancock’s previous owner, Broadway Partners of New York, defaulted on some of the loans it used… »

Winners and Losers

By Dave

H/T 2 Helena… »

It’s Come To Jeebus Time – Earnings

By Dave

It the start of the quarterly reporting season and the results will impact the psychology of the market to a greater extent than in more normal times. To borrow from… »

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The information on this site is not intended as individualized investment advice and all investment decisions by a reader must in all cases be made by the reader either individually or together with his/her investment professional. The views expressed in articles appearing on this site are solely those of Dave Budge and should not be attributed to any other person or entity except where expressly stated.