Hinwil is a smallish town in the canton of Zürich in Swizerland. It can, by no stretch of the imagination, be characterized as either remotely Hawaiian or Australian. Even more so as an especially long winter retains its iron grip on the region. Why is it then that a local discounter (Aldis) has found it to be economically attractive to carry both ukuleles and didgeridoos, as shown in the photos below?

UkulelesDidgeridoos

Is it really so bad to see the back of an economic system that provides us with lunacy... [More]

We are ill-equipped to deal with huge numbers. Many of couldn’t tell the difference between 100,000 people and 1 million people. We are notoriously bad at estimating, conceiving of and comprehending large numbers. This makes it that much easier to pull the wool over our eyes when it comes to budgets and finance. Take, for instance, the $1 trillion figure being bandied about these days. What does one TRILLION dollars look like? (PageTutor) provides a handy visual mnemonic, starting with a single $100 bill... [More]

Man Up! Hedge-Fund Man’s Advice for Wall Street by Michael Lewis (Bloomberg) is a (somewhat) amusing look at the world through the eyes of “typical” trader on Wall Street. This trader is wondering why Wall Street is wasting its time worrying about what the rest of the non-Wall Street-world thinks. Instead, he feels his fellow traders should stick to the plan and stick it to a government that gave them so much money without bothering to force any conditions first.

“Think about this. Some fool comes along and gives you $15... [More]”

The article, Why I am a Green, not a Democrat by Mitchel Cohen (Informed Comment), wasn’t exactly about finance, but it did involve this interesting question that the author wanted to ask of the exceedingly smarmy Senator Chuck Schumer. It’s about a slated fare increase on NYC transit from the current $2.00 to $3.00 per ride. The fare increase is “to raise $1.2 billion claimed by the MTA as its deficit”. Naturally, the MTA is not allowed to run a deficit, so it has to make up the difference. Since bailing out a transportation... [More]

The blog entry, Washington Post Crashed-and-Burned Watch (“Bipartisan” Edition) by Brad DeLong (Grasping Reality), lists the actual votes for the spending bill recently passed by the Congress and the Senate.

“The Obama bipartisan proposal receives 0 Republican votes in the House, and 0 Republican votes in the Senate. An extremely small group of posturing senators makes the plan materially worse – reducing its likely efficacy as an employment boost by roughly 600,000 or so – and it looks as though the final passage bill will... [More]”

The blog post, Gary Ackerman goes off on the SEC (NY Newsday), refers us to a five-minute video of a portion of the investigation of how the SEC managed to avoid shutting down Bernie Madoff ten years ago. The video is linked below.

Rep. Ackerman on Madoff Fraud (YouTube)

I’ve taken the liberty of providing a rush transcript of the best bits below. In all cases, “you” refers to the SEC.

“Your mission you said was to, ‘protect investors and detect fraud quickly’. How’d that work out? What went wrong? […] One guy with a few friends and helpers... [More]”

Even the pundits most slavishly devoted to the myth of the free market think that the economy is in dire straits. Things look bad on many fronts and even those that denied that anything was wrong even as late as August now agree that the recession actually started in December of 2007. As the elections neared last year, it was accepted wisdom that all of our woes were due to the poor taking out shaky mortgages. Once that canard failed to hold up, the media stopped trying to come up with causes... [More]

David Rees weighs in with possibly one of the last GYWO cartoons ever. He started about eight years ago and has moved on to videos instead. As usual, he manages to capture that which is most important out of the miasma of obfuscation that the mainstream media emits (as Homer Simpson put it: “It’s funny because he says what we’re all thinking.”

get your war on 81 − #6

And the money quote, transcribed for posterity.

“Oh, enough with all the “broad bipartisan” bullshit! Did Republicans not got [sic] their asses totally... [More]”

Bill Watterson understood how things worked 15 years ago, which is pretty much how things still work today (click to see a larger version).

Calvin's Premium Lemonade Stand

The date for the cartoon was obtained from this comment, Re: $8.4 BILLION Profit for Oil Giant (This Quarter Only!) and the image originally found on the Truth About Cars blog. Another full transcript of the cartoon is available at Recurring themes in Calvin and Hobbes; Wikipedia, the original source has since been edited and longer contains it. Such... [More]

In discussions between two opposing viewpoints, people tend to choose a “winner” based on who’s willing to raise the volume and lower the level of discourse. If they can identify with one side’s points—or have no reason not to believe them—they tend to identify that way. Simplistic and specious reasoning, straw-man logic and outright, bold-faced lies often carry the day. Check out any Bill O’Reilly interview[1] and you’ll see a master of the form at work.

Now, the right-wing version involves ... [More]

So, suddenly everyone cares about macro-economics. Suddenly, we’ve upgraded our interest in the magic, money-making machine—this financial Perpetuum Mobile—from non-existent to frantic. For the longest time, very few of us cared exactly how it worked or why. No one bothered to ask why it was a given that investing in the market made sense—be it through funds, pensions or directly[1]—that’s why it’s called a given. (Duh.) We ignored clear signs that some were making out like bandits—and... [More]

As of the weekend, we heard that the Dow industrials [was] down over 5,500 points, or 39%, from year-ago peak (MarketWatch). It’s strange, though, because doesn’t crash mean that everything stops working? Crash means bread lines and digging holes and filling them in again to pass the time. At least, that’s what happened during the last crash. What does crash mean today? The internet clearly still works. Jets are still flying on time... [More]

They say that the financial system is on the brink of collapse, that it has stopped “working”. This sounds bad. However, before rushing to support whatever solution is put forward to fix it, it would be best to figure out what it was like when it was working smoothly. Only then can you know whether or not you want to fix it. Some of the votes of “no” to the bailout came from representatives that believed just that: that the goal is not to put everything back the way it was, with the same people... [More]

Most of us don’t follow the markets very assiduously. We buy into pensions or mutual funds or get CDs or money-market funds at the bank or we just have a savings account with decent... [More]

Even the most razor-sharp of hewers to the party line must be having a tremendous amount of psychic agony in trying to follow the script. If cognitive dissonance can cause actual, physical pain, then now is surely the time for it to do so. John McCain is praising the bailouts and buy-outs of major American financial institutions to high heaven, while at the same time calling for even less regulation—ostensibly because there are still a few banks that haven’t managed to glut themselves into... [More]

Two point five kids.

Four-bedroom house in a good neighborhood.

Two-car garage full of garden tools and two new cars in the driveway.

Good schools.

Fancy vacations.

Keeping up with the Joneses.

The American Dream.

It’s called a dream because it doesn’t seem realistic that it will come true for every American. And it doesn’t—but only for those losers who aren’t willing to work hard enough for it. That’s the hard-as-nails story anyway—the philosophical core of the American... [More]

Factors in Our Colossal Mess by Gabriel Kolko (CounterPunch) offers a nigh-panicked critique of the out-of-control hyper-captitalism found in the rarified air of the international financial instruments markets. With a name like that, it’s already clear that the intent is to hoodwink and the system does not disappoint. With the introduction of ever faster computing, ever more memory and ever tighter integration of information and communication, traders, who used to be limited in their schemes to invent money out of thin air,... [More]