Ted Stevens.........

Just the tip of the iceberg on the shenanigans these bozo's in political office pull with lobbyists money.

Dorgan from North Dakota should be next.

T. Boone and Yahoo.........

One of the bigger mistakes T. Boone has made as of late.

One billionaire following another billionaire isn't a guaranteed profit.

Steve Ballmer is a happy camper.

Dilution and Merrill Lynch...........

The massive dilution that firms like Merrill Lynch bring to their long time shareholders reminds me of parasites I see in the natural world.

The host feeding everyone who needs to be fed at the moment to stay alive.

The parasites enjoying the "upside".

Typical Wall Street. And not a customers yacht in sight.

Randy Pausch

May the Creator bless the soul of Dr. Randy Pausch.

And prayers to his family.

XM/Sirius

To see another fine example of what ails this great nation look no farther than the FCC.

This merger shows why all these bums in Congress should be tossed out and lobbyists banned.

Islam is terror.........

Islam is not going to peacfully exist any place or any country or with any people. From the Phillpines to India, Islam is Jihad. For almost 1,400 years, that has been the reality of Islam. There is not one single place on this earth where Muslims are peaceful to any people.

It is not about Jews in Israel, or Orthodox Serbs in Kosovo, or Hindus in Kashmir, Buddhists in Thailand, or Maronite Catholics in Lebanon, Taoists in China, or Christians in Sudan and Nigeria, but all of us.

Islam is at war with all of us.

Carl Icahn

It's always fun to see these billionaires trying to rescue their investments by getting Board seats. Yahoo is dead money with Carl and his band beating the drums.

Yahoo is losing its luster every day. And Jerry Yang, bright guy that he is might want to keep his mouth shut. That's hard for him to do.

Steven Ballmer

Brilliant and a billionaire. You go boy.

Yahoo is a has-been and you know it. You voted with your firms capital.

The talking heads second-guessing your move don't have a clue. They don't have a clue about what you know. And I know for sure, Carl Icahn wishes back when what you know now.

Congress and bail-outs......

These clowns who represent your interests and mine would sell their souls to stay in power.

The bail-out bubba's were so far behind the curve in curtailing this fiasco.

Instead they were grandstanding front and center on steroid use in baseball.

Birds and Birding.......

As many of you know, I love birds and bird watching. I also love to hunt them, shoot them and eat them.

I started birding very young, probably my first passion. Today, I am a Life Member of the Georgia Ornithological Society and keep an active Life List. This one was too good to pass up.

Enjoy..........

I bought a bird feeder. I hung it on my back porch and filled it with seed. What a beauty of a bird feeder it is, as I filled it lovingly with seed. Within a week we had hundreds of birds taking advantage of the continuous flow of free and easily accessible food. But then the birds started building nests in the boards of the patio, above the table, and next to the barbecue. Then came the Shit. It was everywhere: on the patio tile, the chairs, the table . everywhere! Then some of the birds turned mean. They would dive bomb me and try to peck me even though I had fed them out of my own pocket. And others birds were boisterous and loud. They sat on the feeder and squawked and screamed at all hours of the day and night and demanded that I fill it when it got low on food. After a while, I couldn't even sit on my own back porch anymore. So I took down the bird feeder and in three days the birds were gone. I cleaned up their mess and took down the many nests they had built all over the patio. Soon, the back yard was like it used to be.... quiet, serene and no one demanding their rights to a free meal. Now let's see. Our government gives out free food, subsidized housing, free medical care, and free education and allows anyone born here to be an automatic citizen. Then the illegals came by the tens of thousands. Suddenly our taxes went up to pay for free services; small apartments are housing 5 families; you have to wait 6 hours to be seen by an emergency room doctor; your child's 2nd grade class is behind other schools because over half the class doesn't speak English. Corn Flakes now come in a bilingual box; I have to 'press one' to hear my bank talk to me in English, and people waving flags other than 'Old Glory' are squawking and screaming in the streets, demanding more rights and free liberties. Just my opinion, but it's way past time for the government to take down the bird feeder. If you agree, pass it on; if not, continue cleaning up the shit!

Staggering numbers.......and more to come

Merrill Lynch reported another dismal quarter. That makes it a total of $48,300,000,000 write-down since the credit crisis began under the stewardship (or lack thereof) of Stan O'Neil.

Think about that number for a moment.

If you are an investor and are using the services of a Merrill stockbroker remember this.

He has bills to pay and when the better part of money management is to do nothing he will be doing something. Why? To keep his seat. He will feed at your trough. Don't let him eat because what they want is to feast on your portfolio.

If you are tired of the abuse give us a call. We can extricate you from the conflicts of interest, massive fees, commissions and abuse.

Call me if you want a bail-out...........

Let's get on the bandwagon boys and girls. If you are in Mandaree give me a good smoke signal and lets get rocking. Everyone in America it seems is getting bailed out by the government. Where can I apply for a bail-out? Surely I qualify for some type of financial largesse and pronto.........perhaps it the influx of mosquitoes I contend with around my swimming pool every night or the several SUV's I own in getting them all gassed up or maybe it is the poor job my landscaper seems to be doing.

Come on, lets get some government action here. The 2008 American mantra seems to be, "When in doubt, get a bail out."

You can have my vote, if you give me a bail-out!!!!!!

2008. Not a iota of common sense in anything coming out of our government in an election year. Do yourself a favor, here is your assignment for the next 72 hours. Listen intently to the news and ask yourself just where the money is coming from for all of these "bail-outs" in the works. Aren't you the government? I'm not, the government takes half of what I make.

Both parties are killing this country.

Unfathomable........

Mr. Cox at the SEC is putting on a cowboy hat to promote the wild and wooly Wall Street crowd to be reined in for 30 days in the area of short selling. This whole bail-out travesty is nothing but Paulson/Bernanke and their cronies on the Street taking care of their pals at taxpayer expense.

Their are no safeguards for the taxpayer. These 11th hour bailouts of Bear and Freddie and Fannie and IndyMac are all reactionary moves. Nobody is out in front of this horrorific mess.

Again, such inept regulation. Nobody in jail, nobody being investigated and last but not least, these clowns wanting to go after some old-fashioned rumor mongering on Wall Street. That is how the free markets work. If these companies wouldn't be in so much trouble for being so dam STUPID ie. being levered say 30 to 1 and having such little risk control on trading desks and in proprietary hedge funds those share prices would recover from short selling. And the banks taking every loan application from somebody with a job and a heart beat and fudging the numbers to make the ratio's work and quickly unloading the crap off on the Fannie and Freddie monster. May Mr. Raines someday get his due.

More Wall Street Shenanigans.....

Gretchen Morgenson is without a doubt, the finest business writer in America. As a comparison she makes the former San Diego Union financial beat writer, Don Bauder look like the Wright Brothers invention at Kitty Hawk up against an Air France Concorde or Boeing 787. I reprint her work here without her permission and hope her employer, the New York Times appreciates the plug. Check out her writings every week, they make any writer at Dow Jones, Barrons look rather rusty. It is classic Wall Street, pounding toxic investments down the throat of Main Street America.


June 29, 2008
Fair Game
E-Mail That Investors Might Like to Read
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
EVERY few years, the conflicts of interest so deeply embedded in the Wall Street business model emerge from the shadows for all to see. Coming to light last week, courtesy of Massachusetts regulators, was UBS’s dual roles in the auction-rate securities market, which have had devastating effects on the people and institutions that invested in them.
Because every big brokerage firm that participated in this market faced the same conflicts as both underwriters of the securities and managers of the auctions that set their prices, similar ugliness will likely turn up elsewhere as regulators continue their digging.
Auction-rate securities are preferred shares or debt instruments with rates that reset regularly, usually every week, in auctions overseen by the brokerage firms that originally sold them. They have long-term maturities or, in the case of the preferred shares, no maturity dates whatsoever. The securities are issued by municipalities, student-loan companies, closed-end funds and tax-exempt institutions like hospitals and museums.
In mid-February, the $300 billion market for these instruments collapsed, trapping investors who had been told that they were safe and easy to cash in — leaving both wealthy investors and those of modest means unable to finance their small businesses, buy homes, pay college tuition and otherwise use their money as they had planned.
After receiving a flood of complaints from investors in his state, William F. Galvin, secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, subpoenaed documents from some major market participants. Thursday, he released materials produced by UBS and filed a civil suit against the firm, accusing it of defrauding investors.
MR. GALVIN’S complaint says UBS misled investors by peddling auction-rate securities as cash equivalents and ultrasafe. But the suit also asserts that UBS dumped these securities on individual investors to minimize its own exposure to the risks inherent in keeping them on its own books.
Karina Byrne, a spokeswoman for UBS, said the firm would defend itself. “Contrary to the allegations, UBS is committed to serving the best interests of our clients. We continued to support the auction rate securities market longer than any other firm,” she said in a statement. “We have offered our clients loans of up to 100 percent of the par value of their A.R.S. holdings at preferred lending rates. UBS, our clients and clients of other industry participants all share the impact of this unprecedented loss of liquidity in the A.R.S. market.”
Nevertheless, the e-mail messages attached to the Massachusetts complaint support Mr. Galvin’s accusations in stunning black and white.
The problem UBS faces began in August, when the credit markets seized. Corporations — which are big buyers of auction-rate securities because of their slightly-higher-than-money-market yields — were beginning to sell. New buyers had to be found or UBS, as underwriter and auction manager, would be stuck with the securities. The firm was going into shell shock because of losses from subprime mortgages on its books, so it needed to find a way out of the auction-rate mess.
Throughout the autumn, increasingly frantic e-mail messages flew among UBS executives. “As you can imagine during these stressful times, the pressure is on to move our inventory,” wrote David Shulman, global head of fixed income distribution at UBS, on Aug. 30. “I am aware that JPM and Citi are on all ‘alert’ in the same fashion with their retail groups.”
Joel P. Aresco, chief risk officer for the Americas, sent this message on Nov. 15: “Why the continual increase” in the inventory of auction-rate securities? “What measures are being taken to reduce this exposure?”
On Dec. 11, Mr. Shulman wrote: “I am pushing every angle here to move product.”
As it turned out, some of that product being moved was Mr. Shulman’s own stake in auction-rate securities, the complaint said. He testified that he began selling in September, because of his “risk tolerance.” By Dec. 12, he had dumped all his holdings.
UBS declined to make any of these executives available.
On Feb. 12, just days before the auctions ground to a halt, another UBS executive wrote: “We need to beat the bushes harder than ever to unload this paper.”
UBS’s Web site, meanwhile, continued to identify auction-rate preferred stock as a highly liquid cash alternative, the lawsuit said.
“The Massachusetts complaint alleges that sophisticated Wall Street insiders, knowing that the market for auction-rate securities was failing, foisted these same securities off on innocent public investors through profoundly deceptive sales practices,” said Lewis D. Lowenfels, a securities law expert at Tolins & Lowenfels who represents a handful of auction-rate securities investors. “If these allegations prove to be true and prevalent throughout the Wall Street community, then civil actions awarding punitive damages and possibly even criminal actions may well become widespread.”
UBS’s clients were not the only ones that the firm’s executives appear to have misled. Its brokers, too, seem not to have been told about the risks that auctions could fail and their clients could be locked into their holdings.
“We continue to be frustrated by the lack of information that they are providing to us,” one broker wrote about the firm’s auction-rate unit in a Jan. 10 message. “Given the strange and difficult environment, it is imperative that we are fully aware of the risk we are taking. We do not want to imperil any relationships over something as ‘simple’ as their cash investments. The lack of clarity regarding ARPS is contrary to our focus on ‘improving the client experience.’ ” (ARPS refers to auction-rate preferred shares.)
NO Wall Street firm likes to acknowledge that conflicts of interest bedevil its business. And UBS says its clients come first.
But one of the e-mail messages amassed by Mr. Galvin stands out for its cogent discussion of these troubling biases. It was written by Joe Gallichio, a managing director in the municipal finance department at UBS, on Feb. 21, after the market for auction-rate securities had frozen.
“As things change they also remain the same,” Mr. Gallichio begins. “What we face now in the firm as related to muni short term is classic Wall Street. In its core, it is trading versus sales, risk management versus client franchise.”
“As a firm we tell people we are client focused,” he went on. “So if the client is always right, then we should fix the problem this product has created in WM,” the firm’s wealth management unit, which includes retail investors. “To let WM and the firm as a whole go through costly litigation, the loss of investor confidence and significant assets, the cost in management time, legal and compliance, IT spend, the total distraction from our core growth strategy and overall employee morale — will certainly be in excess of the multibillion-dollar hit to balance sheet we would take by just buying the rest of the assets from WM. I just don’t get it.”
Reached Friday, Mr. Gallichio declined to comment. He didn’t have to. His e-mail said it all.

$52,000,000,000

Is a whole lotta BUD...........congrats to the boyz in Belgium and Brazil for making the Busch family bigger.

Let's hope they keep the Clydesdales.

Fannie and Freddie

Taxpayers footing any bill of this magnitude to bail out these quasi-governemental entities?

Disgusting.

Horse sense........

One of my favorite adages on the behaviour of Wall Street is "where there's smoke, there's fire."

Seeing these massive companies get clobbered is astounding. The pricks who got these companies in such a jam and who made hundreds of millions in compensation are long gone to their sunny abodes. They should be in jail.

The common shareholders who have an ownership interest in these companies via their mutual funds in their 401-k plans are left holding the bag. Great Americans going to work every day, day in and day out, getting their retirement funds pounded quarter by quarter by the greed that these corporate chieftains brought on themselves. It is disgusting.

No one is accountable. They bring in some new chief and set him up for life to maybe "rescue" a company. The dilution of common shareholders equity is also disgusting.

Guys like Franklin Raines and Stanly O'Neill are the worst. Top dogs who fed at the trough while the going was good, knowing full well the piper was on his way. This is insanity with such little regard for controlling risk by these major investment banks.

The government is us folks. Maybe this election will be your wake-up call.

Bear Markets.......

Bears have many different color phases. Chocolate, brown, cinnamon, black, white with assorted variations.

This bear is no different. Lots of different aspects, few solutions.

Ken Lewis at Bank of America is the antithesis of Jamie Dimon. What an artist of spewing colorful words. And that's about it.

T. Boone ........

Is the man for ponying up millions for his crusade for alternative energy in America.

With over 70% of America's crude being imported and over $700 billion leaving our country every year it is the largest transfer of wealth in the historyof mankind.

Rest in Peace

May the Creator bless the soul of Sir John Templeton.

The Second Half of 2008

Inflation and energy. The latter busting the former out of the seams. The Market Mistress doing her thing, wringing the Wall Street crowd and bankers down to a level of sanity. America is on a collision course with reality and none too soon. For far too long the price of a gallon of gasoline was cheap. America fed at the zero percent financing trough of Detroit and drank those stocks down to double digits. High pump prices, credit issues, politics, speculating get the pointed fingers. All are to blame.

The average bear market lasts about 10 months. This bear will take us well into the second half of the year.

The problems around the globe are increasing. Pollution, disease, overfishing the worlds oceans to name but a few.

America's problems, look in the mirror. Where's our soul? What is the collective breath? Is it the "something for nothing" mentality of casino gaming? Is it the socialism of Social Security? Is all of America for sale with lobbyists spending 1 billion dollars a day inside the Beltway?

Good markets come after bad markets. American ingenuity will prevail.

It is NOT different this time.

Canada...........

Enjoyed a float-plane trip up to the provincial capital of British Columbia.

Beautiful.

The killer whales were spectacular.

More on the trip in a bit, Mt. Rainier beckons.