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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Jonathan Kaplan" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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11:28 am
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they can see clearly now.
I just joined facebook.
I've resisted because there was no real need, I prefer privacy, but then I see a couple of favorite cousins there and I figure this is the best way to communicate with them.
So, I added most of my family that I can find, and a few long lost friends. What a great tool!
Except, now, people are starting to come out of the woodwork, and I don't really want much of that, so trying to find criteria for accepting "friends".
And even worse, facebook admin (and other faceless people) now have access to my history of connections. They are developing a database unheard of before, one that gives its owner extreme power, should it choose to exercise that. A few years of facebook, less privacy, a trend towards fascism, and then a bad president will be able to make himself dictator.
How worrisome is this?
Tags: facebook, fascism, politics
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01:57 pm
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testify too
I enjoyed the responses to the last post a great deal, very thoughtful. Thank you! I'll respond to some of them, and add my own reply, in the near future. But I didn't want to affect this thread. I'll reply last in this thread too, pretty much.
2) Justify Mankind's existence.
Same rules as last time (meaning, no rules).
Thanks again!
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01:39 pm
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testify
Justify your existence.
(Answer in any sense you wish, whatever floats your boat. Thanks!)
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03:39 pm
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astounding
If you went back to 1969 and told me that by 2009 we would have personal communication that was better than a Star Trek communicator, I would have said "no way, man". If you had said that water was going to be sale-able at $1 a (small) bottle, I would have laughed in your face (even though I have always been bullish on the price of water, that commodity is going nowhere but up in the long run).
The point being, a few very unpredictable things have happened in the last forty years.
So, pull out your crystal ball and answer me this:
In the next 40 years, what is the one (or two) most astounding things you think will happen to the world? Political, cultural, financial, medical, whatever, you pick your sphere.
(I'll put my two cents in the reply comments in a day or three. Thanks!)
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01:55 pm
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beware the second wave.
I was going to talk about something more interesting and cheerier, but this seems more timely. The inefficiency in the commercial real estate market is about to dump a lot more pressure on the solvency of banks, and maybe even the system (again). Everywhere I've been lately, there are increasingly more empty storefronts, empty buildings, a great excess of commercial brick and mortar. Some amount of that was created during the housing boom, in locations that no longer make sense, and the banks are going to eat those errors, and tighten liquidity even more.
And everything is going to go down again, before the end of the year, eventually to new lows.
Are businesses booming, or even, surviving well, where you live? I hope I am wrong, but I don't see it.
Tags: depression, finance, stock
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12:37 pm
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creep-age
So, of the four choices, you guys picked the one I least care about. I knew I chose the last post's title correctly.
Just antecdotally, Paulson was an assistant to John Erlichman, one of Richard Nixon's scummiest advisors, during Watergate. Paulson started with Goldman in the early 80s and worked his way up from there. Goldman is a firm known for it's 'on the edge' tactics. They skirt the law, they do anything for the dollar against outside firms, they compete with each other inside the firm as dog eat dog. (I used to work for Spear Leeds and Kellogg in the 80s and 90s, a similar but smaller firm. SLK was eventually taken over by Goldman.) It would be nearly impossible imo to rise through the ranks of Goldman to stand on top of the hill without having done a lot of things that Erlichman would have approved of.
But to the meat of the matter. Paulson was instrumental in bailing out AIG. Goldman was one of AIG's largest counterparties (if not the largest) in many dealings. Paulson showered his friends with government money, saving them billions. As treasury secretary, he made sure his friends and ex-firm were kept above water, while simultaneously allowing a few of Goldman's best competitors to fail. And as further conjecture, you don't become treasury secretary in the middle of a president's second term by accident. It would surprise me if, somewhere in the future, GW Bush doesn't gain financial benefit indirectly from Goldman.
Washington D.C. is corrupt, especially at the highest levels.
Ben Bernanke is a stooge generally by doing exactly what the Street most wants, namely, pumping up liquidity, taking onto the Fed balance sheet billions in toxic assets, and devaluing the USDollar as necessary to (supposedly) ameliorate almost any financial crisis. But he is specifically a Stooge for, under orders, forcing Bank of America to consume Merril Lynch even after they had discovered things on the balance sheet that wanted them to back out of the takeover. BAC backing out right then would have been hell on the markets, and the president and treasury secretary didn't want that, so they got Bernanke's people to be the bad guy in forcing BAC to not only swallow Merrill (and further, not even talk about any of the problems.) (As a (presumably) unrelated note, ex-Goldman guy John Thain was currently heading Merril, trying to save it.)
Greenspan is evil cause he knew what he was doing to the economy by providing the Greenspan Put, but he did it anyway. He may try to distance himself now by saying he had no idea this could all happen, but if he knew, he was evil, and if he didn't, he was an idiot stooge himself. I choose the evil explanation.
(If you want back up reading or citing for the impetus to any of these conclusions, feel free to type any of these names into Wikipedia and read the entries. I'm too tired now to make all the hyperlink connections. And besides, I am still a tad annoyed to write about these trash next when y'all could have chosen a discussion of why millions of children die every year in Africa from the treatable diseases Malaria and TB.)
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01:42 pm
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relativity
I have a few topics that have been on my mind lately, and it has been awhile.
which should come next?
Poll #1399348 relativity
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 31which would be more interesting to discuss next, here?
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02:29 pm
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oily matter
John D. Rockefeller built Standard Oil over a century ago. He used a lot of savvy to make the oil business. One thing he did was he'd negotiate with railroads for the cost of transporting his oil (and he did A LOT of transporting). Independent (or even just smaller) oil producers invariably paid higher transport rates. Rockefeller's haggling made the company millions, over time. Many independents just couldn't compete with the lower cost structure and disappeared, or were bought up by Standard Oil.
If you need a colonoscopy in the near future, that procedure will have a total cost and price. If you are a Medicare (or other government-type patient) it will be the "lowest" price (generally). If you are privately insured, it will be the middling price. If you have no insurance at all, are paying out of pocket, you will pay the highest price.
The government has much more negotiating power than does an uninsured private payor in determining their price of medical procedures. If you are an individual, you have almost none. The hospitals need the private payor to have any real chance of making money for the stockholders?
So, was it all right that Rockefeller used his negotiating power in this way? Is it all right that the US government does so? Finally, is it all right for the private buyer of that colonoscopy to pay the highest price?
(I am only a layman here, feel free to correct anything, or discuss any aspect of this I might have missed. Thanks.)
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11:38 am
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the fight between the 'flations
Most of the battle of investing is determining whether we are in a part of the cycle that the immediate future is inflationary or deflationary.
There are great arguments for either side at the moment. The Fed Chairman sees almost no chance of inflation. I see the de facto money supply rising at a prodigious rate. The President has lowered expectations so much (for his own political reasons) that everyone I know is depressed about money issues.
BTW, that is USUALLY the best time to buy stocks, when everyone is this fearful.
Sell exuberance, buy fear.
Companies are deflating, cutting jobs, cutting plans. But then look at Gold in stock market terms, the Gold/Stock pair has risen most dramatically.
So, are we going to continue deflating for the foreseeable future?
`or not?
Tags: economics, finance
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01:59 pm
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4D Time or about time or.....
An old friend of mine has chided me to make a new post. Okay.
A considerably younger reader here sent me an email some time ago (which, inexplicably, I can no longer find). In it he asks an interesting question, and realizes that this forum of older intelligentsia (hope that word isn't offensive, if it is attack at will) is a better place for his question than his own forum (of much younger, cooler readers). Contrary to the lack of my input here, I have given his thoughts much thought. I would add a bit, and I am going to rephrase it some here in my own words. I hope he doesn't mind, that I get the thought correctly enough and I also hope he wishes to identify himself here, but that is all his call. It is a two-parter.
1) You enter a familiar room. Standing over there is you, when you were just twenty years old. You sense this isn't actually you because YOU are standing over here, and besides, you remember this room as having a window over on this wall and not that one, along with a few other minor discrepancies, so you guess this is some alternative you in an alternative time line, a part of the "line" YOU have passed through already. You also see a timer (just in your head) ticking down. You don't have much time.
What do YOU do?
If you give you advice to you of some kind (do YOU?), what is it?
2) It isn't you over there this time, it is some unknown young person living in the time when you were almost 20 years old. What do you do this time?
If you choose to reply to any of this, I want you to also tell your age (+/- 5 years), right up front. (As example, I am closer to 50 years old than 40.)
My reply will be as close to the 10th reply as I can get.
Tags: age, time
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03:27 pm
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get with the times
I'd like to rarely amend/change the US Constitution. One of the few good changes was when the Twentieth Amendment changed the date of the Presidential inauguration from March 4th of the year after the election to January 20th of the year after.
Does anyone NOT think this amendment should be amended to make the date even closer to the election itself? Aren't we even faster now than in 1933?
A few weeks after should be plenty?
Tags: politics, presidency
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10:42 am
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inherit the wind
Your great-aunt Lily just passed on.
In her will, she gave you $10000, with restrictions.
You must use this money to invest in one specific thing for the next 5 years.
It can be any one stock, or a CD, but those are your only choices, and it must be invested by the end of the year, and remain there untouched for at least five years. (You can roll CDs if that is your choice.)
Where do you put this money?
Tags: finance
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11:15 am
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financial mashup
Stock markets worldwide just had another bad October. Whatta ya know?
I just saw this article about the world's reliance on the dollar. China has an awful lot of those dollars, considering. Makes me think the Chinese holders of that USD are going to start putting it elsewhere than US government paper, perhaps even into the US stock market more significantly now.
So, in this panic, consumer confidence hits record lows (well, for the last 40 years of stat-counting, anyway). Maybe US consumers will save more productively and buy less useless crap, especially on credit. Who knows, maybe bankers will lend responsibly and/or the biggest beneficiaries of US "good life" will pay slightly more. Maybe there will be more transparency in financial dealings. All that sounds like a good thing to me.
Does the Plunge Protection Team exist? I think they do, and further, I'll bet some US Government off-budget line item somewhere is recording a HUGE unfathomable loss, trying to support the market the last couple of months. (Google Plunge Protection Team for a lot of information (and plenty of conspiracy dross, to boot.)
On a different yet related note, amazing how many Goldman Sachs employees are being used by Paulson to help staunch the bleeding. Is it a wonder why AIG was saved? Does this bother any of you?
The Yen Carry trade has appeared to unwound. Fully? I wouldn't know.
Is there a new Bretton Woods meeting coming up? What could they do? Are they going to try and shift the world's trade away from such complete reliance on the USD? I can't possibly believe anyone in that power really wants to anchor their currency to anything also not paper. Still, this event could be amazingly relevant to the next decade (or three)'s macro finance, if they make real change.
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02:08 pm
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that blimp is history now..
About a year ago I wrote this entry, indicating it was time to sell stocks.
Since then, perceptions have shifted dramatically, awareness of difficulties has shot up, and instead of greed, the market (and the people) have a lot more fear in their psyche. The shift from greed to fear is what moves the stock market down. We've done a lot of that shift.
I'll go on record and say that the selloff from the highs is at least half over, price-wise. I think we probably still have a big crash period in our near term future (thanks to lack of liquidity, even with everyone pumping every spigot) but if you are a long term buyer, you can probably start to nibble on equity here. Or at least, don't be as fearful as everyone else is heading towards. Pick good companies that don't have credit problems. And the week you see the most fear, that will be the right time to invest more strongly. I've been a bear, now I am just neutral.
OTOH, this is a still a bear market with a lot of problems, and time-wise, it probably ISN'T half over yet, even if it is price-wise. The next couple of years are still going to be tough, and I doubt if the market turns on a dime from bear to bull. No need to rush to buy.
Just try not to get too caught up in the Fear if you are in it for the long term.
(I should add the comment I am always too early as an investor. And bear markets rarely end without more fear than this, I think. So expect more ugliness, still.)
Tags: finance, market
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11:38 am
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a rose is a rose
(This entry is a (potentially offensive?) distraction from the fears and crisis about economic crap and malfeasance in washington and wall street. Just two days ago I watched (for the umpteenth time) this movie, now 70 years old almost, and it makes one cry to think too hard on it. So how about the following, instead?)
I saw Tommie Smith and John Carlos do this right when it happened. It felt like a big moment, even right then.
But for awhile now, I've been bugged, peeved.
I can remember when Americans of color were called Negro (and worse). For many reasons not described, I was proud of those Olympians, that day. The advancement from Negro to Black was (perhaps) the turning point in the movement. It was at the least a linguistic step from which there was no neutral turning back.
In the past decade, many Black Americans now want to be called African Americans. (Notice the link for this was immediately available on the wiki Black Power page.) Personally, I'd be offended if anyone called me a Ukrainian American, or a Jewish American.
I am just an American.
And if you are an American, that is what I want to call you. Or perhaps, if you prefer, a Black American, but I have eyes, can't I just see that? And to me, being called African American seems like a real step backwards.
I ask you, am I wrong in thinking this way?
Is Black American now (or in the near-future) going to be a derogatory term?
What do you WANT to be called, whatever you are?
Tags: black, politics
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10:41 am
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black or pink?
I watch very little news. Almost all of it is depressing, and most of it is irrelevant to my life.
My first presidential vote ever was in 1980 and I voted for John Anderson, mainly so he wouldn't have to go bankrupt for his idealism. Since then, I have yet to vote for a major party candidate in the presidential election. As a rule (and this year is a prime example), the people it takes to become president are corrupt, venal and parochial. Pretty much what it takes to become a US Senator, huh? I have voted in almost every election however, but I found myself always voting for the other candidate. Ross Perot. Ed Clark. Meaningless votes. Since most of my time was in Chicago, and voters there are strongly Democratic, it rarely even seemed worth voting. And this from someone who once wanted to be a constitutional lawyer, arguing before the Supreme Court.
I don't involve myself in much of that, it dissipates my energy.
But I do think I will vote for a major candidate this election. I think America is at a crossroads. Our brand of capitalism has become Corporatism. We pretty much have two (better than the alternatives) choices going forward. Our Capitalism can become more socialistic or more fascistic.
I think I'll choose Socialism.
Kudos if you get the title reference without research.
More kudos if you have read Sinclair Lewis' book.
Tags: politics
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01:50 pm
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headless horseman
I think there must be some Ohio law which says that a motorcyclist is not allowed to wear a helmet in warm weather.
I don't think I have seen more than two helmets all summer, and I am sure I have seen at least 30 motorcyclists out driving in that time.
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11:39 am
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forever...
USPS markets a stamp as the Forever stamp. It will serve to mail one first class postage, no matter what the price of that stamp is at any future date.
If you have the money, is there any good reason not to buy this in bulk, even stockpiling it, perhaps even investing in cases of it, as part of an inflation hedge?
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11:54 am
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rolling over
Seems like I have been reading/thinking a great deal the last few months about social injustice. In accord with that, I recently read the book 'Oil!', by Upton Sinclair. It was a worthwhile read, and Sinclair uses words with more skill than most of his peers. Perhaps you were forced to read 'the Jungle' when you were in school, that is his most famous work.
Any serious reading of these two books (without even knowing of Sinclair's full history) makes it clear that Sinclair was a social reformer, that societal injustice was a great concern of his. In 'the Jungle', he describes in great detail the malfeasance of the wealthy and privileged juxtaposed directly against the deprivation and hardship of the working poor. (People remember this book more for the graphic depiction of the unhealthiness of the meat packing plants, but there is a lot more meat in those pages.) In 'Oil', he shows how a few fortunates become extremely wealthy while their labor force suffers ever less quietly. Throughout this book is writing about the anarchist and socialist/communist movements. The book is well written, although it does drag just a bit at the end, like Sinclair didn't know how to wrap it up.
I just watched the movie 'There Will Be Blood', with Daniel Day Lewis. The cover of 'Oil' purports in multiple places to be the inspiration for this movie. They even have the movie credit box printed on the book's back cover! The only similarity between the two was the setting at the start of both was akin. Both stories started around 1900, in the far West USA, there is oil drilling and a few of the names and locations are the same. The story the movie tells is decidedly less socialist, even anti-socialist in much of it's context. Lewis gives an excellent performance, but it is very much opposite to the way his namesake in the book would have acted, at almost every point. I couldn't get past wondering how Upton Sinclair would feel about this complete perversion of his society-moving message.
Anyway, I've been thinking about other dead notables, how the powerful message of certain dead can, after their demise, be totally misused.
Can you remind me of other (preferably more obscure than Jesus) examples?
Tags: books, review, theft, upton sinclair
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11:35 am
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the best 7stud player you never heard of....
....won the $10,000 Stud championship at the wsop yesterday.
Eric Brooks and I first met in 1982 standing in the Dome Mines trading pit. We each were working our positions up to the (then) limit, buying a spread that still stands in my mind as one of the best I'd ever done. (That's a different story.) We both traded on the PHLX for some years, then in 1987 his good friend Jeff Yass and a few others with Eric all started a trading firm to take advantage of their math prowess and understanding. They caught the 1987 crash very well, and that firm is now called SIG, a top well-capitalized firm.
SIG always pushed poker as a trading educational aid, most days we'd play (usually Stud) after work, in the game room, (backgammon also, in case you were wondering). It was required for the trainees/neophytes to play, others would pitch in and teach. We'd play and show hands and discuss tactics/strategy, there was NO better way to learn poker, I think. We played penny ante, and do all sorts of things to see what happened. I can remember one type of "test", Eric would throw a hundred dollar bill into the pot at the start (we played 25/50 cent limit), just to see how the trainees reacted to the changed situation.
I have so many Eric stories, but this isn't the place, or time, but a few bubble up right near the top. Eric was a principal at Phila.Trading/Susq/SIG, but retired recently due to a rare form of a rare disease. When I consider the group of people I knew from then, it is amazing how many of these 40 year olds have been forced out of the business (or even, died) due to health issues, maybe as many as 1 in 3. If I knew then what I know now, how physically and mentally debilitating trading is, I would have picked a different career, I think.
Another thing that leaps up to mind is how right we all were thinking that trading and poker had great similarity in skill set. In these last two wsops, at least 3 former/current SIG traders have won bracelets. It wasn't a coincidence this happened.
Finally, and regrettably, I wish I could still do some of this stuff. Neurological pain really sucks. I don't envy others, no green in me, and I certainly don't envy Eric, one of the nicest extremely wealthy people you'd ever want to meet, but some part of me thinks that, except for this f--ng pain, I might be there. When I worked at SIG (so long ago) it was said (by more than just me) that I was the second best poker player in the firm, or maybe third (after one anonymous person here, and in deference to him).
But we were both behind Eric.
Tags: finance, poker, sig
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