Global crisis foment

Normally I do not post about geopolitics because generally these issues do not affect the performance of the financial markets. However, I have to alert you to rumblings about Iran that I am reading, mostly via Stratfor, and why that warrants our attention. The issue...

Happy blogiversary!

Today marks one year since I first put fingers to keyboard and began writing the blog. Thank you to all of you who read the blog with gusto. While there have been many exciting, informative and prescient posts on the blog – including calling the market bottom...

Pay czar saying the right things

Ken Feinberg, the Obama Administration’s pay czar, is talking about what he feels is necessary to reform pay at firms that have received huge chunks of tax payer monies. The companies in question are: AIG, Bank of America, Chrysler Financial, Chrysler LLC,...

Soft vs. hard

Way back in the day I was an entertainment and media analyst for about a half a second in my career. But my official opinion of the industry was that I didn’t like any of the companies that occupied the entertainment space…other than Electronic Arts, but...

Tenuous job market

September’s unemployment rate climbed to 9.8% as businesses fired an additional 263,000 people. This number far exceeded consensus economist estimates of 175,000. This will certainly have a deep reverberation through the financial markets. The amount of the...

Council of regulators proposed

One of the pillars of change that I have been calling for is a change in the institutions that watched, but did not act, as the world’s financial systems glutted themselves on debt and then suffered colossal acid reflux of that debt. The Obama Administration has...