BOTD: A History of the End of the World

Why worry about things like Iraq, poverty, the environment, government and corporate corruption, etc. when the end of the world is just around the corner, and solving those problems might postpone it?

If the current occupant of the White House "does not speak in the familiar vocabulary of apocalyptic fundamentalism," Kirsch writes, "it is mostly because a new and updated 'language arsenal' has been deployed in contemporary America" -- an arsenal that in this case, Kirsch explains, uses code phrases such as "intelligent design" and "culture of life." But many of the president's policies resonate powerfully with a large fundamentalist community that takes apocalyptic notions, including hose that apply to Israel, with a fervent literalism. For them, and many others, the rapture draws nigh. - Jay Tolson, Washington Post review

He's a Nut

Seriously.

Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated "I am the president!" He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of "our country's destiny."

You Wan't Winners? Don't Look To Jim Cramer.

How soon people forget...Mad Money on CNBC is another sign that the Apocalypse must be near.

Check out this drivel from an infamous Jim Cramer TheStreet.com piece of, um, commentary on February 29, 2000 (you can hear the bell ringing in the background)...my [comments] are in brackets...

You want winners? You want me to put my Cramer Berkowitz hedge fund hat on and just discuss what my fund is buying today to try to make money tomorrow and the next day and the next? You want my top 10 stocks for who is going to make it in the New World? You know what? I am going to give them to you. Right here. Right now.

OK. Here goes. Write them down -- no handouts here!:

724 Solutions [$188.25 when Jimmy recommended it, $3.34 or so today]

Ariba [$264.50 then, $9.04 now]

Digital Island [bought by Cable & Wireless]

Exodus [Bankrupt]

InfoSpace.com [$217 then, $23.79 now...one of his less horrible picks..only down 90%]

Inktomi [bought for $1.65 by Yahoo]

Mercury Interactive [bought by HP]

Sonera [merged with Telia]

VeriSign [$253 when Jimbo recommended it, $29.09 today]

Veritas Software [merged with Symantec]

We are buying some of every one of these this morning as I give this speech. We buy them every day, particularly if they are down, which, no surprise given what they do, is very rare. And we will keep doing so until this period is over -- and it is very far from ending. Heck, people are just learning these stories on Wall Street, and the more they come to learn, the more they love and own! Most of these companies don't even have earnings per share, so we won't have to be constrained by that methodology for quarters to come...

How did this bizarro world where nine-tenths of the companies I have followed as a stock picker for the last 20 years are losers and one-tenth are winners? To answer that question, you have to throw out all of the matrices and formulas and texts that existed before the Web. You have to throw them away because they can't make money for you anymore, and that is all that matters. We don't use price-to-earnings multiples anymore at Cramer Berkowitz. If we talk about price-to-book, we have already gone astray. If we use any of what Graham and Dodd teach us, we wouldn't have a dime under management.

He also dismisses real companies like US Steel (up to $112 from $21.875 at the time of his bashing) and Union Pacific (up from $38 then to $118.76 now). Heckuva job, Cramer!

Another investment gem from the Mad Money guru:

First, any company that is a commodity producer simply can't be owned, no matter what.

Too funny! Finally there's this hilarious closer

So, if you can't own the retailers, and you can't own transports, and you can't own banks and brokers and financials and you can't own commodity makers and you can't own the newspapers, and you can't own the machinery stocks, what can you own?

A-ha, that just leaves us with tech. That's why we keep coming back to it. That's why, despite the 80% increase in the Nasdaq last year, we are looking at another record year now. It is by that process of elimination that I have picked my top 10. And my next 10 and my next 10 after. Only those companies are worth owning. The rest?

You can have them.

Thank you.

No, thank you Jim! For calling the top almost exactly.

The Nasdaq peaked about ten days after this clown's article.

Boo-yah!

VOTD: Jon Stewart with Bill Moyers

The Housing ATM

Again from the WP [but credit Bill Fleckenstein with coining the phrase 'Housing ATM']

For years, as the bull market in housing gathered steam, people used their homes as glorified ATMs, pulling out money for all sorts of reasons. The trend helped support continued economic growth and recovery from the 2001 recession. But now people are reining in their spending, raising concern that their collective decisions could nudge a sluggish U.S. economy into recession...

Homeowners gained an average of nearly $1 trillion a year in extra spending money from 2001 through 2005 -- more than triple the rate in the previous decade -- according to a study by former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and Fed economist James E. Kennedy. That's the "free cash," as the authors call it, left over after closing costs and other fees deducted from equity withdrawals. Most of the money extracted during those boom years, nearly two-thirds, came from home sales, the authors found.

Another 21 percent came from home equity lines of credit, while 15 percent came from mortgage refinancings. About a third of the free cash gained during this period was used to buy other homes, they calculated. About 29 percent was used to acquire stocks and other assets. About 12 percent went to home improvements. And nearly a fourth, 23 percent, went to consumer spending, including paying credit card bills and reducing other non-mortgage debts.

The amount of free cash extracted has fallen sharply since the peak in 2005, to $217 billion in the last three months of 2006, down by almost half from a peak of nearly $400 billion in the third quarter of 2005. Analysts disagree about whether these changes will affect consumer spending.

Analysts disagree about whether these changes will affect consumer spending???? It seems not unreasonable to think that a drop of 50% in "free cash" available to spend on plasma TVs, stocks and third homes might somehow possibly maybe put at least a slight damper on consumption.

Paul Wolfowitz is an Idiot

..so naturally, Bush today praised him as an "able public servant" and "a man of character and integrity".

Of course, Wolfowitz was one of the chief architects of the Iraq disaster. From the WP

Being Wolfie means not having to say you're sorry. Nearly three years ago, he offered some of the most memorable forecasts about Iraq: that it was "wildly off the mark" to think hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to pacify a postwar Iraq; that the Iraqis "are going to welcome us as liberators"; and that "it is just wrong" to assume that the United States would have to fund the Iraq war.

Some stunning gems from this complete, unrepentant screwup are collected here. How he can continue show his face in public is a complete mystery.

Presumably there's a special place in hell for this creep.

SOTD: Crustation - Purple

SOTD: Mick Jagger - Sweet Thing

SOTD: Sol Seppy - Slo Fuzz

SOTD: Mr. Scruff - Honeydew

BOTD: The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future

Hey! There are two major types of Muslims! This new book is pretty good at explaining the difference between Shia and Sunni Muslims, and why they're both very scary.

Flashback:

Former Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith is claiming President George W. Bush was unaware that there were two major sects of Islam just two months before the President ordered troops to invade Iraq...

In his new book, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created A War Without End, Galbraith, the son of the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith, claims that American leadership knew very little about the nature of Iraqi society and the problems it would face after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Maybe George can read this book after he's done with The Pet Goat.

Which Chart Better Reflects The Value of a Buck?

From Minyanville

Income Inequality

From The Street Light

Basically, income inequality is rising in the U.S. (but not other wealthy democracies), and the gap between rich and poor is much larger in the U.S. This is not a good thing.

Notes: Real Disposable Personal Income (DPI) for low- and high-income households expressed as a percent of median income in the US. Reduction in inequality measured as the change in the Gini coefficient between market incomes and after-tax (including transfer payments) disposable personal incomes.

This Woman Was Responsible For Hiring US Attorneys?????

Was the head of FEMA position not available?

Is there any standard of competence in the Bush Administration train wreck?

Is the sole qualification for employment in the Justice Department graduation from a fundamentalist Christian college and a strict GOP voting record?

Is Monica "Moon Unit" Goodling really Frank Zappa's long lost daughter?

Good grief....every day it gets more embarassing for this poor country.



Via ThinkProgress....


Rep. Bobby SCOTT: Did you break the law? Was it against the law to take those political considerations into account? You’ve got civil service laws. You’ve got obstruction of justice. Were there any laws that you could have broken by taking political considerations into account, quote, on some occasions?

Monica GOODLING: The best I can say is that I know I took political considerations into account on some occasions.

SCOTT: Was that legal?

GOODLING: Sir, I’m not able to answer that question. I know I crossed the line.

SCOTT: What line — legal?

GOODLING: I crossed the line of the civil service rules.

SCOTT: Rules? Laws. You crossed the law on civil service laws. You crossed the line on civil service laws, is that right?

GOODLING: I believe I crossed the lines. But I didn’t mean to. I mean, I…

SCOTT: OK.

Hey, she said she didn't mean it!

Move along Representative. Nothing to see here.

fyi China is Gonna Crash at Some Point

From Mish's fine site there's a great piece on the China Bubble...China is going to do very well in the next 100 years, but right now its stock market is crazy...remember when the Japanese were going to take over the world in 1989? Well, they didn't and their stock market is STILL 55% below it's peak, 18 years later! Check out the Shanghai stock market vs Nasdaq circa 2000 chart comparison....history doesn't repeat but it rhymes.

Another good site where you can read about all the nonsense is Sudden Debt.

This is a classic parabolic spike...they never end well...

We're Fighting Them Over There So That Al-Qaeda Can Get The Funding It Needs

Another sickening Bush administration disaster...

...In one of the most troubling trends, U.S. officials said that Al Qaeda's command base in Pakistan is increasingly being funded by cash coming out of Iraq, where the terrorist network's operatives are raising substantial sums from donations to the anti-American insurgency as well as kidnappings of wealthy Iraqis and other criminal activity...

Little more than a year ago, Al Qaeda's core command was thought to be in a financial crunch. But U.S. officials said cash shipped from Iraq has eased those troubles."Iraq is a big moneymaker for them," said a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official....

The officials were charged with reinvigorating a search [for Bin Laden] that had atrophied when some U.S. intelligence assets and special forces teams were pulled out of Afghanistan in 2002 to prepare for the war with Iraq...."We're not any closer," said a senior U.S. military official who monitors the intelligence on the hunt for Bin Laden....

As for our "good ally" Pakistan's deal with Al-Qaeda a while back...

Everything was undermined by the so-called peace agreement in north Waziristan," said a senior U.S. intelligence official responsible for overseeing counter-terrorism operations. "Of all the things that work against us in the global war on terror, that's the most damaging development. The one thing Al Qaeda needs to plan an attack is a relatively safe place to operate." Some in the administration initially expressed concern over the Pakistani move, but Bush later praised it, following a White House meeting with Musharraf....

So, we pull our guys off the hunt for Bin Laden in Afghanistan to go to Iraq, but our presence in Iraq ends up being a huge financial windfall for Al-Qaeda, and we still have no clue where the guy behind 9/11 is. Swell.

Bin Laden couldn't ask for a better (unwitting) ally than GW Bush.

SOTD: Translator - Everywhere That I'm Not

What Subspecies is Voting for Blake?

The Last Undervalued Investment

Buying FXY around 82.5, though it could drop as low as 76 if the bubble continues...we'll see.

The yen is already the most undervalued currency in the world. Since the collapse of the Japanese asset bubble in the late 1980s, Japan's economy has been recovering slowly -- thanks in large part to the Bank of Japan's extremely low interest rate policy. This has caused the yen to become remarkably undervalued.

Indeed, the yen hit an all-time low against the Euro last month, and its trade-weighted value was at its lowest since 1970. By some assessment, the yen is undervalued by approximately 28%. At some point, this imbalance must be corrected and the yen has to rise.

Hey, the Stock Market is at a New High!

Too bad that is meaningless to most people.



The economy is just fine however (if you're a CEO)...

The average CEO-to-worker pay ratio in the U.S. has grown from 107-to-1 in 1990 to 411-to-1 in 2005, according to a report by United for a Fair Economy, a nonprofit group in Boston that studies economic inequality. "If the minimum wage had risen at the same pace as CEO pay, it would now stand at $22.61 per hour, over four times the current $5.15," said Mike Lapham, project director of Responsible Wealth, an affiliate of United for a Fair Economy. "It's clearly out of control. We have a culture that says the CEO gets all of the credit."

However, if you're not a CEO...

Planned U.S. layoffs jumped 44 percent in April, led by a surge in financial sector job cuts after Citigroup announced it would eliminate 17,000 positions, an independent report showed on Wednesday.

Truck manufacturer Freightliner LLC said Monday it would lay off up to 1,528 workers at its assembly plant north of Charlotte in July.

Newisys Inc., a subsidiary of a California electronics maker, is closing its doors and laying off 87 local employees.

Trinity Industries Inc. confirmed Monday it laid off workers at its Standard Forged Products axle plant in Johnstown last week, but would not comment on the number of employees out of work.

LendingTree has laid off 20 percent of its work force nationwide, with some of the cuts coming from its office in Irvine. The online lending and realty-services exchange, which has 2,200 employees, cites the slump in the mortgage industry.

Advanced Micro Devices said Wednesday that it cut 430 jobs, or 2.6 percent of its global workforce, in an effort to reduce costs and battle intense competition from Intel.

Windsor Foods laid off 50 Albuquerque workers Thursday.

ImpacMortgage Holdings Inc. became the latest local lender to falter amid rising loan delinquencies Wednesday as the company laid off 120 workers in Orange County.

The OC Register's "running list" of OC Mortgage-related layoffs.

Lennar Homes, developers of two housing developments in Loveland, laid off 76 workers last week, essentially pulling out of Northern Colorado's slow housing market.

Unifi Inc. laid off 45 management employees in April, just a week before it announced it would shut down a South Carolina plant it had bought at the beginning of the year.

Financially strapped subprime mortgage lender New Century Financial failed to receive any bids for its mortgage loan origination business, forcing it to shut down the unit and lay off about 2,000 employees.

Clover Technologies Group LLC, a manufacturer and distributor of printing supplies such as laser toner and inkjet cartridges, will close its Louisville plant next month. The plant's 75 employees will be laid off, effective June 29, according to a notice filed with the Kentucky Division of Workforce and Employment Services.

State Street and Investors Financial Services gave the ax to about 450 employees yesterday in what is expected to be the first wave of layoffs resulting from the planned merger of the two Boston financial giants.

Ford Motor Co.'s financial troubles claimed more victims Monday when the struggling company announced that it will close a casting plant near Cleveland in 2009, costing 1,100 hourly workers their jobs.

DiVosta Building Corp. says today it’s laying off 42 people, the homebuilder’s third round of layoffs in recent months. In December, DiVosta told the Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation that it would fire 218 of its 552 workers. And on April 30, it announced nine layoffs.

So, CEO's make 411 times what the average worker does, and layoffs are surging, so it's a good thing that the government is reporting today that "the consumer price index rose 0.4 percent after rising 0.6 percent in March, while core prices - which exclude food and energy - rose 0.2 percent after a 0.1 percent gain."

If inflation (when you take out unnecessary stuff like food and energy) is only running at 2.4%, then that $5.15 an hour goes a lot further.

Unfortunately real-world inflation (i.e., if you buy more food and gas than pocket calculators) is running around 11%.

SOTD: Maktub - Just Like Murder

SOTD: Black Lab - This Night

SOTD: Terranova - Midnight Melodic

SOTD: Corinne Bailey Rae - I'd Like To

Police Riot in LA

The LAPD is very good at beating back dangerous roving gangs of TV camera-men and women.

Another Day, Another Scandal (or two)

This is how this administration supports the troops:

Congressional leaders on Thursday demanded that the Veterans Affairs secretary explain hefty bonuses for senior department officials involved in crafting a budget that came up $1 billion short and jeopardized veterans' health care....

A list of bonuses to senior career officials in 2006 documents a package of more than $3.8 million in payments by a financially strapped agency straining to help care for thousands of injured veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is how this administration treats people who investigate their crimes:

A federal official whose investigations of waste and corruption in Iraq have repeatedly embarrassed the Bush administration is now being investigated himself by an oversight committee with close links to the White House and by the ranking Republican on the House Government Reform Committee.

SOTD: Madeleine Peyroux - A Little Bit

Thomas Sowell Dreams of Fascism

Thomas Sowell spewing complete nonsense in the National Review online...

When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.

Good grief, is that the Far Right's fallback option?

Personally, I think a military coup might not be Constitutional, but I'm not an attorney.

Bush as Defeatist

In 1999, when GW was governor of Texas, he criticized President Clinton for not setting a timetable for exiting Kosovo:

George W. Bush, 4/9/99, Houston Chronicle:

“Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the president to explain to us what the exit strategy is.”

Followed by this:

George W. Bush, 6/5/99, Scripps Howard/Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

“I think it’s also important for the president to lay out a timetable as to how long they will be involved and when they will be withdrawn.”

Timetables? What a Defeatocrat.

...of course there's this yesterday:

“Setting a deadline for withdrawal is setting a date for failure, and that would be irresponsible,” he said. The president warned that a deadline “would dictate the terms on which the remaining commanders and troops could engage the enemy.” “This is a prescription for chaos and confusion, and we must not impose it on our troops,” Bush said.

Frankly, the date for failure is already past. Bush administration incompetence has already created "chaos and confusion" in Iraq. We should not have our soldiers as referees in a 1300-year old religious civil war fought between groups of crazy animals.

Wasn't the message of the last election that the American people wanted out of Iraq?