Woulda Coulda Shoulda

In the past several months I have made more than a few trades that should have been *long term disinvestments*.

I have shorted Washington Mutual at $21.50.

I have shorted Fannie Mae at $39 per share.

And, sadly, I had a short position on Lehman Brothers at $47.45

See these two links Trading Update and May Trading Update.

Yesterday WaMu closed at $3.30,

Shares of Fannie Mae now qualify for the Dollar Store, closing at $.99 apiece.

And Lehman Brothers closed at $7.79.

It's been a rough year for me. I closed out those shorts and moved on to others like Wells Fargo, Simon Property Group, HSBC, etc. that haven't exactly worked out.

AND I just made another mistake. I used "Google Finance" hyperlinks above. Soon, I will have to go back and edit this post, replacing them with "Wikipedia" links!

Blame Coach Belichick?

So Tom Brady got his knee smashed up and is done for the season...

Well, any QB passing as much as he did was inevitably going to go down hard. This is why these Old School coaches are so into running the ball.

I fully understand the dilemma. Having a passing talent like TB definitely compels a coach to use him. Regardless, I think the Patriots run is over.

Unless of course this no-name backup QB pulls a "Tom Brady"!

Depression Pics

Someone emailed this to me. I won't even try to figure out its original source as it looks like many have co-opted it. Note the next batch of Depression pics will be memorialized in HD!

America Before Pearl Harbor - Early Kodachrome Images

When we think of America during the Great Depression, we often picture it in shades of grey. It was a grim era and nearly all of the photographs we see are in black and white.



This is one of Dorothea Lange's most famous photographs: a destitute mother in a migrant farm worker camp in California. Lange was one of the many talented WPA photographers who recorded the history and conditions of the Depression across the United States. Follow me as we look at America before Pearl Harbor.

The rest of the photos were taken with Kodachrome. As you can see, COLOR presents an entirely different image:



This is a photograph of Faro and Doris Caudill, farmers in Pietown, New Mexico. They lived in a dugout and struggled to survive on Resettlement Administration land.

As the 1930s came to a close, Kodak came out with Kodachrome film, the first commercially viable color film available to the general public. In 1937 and 1938, the colors were still not stable and accurate, but by 1939 Kodachrome was producing color images of remarkable precision.



Not just anybody could buy this film. It cost $5 per roll and had to be sent back to Rochester, New York for development. By comparison, in 1938 Congress established the first minimum wage at 25 cents per hour. $5.00 represented several days work. But the Farm Security Administration sent out about a dozen photographers with this new film. Commercial photographer, Samuel Gottscho, and well-to-do amateur, Charles Cushman, embraced this new technology, as well.

New York City was the metropolis of America:



Times Square was the happening place. Big date. Hop in a taxi, and go see 'Night Train' at the Globe Theater.



Washington was a city of contrasts, the New Deal having extended its
influence across the nation.



But it was still very much a Southern city - especially if you were Colored, as they said in those days.



Chicago was the transportation, food, and manufacturing center of the country.



And the Southside was still an industrial neighborhood of steel mills and packing houses.



New Orleans was the largest city in the South - not Atlanta.



Jim Crow laws were a fact of life for residents of the Ninth Ward.



San Francisco had been eclipsed by Los Angeles in size, but it remained the most important port and financial center of the West.



And Charles Cushman had to take a photograph of his new coupe beside the recently completed Golden Gate Bridge.



Nearly half of all Americans still lived on farms and in small towns.



The Farmall Tractor had revolutionized farming, but mechanization remained limited.



In rural Georgia, folks still went to town on Saturday by wagon.



And kids still went barefoot in Indiana in the summertime.



Mothers still made clothes for the kids from flour and feed sacks, as with these girls at the Vermont State Fair.



And grandmothers still made sure that their teenaged granddaughters didn't hang out at the horse auctions with the menfolk in little towns in eastern Kentucky:



(Look how mad Grandma is and how her granddaughter is stomping away.)

Saturdays were the day that everybody went to town in Cascade, Idaho.



But rural life remained quite distinct from urban America - whether on the C-D Ranch in Montana...



Or during the peach harvest in western Colorado.



Despite the Depression, modernization proceeded rapidly in the 1930s.
People still traveled by train. Railroads were one of the largest employers.



But the emerging airlines were already flying four-engine Boeing Stratoliners out of Chicago Midway for those wealthy enough to fly.



The country store was the furthest many rural Southerners ever got.



Yet, Miami Beach was filled with northern vacationers.



Hoover Dam began generating electricity for California in 1936 - promising to transform the West.



The Roosevelt Administration's projects created jobs and electricity for one of the poorest regions of the South. The divide between urban and rural America was beginning to close.



By 1939, Americans wanted to imagine a new and better future after the Depression decade. The futuristic New York World's Fair ran for two seasons in 1939 and 1940.



San Francisco's Golden Gate International Exposition envisioned a Pacific
future for America.



Americans celebrated Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak during the summer of 1941 and another Yankees' World Series championship in the fall.



Dances in Oklahoma were simple affairs - with perhaps a fiddler and guitarist.



On the cusp of modernity, Americans still clung nostalgically to rural myths.
Not the reality of the poverty that most rural Americans endured during the Depression.



But they saw it in color - for the very first time.

Although immigration had been curtailed in the 1920s, the Lower East Side remained vibrantly Jewish.



Minorities faced brutal discrimination in jobs, housing, education, and public accommodations.



The New Deal did little to improve conditions for sharecroppers in Alabama.



Mining families in Pennsylvania still lived in decrepit company housing.



The Roosevelt administration struggled to get Mexican American children out of the fields and into schools in Texas and other border states.



Native Americans, who had only recently received citizenship in their own land, remained desperately poor. (Photo taken in Tucson.)



And little do these Americans of Japanese descent suspect - as they celebrate their culture during the World's Fair - that within two years, they will be deported to relocation camps by their own government.



After December 7th, that America would be changed forever.

For West Coast Tom!

Fast forward to the 21 second mark of this clip:



See the comments of my previous post.

Gotta love YouTube!

You Know You're Old When...

...when Time-Life is running informercials selling YOUR music. Late last night I watched and enjoyed almost the entire 30 minute ad for some 1980s *Rock Ballad* CD collection.

Now I'd never order this or anything like it. Today I went to their website and used the CD tracks to create "80s rock ballad" playlists for YouTube.

If they really want to bring us "back", they ought to put the songs on a mixtape.

Marginalizing John Maudlin

John Maudlin writes a financial newsletter - "Outside the Box" - that gets emailed to something like 1,000,000 "informed investors" all over the globe at least once per week. Obviously he is pretty bright, otherwise we'd need to use the terms "sheep" and "cult" in explaining his ginormous readership.

I started reading his letter sometime in the past year or two and have, I guess, learned a few things from him. BUT, every once in a while his commentary really chafes me. I have a problem with his latest:

Additional Thoughts On The Continuing Crisis

We are entering the next stage of the credit crisis, and one which is potentially more troubling than what we have seen over the past year, absent some policy reactions by the central banks and governments world wide. The crisis was started by an intense run-up in leverage by financial institutions and investors world wide, investing in increasingly risky assets such as subprime mortgages and then the realization that leverage could hurt. The deleveraging process started to intensify last year about this time. The easy part of that process has been just about done. Now is the time for the really hard work. It will not be pretty. In this week's letter, we look at the process and think about its implications for the markets and the economy, and visit some data on the housing market and unemployment.
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Action Is Needed Now

It is unfortunate that the crisis in housing and the credit markets seems to be coming to a head in the middle of a hotly contested election cycle and a lame duck president. Matters are such that waiting until a new president is in power and has his new appointees in place is a very bad option. Things could spiral down very quickly without action by the Treasury and the Fed and other regulators.

Lax regulation of both the mortgage industry and the rating agencies allowed the current crisis to develop. While new regulations will be helpful in the future, we have to deal with the problems as they are today. As I noted above, the credit crunch has the potential to get much worse in the coming quarters. It is clear to a number of observers that Freddie and Fannie are dead men walking. They are going to need capital from the Treasury. Those with mortgages that have the ability to pay at some level should be helped, and the rest need to be sold off at market clearing prices. But that means mortgage debt must be available. Because of the problems in the markets, mortgage rates are higher than they should be, making the housing problems worse.

Since we are going to have to take action sooner rather than later, we should do it sooner. One of the main rules in investing is that "The first losses are the best losses." The longer we wait, the more distress there will be in the housing markets and the lower values will go. Putting off action until next year will mean more losses for taxpayers and more pain in the markets when action is finally taken.

It physically hurts me to write those words. It is so against my free market economic beliefs. But a slow implosion of Freddie and Fannie, and a non-existent jumbo loan market, will mean a very serious recession if not checked soon.



Okay, that's the second time I have used that *hypocrite* image in about a month. I could probably use it in every single post!

It's one thing for say, a drill sergeant whose life is *discipline* to be a wee bit hypocritical and perhaps let his children slide on light punishment for heavy sins.

But for John Maudlin to claim to have *free market economic beliefs* in the same paragraph where he advocates the LARGEST GOVERNMENT BAILOUT in the history of Earthly civilization....well, that's more than a little tough to digest.

This weekend, the government is about to announce a bailout for Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's debt. Don't believe any of the spinmeisters' claims on the true cost of this bailout for wealthy investors and foreign governments. This will add roughly $5 trillion to our national debt - taking it from $9 trillion to $14 trillion at the stroke of a pen.



Point of fact, if an impartial reader came upon Maudlin's bit under the subtitle "Action Needed" (you'll have to click on the link above to read it in its entirety), you'd have trouble convincing him that the author wasn't Ted Kennedy or Barney Frank, outright communists.

Maudlin wrote:

Since we are going to have to take action sooner rather than later, we should do it sooner.

That ridiculously illogical sentence sounds EXACTLY like a lispy Barney Frankism!!!

How much do you want to bet that John Maudlin's *clients* are knee deep in Fannie and Freddie Agency debt?

It would be a reckless inference to say that guys like John Maudlin and Bill Gross have exchanged their principles for *fees*. There's simply no evidence they had any to begin with.

What can be claimed, however, is that extreme wealth AND probity rarely mark a Wall Street guy.

Alien Mating Habits

Movie director James Cameron has a new *monster* production called Avatar coming out in December 2009. Okay, big deal. Most of us will see it eventually.

What struck me in reading about it was the passing mention that he is currently on wife NUMBER FIVE!

I juat did a quick google on "who has been divorced the most" and came up with an article titled The Good News Is That Divorce Is Increasing where some 'old bag' (?) celebrates, yes CELEBRATES, the rise in women over the age of 60 filing for divorce. Unbelievable.



I do remember that Zsa Zsa Gabor had nine different husbands or so. Maybe Chris Evert Lloyd Mills Norman will catch her one day?

There's a whole other world out there that I would like to stay, well, out there. So long as we merely read about and gawk at these aliens from the safe confines of supermarket checkout aisles....we should be alright; and the human race will survive.

My TV Life In Pictures

It's somewhat humorous to look back upon all the TV shows I was consumed with over the years. I am probably missing a few so as my memory returns I will interject them.

Here they are in rough chronological order:





























Shoot. I must be missing a bunch of shows.

Note there is a big gap in the 1990s. That's when I went off to college and became consumed with alchohol, golf, and coeds in Philadelphia.

So, a show like Seinfeld, though I've seen all the episodes, I never once watched it during primetime.