This week our trivia question comes from American history.

Most economic historians attribute the start of the Great Depression to what particular event in 1929, tho’ some saw it as a symptom?

It Ain’t What They Call You – It’s What You Answer To

I commented on a piece written by a guy out in Colorado yesterday. He’s a statistician/economist blogger, and has been writing his stuff for the past five years. In a random review thru his multi-year postings, I noted that he has never had one comment on anything he’s written in five years. That is amazing. He had the confidence and discipline to write hundreds of blog items about the economy, both at home and foreign, without anyone ever even acknowledging his work. Oh – by the way? He has no ads, so this isn’t something he apparently does for money. So his latest entry was musing about how much longer interest rates would remain this low. I could find nothing in his statement with which to disagree, so I just asked him a question. The question, in essence, was whether the expectation of a continuation makes it continue? In fact, I referred to it as continuation expectation. I think maybe I’ve invented a new phrase! I’ll have to google it and see if I invented it or stole it, albeit subconsciously. But my point was in the 60’s thru the early 80’s, there was an expectation that inflation would continue. As such, people saved little and bought stuff, because it was bound to be more expensive later. Now we have deflation, with an expectation that these low interest rates will be around for a long time to come. So with no rush, don’t buy today – it might be cheaper tomorrow. Japan is a perfect example of that – for over two decades!

My hat is off to this fellow, who calls his blog “Common Sense Forecaster”. Here’s a link if you’re interested.

http://commonsenseforecaster.blogspot.com/2012_08_01_archive.html

OK, here’s another new thing-writing a post while watching the second Part of “The Newsroom”. Ostensibly it’ll be more spontaneous than writing on the computer keyboard. Let’s see! Got the idea from Michael Scherer in Time magazine writing about and during the Republican debates. what he wrote was fresh & spontaneous, and clearly read by the SNL staff for their sendups of the candidates. OK, enuf back stuff-here we go!

PartII: mock debate

POWER OUTAGE AND NO CONTINGENCY for it. Mac says “guys” just like Emily does when her Xbox 360 buds are killing her on Minecraft.

Characters are yelling at each other. Aw, gee – power came back on, but not before an intrepid speech by English Mac. Back to Casey coverage…

Neil (the guy from Slumdog Millionaire) wants to be a troll on some website, so he can write about posting fraudulent, incendiary posts that are pre-cleared by the object of his virtual abuse. Which side of the mirror are we on? as time goes on, I find it harder to keep track.

More relationship blah blah ..

Debate prep with the show characters ..

Have you noticed how Mac’s blouses are just like Diane Sawyer’s? So is there a uniform for ladies in front of and behind the camera?

Now the junior girl is brow beating Casey Anthony’s high school acquaintence? She’s holding out, pleading ignorance. Then a guilt trip! Cajoling .. Finally she acquiesces. Jim the junior producer says he isn’t crazy, but his dialogue is bizarre.

More relationship blah blah-Jeez!

The scene switches to the big Kahoona character Will talking to his shrink…more funky dialogue and relationship moia moia (that is that Charlie Brown teacher sound).

More troll stuff-the most interesting part of this plot. Which is slowly thickening..

Whoa-the character said what all us mothers thought about the hypocrisy of prolifers, as it pertains to CA. We decry abortion, while we pillory a woman who had no business ever being a mother. But in the show, this Whoa statement is shoehorned into this multilayered plot. Loses a lot in the traffic.

Then it’s pillory the Republican candidates time in the mock debate. Show their rep to be a sniveling worm with no scruples. Why can’t we all just get along?

Fifteen minutes left and they “lost” the debate they never coulda pulled off anyway. Golly, if I was Jane Fonda I’d fire this gang too for being schizophrenic. Always relationship blah blah interwoven with tiny slivers of powerful plot. And it’s all so fast, nobody could possibly keep up.

And I cannot understand the smart economist gal when she talks-which confuses the whole troll part.

More dangling relationship between the two juniors … o

Sixteen more plot pieces with an obnoxious version of Carole King’s Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? Horns too loud. Will Will get bumped off? Literally or career-wise, that is the question. But the real question is: do we care anymore?

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Today I started a new feature (yes, Virginia, ANOTHER new feature, in addition to movie reviews and trivia questions: anything to get some foot traffic here!)

On Saturdays I will be handicapping the presidential race, down to the last electoral vote! Let’s see how accurate I can be as we head into the final 10 weeks of the campaign!

So, gentle readers, go to the Politics tab and send me a comment~

Today is Friday, you know what that means? It’s MOVIE RECOMMENDATION day!

At my advanced age, I have little use for new stuff. Apparently this is shared by movie rating entities like the one that just demoted Citizen Kane in favor of …
Vertigo! Nah…I’m not that big a fan of Citizen Kane, other than its novel camera angles. According to the movie about making the movie of CK, Welles cut a hole in the floor for the cameraman to film the shot from the feet’s-eye-view – unheard of in its day. Well, enuf of that..

What is the recommendation for today’s movie? A little thing from 1966 called “Seconds”. For its time, this John Frankenheimer production was terrifying. I don’t think I saw it until it ran on TV (which, in those days, took years rather than days) so I was maybe 19 or 20 by the time I saw it. It shook me up, nearly as much as seeing “Carrie” on the lawn at UF or “The Omega Man” with Charleton Heston at the drive-in.

The plot line is as new today as then – reinventing oneself to lead the life you think everyone else is leading that’s better than yours. I just watched Episode 3 of “Enlightenment” with Laura Dern on HBO two nights ago – same theme! So dear readers – all 1 or so of you – check it out and let me know what you think. By the way – it stars Rock Hudson, who actually does a pretty good job in a very serious role. No Doris Day or Elizabeth Taylor – just Rock trying to be somebody else. Imagine!~

Later…

In order to attract more viewers, I will reserve Thursdays for my Trivia Question of the Week post. Since anything more than 0 is an infinite increase, what do I have to lose?

So I will be choosing questions from a variety of subjects, so as to appeal to the broadest possible audience. Questions for young and old; sports fanatics and movie buffs – investment gurus like Kyle and technical wizards like John. History will be included as a topic, both recent and far past. I am not adverse to posting a trivia question that requires an – oh boy! – essay-type answer, which I will be the judge as to who’s is the best. That implies at least TWO readers, so everyone hold on to your hats! Let’s get with it.

Today’s trivia question will be from the Sports world, as I have recently invited Michael to visit the blog. So he’ll have an edge over all you viewers out there who don’t know a soccer ball from a basketball hoop! I got this one from the “Sports & Leisure” portion of the Genus version of Trivial Pursuit. Here goes:

What 1910s baseball player earned his nickname because his new spikes gave him blisters?

There it is! Have at it…

I got an e-mail today from one of my former colleagues, asking me to lunch next week and asking the magic question, “How’s That Book Coming?”

When I left work at the end of June, I conceived of a plan to write a book along the lines of Moneyball, only for auto dealerships.

Ever since then, I’ve paid particular attention to television car ads and have visited a car dealership, both of which figure prominently into Chapter 1. What’s my thesis? Simple: auto dealerships do not understand the demographics of their customer base – women. According to recent research, 71% of all car buying decisions are ‘strongly influenced’ by women. But when I speak with women, they tell me they’d rather go to the dentist, have a mammogram or put a stick in their eye, rather than visit a car dealership. Why would that be?

That’s where Moneyball comes in – the idea that you have to reinvent the way you approach baseball in order to succeed. The Oakland Athletics have the second lowest payroll in all of professional baseball. The San Diego Padres have the lowest. The Padres are in next to last place in their division, having won a total of 52 games this year. The Athletics – the “A’s” – are second in their division and have won 61 games this season. Who’s ahead of the A’s? The Texas Rangers, whose salary budget is 4 times’ the A’s. You get the idea.

Back to auto sales – most dealerships compare their sales results monthly versus the previous month and the same month last year. They have no idea how many sales they didn’t make, because they do not collect any data on their prospects. In other words, they assume a certain percentage of their customers will come into the dealership and leave without even leaving their name. The analogy to Moneyball is in how the teams find players. They use scouts that look for all the criteria that don’t matter: fielding expertise, RBIs and other ‘soft’ attributes like how they look in a uniform (?!) The Oakland strategy, from a guy named Bill who was a night watchman at a food factory, was only one criteria matters: can the player get on base? In the dealership section, out of x prospects, how many are women, and how many cars did you sell to those women? They have no idea. But if you want to know more about my strategy, stay tuned. I’ll post Chapter 1 within the next 10 days. Ultimately I’ll publish it on Amazon’s Kindle.

Based on all I see and hear, I’m well convinced that BarryO is going to be re-elected in November. With the advantage of the two term limit rule, he’s now free to do as he sees fit.

Given those realities, I feel compelled to suggest some second term changes

1). Let’s start with the big one: drone attacks. Stop them. You crossed the line by authorizing the killing of American citizens without trial or any other semblance of due process. This is wrong, by any measure. In your acceptance speech after the election, please confirm that these attacks will stop. Period.

2). The day after the election, you need to convene a round table of the best minds in the world. Note I said the best minds, not the best economists or Wall Street executives or government leaders-just the 15 or so best minds in the World. Put them all in a room and challenge them to develop a plan to fix the world economy. Give them 72 hours and only allow bathroom breaks; send food and water in while they work. Tell them you want the solution in plain English with no more than 15 pages of text. You take the product to the UN and get the world to endorse it. This will atone for Colin Powell’s mortal sin in 2004 and may save us all.

3). FIND the will and a way to work with the Republicans. You are way smarter than them, but you need to get past that. Without bipartisan cooperation, we cannot solve any of our problems. So get over the fact that they hate you for being who and what you are and rise to your level of potential. I’ll bet Michelle tells you the same thing.

4). Our veterans are dying daily. They need for you to devote a huge portion of your second term to finding solutions, not just rhetoric. Find someone with passion to run Veteran’s Affairs-Eric Shinseki needs to go. Ask somebody like Ross Perot seemed to be to run it for a dollar a year. Get some FDR mojo on this one.

5). Last suggestion: start succession planning on day 3. Joe Biden cannot and should not be President. Recall that George W. lost the White House for his party because he selected an unelectable vice president. Don’t make the same mistake, or we’ll have Jeb Bush in the White House in 2016. That will be your mortal sin.

Element #1: Here’s the headline for an article by a young whippersnapper working for the venerable Forbes Magazine:

Pimco’s Bill Gross Says Stocks Were A Ponzi Scheme For The Last Hundred Years

Element #2: Last night’s episode of The Newsroom was all about dumbing down the news to attract viewers. They used the Casey Anthony trial and Nancy Grace as the example for trading intelligence for hysteria and exploitation.

Element #3: Current political ads – Obama is removing the “work” part of welfare and Romney killed that man’s wife.

What do these three elements have in common? All three are a reflection of the partisan polarization in the U.S., nurtured and manicured by popular media.

The real danger with it all is that we citizens have become sheep, led to the trough by our particular form of bias with varying levels of absorption. How completely have you swallowed the Kool-Aid for your team?

Let’s start with the first one – the young guy from Forbes writing about Bill Gross’s essay about equities. The headline implies that your 401-K or pension money is being invested in a fraud, and you will lose everything. Right? Isn’t that what happened to Bernie Madoff’s “investors”?

This feeds right into the continuing saga of missteps and outright theft perpetrated by Knight Capital, MF Global and Peregrine, to name three that have been in the headlines in the past six months or so. So, let’s sell everything and move to the hills of Montana! Nobody on Wall Street can be trusted, they are all thieves, cheats and liars, so let’s invest in … in what? Why, nothing of course! Put the cash in the mattress and let the parade go by.

Reality is very different. What Bill Gross suggested in his real contribution that you can access on your Ipad or Iphone through the Pimco App is that the return from equities over the past 100 years has effectively exceeded the world’s GDP by almost double. He explains that two factors created the path to that additional wealth creation:

1) reductions in cost for labor, both in the U.S. and world wide as a function of globalization; and
2) reductions in corporate tax rates

Bill then asks the question: are these returns (6.6%) sustainable for the next 100 years? He suggests the answer is a resounding “No”. He concludes that there are only two paths for the future: your investments will take a ‘haircut’ (i.e. they will be devalued) or inflation will let you feel like you’re making money, but you won’t be in real terms. Oh, by the way: the phrase “Ponzi Scheme” does not appear anywhere in his essay.

On to Element #2: Last night’s episode of The Newsroom. I must admit, in the beginning I too was fascinated by the Casey Anthony story – for about 10 minutes. It became clear after a few viewings of Nancy Grace that the manipulation was palpable, and time was better spent waxing the coffee table. The point of The Newsroom was that there were about 400,000 of their viewers that switched because they weren’t talking about the trial. Since they wanted to secure the rights to the Republican debates, they caved to the pressure and began covering the trial.

So how does this fit with my thesis? Well, part 2 of the saga airs next week, when we will find out if it was worth it. But one of the characters shares the thought that as soon as they caved in to the pressure, they sold their soul, never to retrieve it again. Isn’t that the state of popular media? Watched ABC News lately? Pictures of guys’ arms in alligators mouths on Sunday night. A story about a plane crash that blamed the pilot for being out of his seat for 1 minute, based on – what? ABC is owned by Disney! Walt would be horrified to see how his company’s money is being spent.

Finally, the newest political ads. You know the ones I’m talking about. Both are lies and everybody knows it. They know that YOU know they are lies, but so what? Obama’s team thinks it’s OK because it didn’t air on television, only on the internet. Romney’s team is lying because – well, that’s what they do because they have no confidence in their own electorate to tease out the truth.

Where does all this end? Think Howard Beale.

This is what I read this morning from my reliable columnist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard from the UK Daily Telegraph:

Caixin magazine reports that China’s entire solar industry is “on the verge of bankruptcy” as it struggles with debts built up during its world conquest over the past four years.

The policy risks a serious confrontation with Washington. “If they do the same old thing and slam down a few more roads to the Gobi desert they will end up with stagflation. They need Thatcherism to get out of this,” said Mr Dumas.

There’s a lot on which to comment in these four paragraphs. Let’s start with the first one: the entire Chinese solar industry is on the verge of bankruptcy. Apparently, in order to bankrupt Solyndra, China’s solar industry borrowed money in order to cut prices. Now the debts are coming due. First: recall the Romney ad chastising Barry O for loaning all that money to Solyndra? Now it can be told how the Chinese flooded the market with low cost solar panels NOT produced by Solyndra. As a purchaser, who did you buy from – cheap from China or expensive from “buy American”. I suppose the answer is obvious. Well, it’s too late for Solyndra, but the chickens have come home to roost for China. So don’t blame Barry O – blame the Chicoms, as Al Payne my friend used to call them.

On to the rest of the quote. The Chinese currency is getting stronger versus the dollar and the Euro. Chinese exporters are seeing their profits dwindle, because they’re paying their people more and shipments are declining because the price – relative to other currencies – is going up. That’s a double whammy. First – is Chinese money going up because of anything China is doing? Nope. The dollar and the Euro are declining because their economies are in serious decline, with high unemployment and government deficits. These are two things China does NOT have, and doesn’t want. So what does China do? The government is “steering the currency lower to cushion the shock.” “The policy risks a serious confrontation with Washington.” And finally, the recommendation that China needs “Thatcherism”.

The Chinese government has always resorted to steering the currency lower to buy themselves time to prevent massive uprisings from its huge population. Since they are a ‘planned’ economy – love the euphemism for communism – they can do that. The U.S. and the E.U. are subject to the buffeting winds of the world’s investors, and have to manage as best they can to influence the strength of their respective currencies. The Fed – that entity Ron Paul wants to dismiss – thru its monetary policy can have some influence on it. Congress and the President through fiscal policy can have less influence, and it takes a lot longer to manage through the budget. The E.U. is really up the creek in this regard, with individual countries managing their fiscal policies and no strong central bank.

So why does this policy risk a serious confrontation with Washington?

Mittens wants to take them on in a big way for currency manipulation, and he’d start a 1930’s style disaster by likely getting the Republican Congress to institute strong tariffs on Chinese goods. That’ll fix it! First, that’ll kill Wal Mart – not that that’s necessarily a bad thing.