We were at Williams-Sonoma this past weekend and saw a beautiful copper, KitchenAid mixer for $899.95. (Its twin is made of nickel, and we have no idea of how prices of that metal have changed, but we doubt that they have gone up since the summer.)
The nearly $900 seemed a bit expensive for a mixer; so, we joked […]
Everybody knows that the shortest day is the first day of winter, which is usually December 21 in the Northern Hemisphere. (Sorry readers from down-under, but we’re rather geocentric that way.)
So, does the shortest day have the latest sunrise and the earliest sunset? Is there a symmetry between dawn and dusk?
Perhaps you’ve never considered it, but one […]
If you have an extra 4:43, check it out: http://adage.com/brightcove/single.php?bcpid=1370868150&bctid=3130509001. (That’s the web site for Ad Age, not “a traditional saying expressing a common experience or observation; proverb.” Although in this case it could be either.)
Mostly funny, but could be painful depending upon where you’ve made your bed. (Perhaps they’re not coyotes that our neighbors on […]
So, a few coaches sent copies of a communication that they received from the director of their basketball league. All coaches were simultaneously told that regardless of the advanced notice, under no circumstances could games be canceled or postponed via e-mail as e-mail was inherently unreliable. Such notice could only be given over the phone! E-mail is unreliable!
Do you want the […]
Our site’s statistics program keeps track of the search terms used to arrive at our humble little venue, and this morning we noticed a hit from the query, “How to trade CMBS?”
That, as they say, struck us kind of funny.
We thought: given the ongoing and (we would guess) accelerating problems in commercial real-estate such a question could come from […]
Deer hunting season started in Pennsylvania on Monday. At one time, over one million hunters would enter the woods and fields on the first day of buck season giving Pennsylvania something like the world’s third- or fourth-largest standing army for a day or two.
Like many neighborhoods in exurbia, ours is overrun with deer. Not really over-run, but […]
Music for Our Times
The turbulence in the financial markets shows no sign of ending. Commodities buyers, including food companies and airlines, suffer large losses from ”hedging” programs as prices plummet. “Hedge” funds suffer losses that are exacerbated by the high leverage applied during calmer days; redemptions are limited. Industries and unions beg for our tax dollars. State governments beg for our other […]
Bill’s and Bill’s, Bill’s and Bill’s
It’s bailout time, for the Citi
Plead-a-ling, hear them sing
To-day, it is our bail-out day!
Citi sideways, Wall Street sideways
Dressed in bank hol-i-day style
In the air there’s a feeling of Christmas
Bankers laughing, taxes passing
Wasting pile after pile
And on every street corner you’ll hear…
Trill’s and Trill’s, Trill’s and Trill’s
It’s Christmas time for the Citi
Plead-a-ling, hear them […]
We were surfing the web this morning, and found this very nice analysis of Warren Buffet at Yahoo Finance: Down $16 Billion - Has Warren Buffett Lost His Touch?
It’s well-balanced and well-written, but the author, Simon Maierhofer, notes that the last two months of reality have not been very kind to Mr. Buffett.
We’re not into hero worship; […]
This a small point, but the pedant in us isn’t above it.
Yesterday’s (November 12) Wall Street Journal contained an opinion column, Is Now the Time to Buy Stocks? by John H. Cochrane, a finance prof at the University of Chicago. Rather than comment on his data-mining exercise, we’d rather repeat his qualification that “History is not a guarantee—this time […]
We must admit, this is our first post that is truly in bad taste, but it seems so appropriate that we just could not help ourselves. TARP. TARP.
We’re trying to write seriously about the government’s—the Treasury Department’s—latest expediencies and tactics to … well, we’re not sure of the objective… presumably, to make it all go away so that Mr. Bush and […]
Back in June, we wrote Justice and E-mails in part to reply to the chairman’s question about whether financial firms would continue to lose money and in part to criticize the egregious behavior of few former Bear Stearns employees.
At the time, we said that we expected the losses to continue, and offered her a variety of reasons. One of the […]
One of America’s largest companies had a disastrous September, and it was touch-and-go there for awhile. A company that some thought too big to fail, failed miserably.
As we have all seen, when a gigantic company on the coast suffers, even from self-inflicted wounds, it can negatively affect all of us in the fly-over.
There were clear warning signs in […]
After watching the Vice Presidential Debate, the chairman mentions that in many ways, Mrs. Palin reminds her of President Ronald Reagan.
We agreed—particularly that ability to genuinely and warmly smile at the person while excoriating them.
“There you go, again.”
By the way, when did everything, including everything discussed at the kitchen table, become the government’s responsibility? And, do you, dear reader, […]
A few months ago, we provided a new definition of speculation. Today, in that same spirit we define the phrase, “financial projection in a crisis.”
No, we don’t mean scenario analysis or stress-testing; two tasks that we actually performed for several years.
We mean something analogous to Freud’s kind of psychological projection, whereby one attributes one’s own undesirable thoughts, motivations, […]
