Panda by the Bull in New York
On most weekdays lately, you will find a panda hanging out by the bull in downtown Manhattan, a couple of blocks south of Wall Street where Broadway forks into State Street and Whitehall.
He sits there every day with a little panda tip jar next to him.
Is it a coincidence that since the stock market is in a bear market that a panda bear appears every day by the bull near Wall Street?
Seeking Alpha article: Will the Fed’s Overkill Succeed?
Last year I discovered Seeking Alpha, a website devoted to investment analysis and opinion. It has become my most frequently visited source for financial information. The information on Seeking Alpha is not your typical CNBC-type rah-rah stock market cheerleading, nor does it always praise government intervention the way almost all other mainstream media outlets do. Seeking Alpha offers a wide range of opinions and open mindedness in their content.
A recent article titled Will the Fed’s Overkill Succeed provides a good summary of the current state of the economy and where we are headed. The article dares to “illuminate the true culprits of this deepening global economic crisis – the Central Banks.” Despite the length of the article, it is well worth reading if you really want to understand current economic events. As one comment states, the article is a “good summary of everything I’ve been spousing [sic] for some time now.”
World Baseball Classic thoughts
A few quick thoughts on the conclusion of the World Baseball Classic:
- How long will it be before Japanese pitcher Yu Darvish is going to be pitching for a team in the United States?
- Here’s a good way to sum up the problem with the team that the United States put together for the WBC: Ted Lilly was the number three starter on the team. If Ted Lilly pitched for the New York Yankees, he wouldn’t even be the third best American starting pitcher, never mind in all of baseball. The U.S. can’t compete with the rest of the world unless we have our best players on the field.
- Even if the WBC never achieves the recognition that World Cup soccer or Olympic Basketball has, the WBC is still an enjoyable exhibition that I hope sticks around every four years as planned.
Book review: Perfume by Patrick Süskind
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind was originally written in German in 1985. Perfume is the fictional story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a man with a superhuman sense of smell but his own body has a complete lack of any scent. The story is set in 18th century France and traces Grenouille’s life from his birth. His goal in life becomes the creation of the ultimate perfume: one made not merely for pleasure but rather one so compelling that it holds power over those who smell it.
Grenouille is a man of few words, and the book contains little dialog. The descriptive nature of the text is the book’s strength. The author does an excellent job of making the world of the olfactory sense come alive, whether it is in relating how Grenouille senses the world or describing the process of how perfumes were created in the 18th century. The thoughts and motivations of the main character also shine through rather well and make the book a compelling read.
The book’s ending is odd, to say the least. I had a hard time believing some of the events that occurred, and this left me with a sense of disappointment about the book. But this let down at the end had only a very slight effect on my overall enjoyment of this unique book.
Rating: 8 out of 10.
Music review: And Justice for All by Metallica
I first listened to And Justice for All by Metallica 20 years ago. I had listened to a lot of Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and Ozzy Osbourne in the preceding few years, but I never got into Metallica at that time. One time in early 1989 I flipped on MTV and found myself transfixed by the video that was playing. I turned on the channel part way through the video so I did not know what I was watching, but something about the video I was watching really grabbed me. At the end of the video when finding out that it was “One” my immediately reaction was “I don’t like Metallica.” That sentiment quickly changed after repeated viewings of the video and subsequently getting the album And Justice for All.
The low volume opening of the album on the song “Blackened” caused me on more than one occasion to turn up the volume while listening to it in my car so that by the time the main riff began it was blasting my speakers out. Once that assault starts it doesn’t let up, as the album is one great song after another. One interest thing about some of the songs is that even though songs such as “And Justice For All” and “To Live Is to Die” are nearly 10 minutes long, they in no way feel drawn out. “To Live Is to Die” is especially noteworthy as it is almost entirely instrumental with the exception of a few lines of spoken words that were written by the band’s former bassist Cliff Burton who had died in a bus crash on tour. The acoustic guitar intro that builds into driving riffs, contrasting sections, and multiple guitar solos make “To Live Is to Die” a great rock instrumental.
A few other songs worth noting are “Eye of the Beholder” with its freedom of speech inspired lyrics, and “Dyers Eve” with its decrying of parental authority sure to continue to resonate with 16 year old boys for generations to come.
Then of course, there is the song “One.” I don’t have an ordered list of the best songs of all time, but if I did “One” would have to be on it. The song starts with a slow build up and opening verses which include some great guitar solos/interludes. The guitars then come crashing in as James Hetfield pleads “please God wake me” only to fade into at first another guitar interlude and then into silence broken by the machine gun double bass drumming of Lars Ulrich. The guitars join in the machine gun attack, leading to the final lyrics of the song recapping the atrocities of war through a single soldier’s horrific wounds. The remainder of the song is a storm of lightning fast guitar soloing from Kirk Hammett. Add it all up and you have one of the best songs of all time and one of the best heavy metal albums of all time.
Rating: 9.5 out of 10.
Ben Bernanke’s speech to the Council on Foreign Relations
A recent article found on Bloomberg.com titled Bernanke Urges Rules Overhaul to Stem Risk Build-Ups has many subtle points which I felt the need to comment upon after first reading the article. After beginning to write all of my comments related to this article, I soon realized that there was simply too much to comment upon and explain, so I decided to limit my comments to just two points and have tried to keep them brief without writing what could have been extensive background materials to the article.
The first sentence of the article reads:
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke urged a sweeping overhaul of U.S. financial regulations in an effort to smooth out the boom-and-bust cycles in financial markets.
Isn’t it ironic that the head of the body responsible for exacerbating boom-and-bust cycles is calling for efforts to smooth out those cycles? Obviously Bernanke’s recommended overhaul does not include eliminating the Federal Reserve itself. See my review of The Creature from Jekyll Island for the details about why the Federal Reserve should be abolished.
The second comment comes from the second paragraph of the article, which cites “remarks prepared (by Bernanke) for an address to the Council on Foreign Relations.” The Council on Foreign Relations, also known as the CFR, is described by Wikipedia as a “foreign policy membership organization” whose “mission is promoting understanding of foreign policy and the United States’ role in the world.” That sounds benign enough, right? Did a little deeper into what the CFR is and you will find the reality is that not only is the CFR “the most powerful private organization to influence United States foreign policy” (again according to Wikipedia), but also the goal of the CFR is establish collectivism through a single world government led by a ruling elite. That ruling elite is the members of the CFR themselves.
Why is the Chairman of the Federal Reserve giving a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations unless the goals of each group are similar? Each are instruments of collectivism, which leads to totalitarianism.
Why I’m done reading The Motley Fool
I got caught up in the euphoria of investing in the stock market in the late 1990s just like everyone else. One of the best sources of information for investment advice at the time was The Motley Fool website. I was a regular reader of the Rule Breakers and Rule Makers articles, and found great strategies discussed in their forums/message boards, specifically those involved with mechanical investing.
Over the past decade the amount of content I have read on The Motley Fool has diminished, but I still continued to occasionally come back to the site for news and investment advice even after I found their blind faith in the U.S. stock market no longer the best strategy for my money. That blind faith was recently illustrated in an article titled The Ultimate Safe Haven Investment.
As I would have guessed, the ultimate safe haven investment spoken about in the article is gold. The first half of the article makes the case for gold increasing in price in the near future. The author even states that “I believe conditions look very favorable for gold to outperform the U.S. stock market in 2009 and over the next three to five years.” But the very next sentence says that “investing in gold isn’t without its challenges” and states that the challenge is how to value gold. The remainder of the article then asserts that because gold produces no income, it can’t be valued using cash flow methods. Therefore the article suggests that you should invest in “gold standard” stocks from defensive industries such as Pfizer, Merck and Philip Morris.
Talk about a bait and switch. This article lured me into reading it with the prospect of reading more about gold but instead turned out to be beating the same tired drum of investing in large cap U.S. stocks. Merck lost about 50% of its value in the past 12 months. How can that be seen as a safe haven? The only true “gold standard” investment is gold itself.
Book review: Meltdown by Thomas E. Woods Jr.
Meltdown, released in January 2009 by Thomas E. Woods Jr., is subtitled “A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse.” If that isn’t enough to hint you at the author’s views, the top of the book proudly pronounces “Foreword by Ron Paul” and the back of the book contains nothing but an excerpt from the aforementioned forward with the words “Ron Paul” being the largest on the page. The dedication of the book is to Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul, “who told the truth.”
I must admit that the people marketing this book did their job well because I ended up noticing this book at the bookstore due to all of the things mentioned above despite the growing number of new releases about the current state of the economy. Meltdown stood out because none of those other books have a foreword by Ron Paul.
The inside front jacket of the book starts by asking the question “Is Capitalism the Culprit?” The obvious answer is: of course not. The book covers an expected range of topics, including how we got into this mess, with chapter titles of “How Government Created the Housing Bubble,” “The Great Wall Street Bailout,” and “How Government Causes the Boom-Bust Business Cycle.” One particularly insightful passage in a section titled “The folly of public-works stimulus” rings true regarding the recent economic stimulus package passed by Congress:
Government … has no non-arbitrary way of knowing how much of something to produce… Private firms use a profit-and-loss test to gauge how well they are meeting consumer needs. If they make profits, the market has ratified their production decisions… If the post losses, that means they have squandered resources that could have been more effectively employed on behalf of consumer welfare elsewhere in the economy. Government has no such feedback mechanism, since it acquires its resources not through voluntary means, as in the private sector, but through seizure from the citizens, and no one can choose to buy or not to buy what the government produces with those resources. The purpose of production on the market is to satisfy real consumer demand; politically motivated and economically arbitrary diversions of resources do absolutely nothing to set the economy on a long-run path of accomplishing that. So these projects squander wealth at a time of falling living standards and a need for the greatest possible efficiency with existing resources.
If you are already familiar with the details of many of Ron Paul’s economic views or the Austrian School of Economics and the writings of Ludwig con Mises and Murray Rothbard, then Meltdown is helpful in applying that ideology to the current state of economic affairs. If you are not familiar with any of the above, Meltdown provides valuable insight into the true reasons behind the current economic crises. Those reasons have nothing to do with the failure of the free markets and everything to do with government intervention and manipulation of the money supply by the central bank (federal reserve).
Rating: 9 out of 10.
Watchmen movie
While I did have high expectations going in to see the Watchmen movie, I also had realistic expectations. I knew that there are certain things that just couldn’t and wouldn’t be filmed, so I wasn’t disappointed when they were not in the movie. I had tried to avoid much of the pre-release hype and press about the movie, but I still had known that the ending would somehow be changed, though I didn’t know what that change would be. I will say that while if I was being really picky that the changes would be sacrilege, but the truth is that the changes work well in the context of the film including the ending and the general focus of the movie on the characters and their backgrounds.
I don’t think I have ever seen the panels of a comic book come to life as well as in the Watchmen movie. Overall, the movie is as good as any film adaptation of Watchmen could possibly be.
Expectations of the Watchmen movie
In the past, I have written about how I no longer have any expectations for movies. However, the anticipation for the Watchmen movie has me not following that rule: I can’t help but get excited about it. Watchmen is one of those seminal works of my teenage years that despite it sounding clichéd to say so, it really did change my life.
Watchmen was rumored to be made into a movie for over 15 years, so when this latest incarnation of the movie adaptation was talked about, I paid it little attention because I’d heard those rumors before. I’d believe them when I saw a trailer. Well, I saw the trailer and it looks awesome. I’ve actually debated whether to even see the movie because inevitably, I felt I would be disappointed with a film version of a work that is the pinnacle of what the medium of a graphic novel can be. I thought that the strengths of Watchmen couldn’t be translated into a film. Then I saw the trailer again and I was hooked in again.
So I will go to the movies this weekend with high expectations for the first time in a very long time.
