Underfunded SEC

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jan 27, 2009 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 2 comments The head of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Linda Thomsen, testified before Congress today about her group’s handling of the Bernard Madoff Ponzi-scheme scandal. Particularly noteworthy is her having said, “While we appreciate and examine every lead we receive, we simply do not have the resources to fully investigate them all.” I have stated several...
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Reader of Wall Street Journal asks…

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jan 22, 2009 in Blog | 4 comments For today’s post I wanted to copy for you a question asked by a Wall Street Journal reader in their “Journal Community” section. The questioner is named Hector Caaballo and he asks: “I don’t get it. Day to day life has seemed to change little for the average American, but the financial markets are in an upheaval. I hear that ninety percent of homeowners pay their...
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Still buying

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jan 20, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments Yes, the markets fell dramatically today. I think that this fear is quite crazy at this point. The new presidential Administration of Barack Obama has already made clear that they are not going to let the financial crisis become ridiculous. Effectively this is a promise of “whatever-it-takes” effort and eventual recovery. How can they promise this? The U.S. has many options, from...
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Life has a way of humbling people

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jan 19, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments We are going to swerve away from investment-type topics a bit for today’s post. I wanted to excerpt a story from “The Week” magazine. Specifically page 10 of the January 23, 2009 issue. Here is the excerpt: Pastor Ted Haggard, who was exiled from his Colorado church in 2006 in a gay sex scandal, said this week that the incident has altered his views on religion and the culture...
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What is real economic growth?

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jan 17, 2009 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 3 comments Happy Saturday to all of you out there!   Today’s post is a missive as to what qualifies as real economic growth. This may sound like a very dry topic, but having a handle on this actually then gives you a powerful tool for evaluating the health of any country’s gross domestic product (GDP) – alias, an economy.   This, in turn, allows you to accurately assess the...
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December’s unemployment report, slight return

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jan 16, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments I had wanted to mention several posts ago about December’s unemployment numbers that pushed unemployment up to 7.2% that this figure is fairly normal historically speaking. The recession of 1991 had higher unemployment than 7.2%. The recession of 2001 had about the same unemployment. And so on and so on. Unemployment was especially tragic back in 1982 and even entered double digits! My...
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GDP stimulus plan from the Democrats

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jan 16, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments I wanted to provide some commentary about the Democrat’s stimulus package that has just been introduced. The most important thing about the plan is not the dollar amount of the package.  That will surely change as the proposal makes its way through Congress and as businesses and State and local governments adjust to the recessionary economy.   The most important thing is to examine...
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