Finance Geek

Is economic growth the highest priority in Obama’s Washington? That’s not a trivial question: in 1972, the Club of Rome, a global think tank whose current members include Mikhail Gorbachev, issued a report entitled The Limits to Growth, challenging the primacy of wealth creation. In arguments later taken up by President Jimmy Carter, the book’s sub-text is that unbridled growth leads to population expansion, but also pollution, resource depletion, famine, and capitalist exploitation.
Reacting to this critique, in the spring of 1979 economist George Reisman published a short…

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From The Business Insider, Oct. 28, 2009: PIMCO’s Bill Gross with a great monthly letter.  Here are the key points:
Over the past 30 years, paper asset prices rose 2X as much as they should have based on economic fundamentalsThis was the result of l

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The Dow Jones Industrial Average is back below 10,000.  That doesn’t mean finding value in the market is any easier, says Mark Travis, who oversees $750 million as senior portfolio manager at Intrepid Capital, including the Morningstar five-star rate

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From The Business Insider, Oct. 28, 2009: Tim Geithner’s getting ready to shovel more taxpayer money down the rat hole, this time to GMAC. 
GMAC, in case you’re in understandable denial, has been bailed out twice already.

And now Tim Geithner wan

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Value investor, hedge-fund manager and author Joel Greenblatt wrote “The Little Book That Beats the Market” earlier this decade. It was a hit and garnered a loyal following, even among novice investors.Greenblatt now has opened

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It must be something in the water. The ruling Democrats know their tax-hiking, re-regulating, and big-spending policies have failed to rejuvenate job-creation or reduce the unemployment rate. And yet they persist in trying more of the same.A recent New York Times editorial acknowledges that the economy is weak, but it pleads for yet another federal stimulus package. The Times editors want another round of unemployment benefits (this would be the third) to subsidize non-work welfarism. They also want more federal spending on state Medicaid — an area that already has been showered with federal…

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The SEC has launched a Web site to provide financial information, with an emphasis on heading off fraud. So far, it’s getting mixed reviews from the pros.

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More than 100 banks have been seized this year by the FDIC, and the regional lenders buying them can win big. But be careful if you invest in this sector.

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Back in the winter when Congress was debating whether stimulus programs could get money into the economy quickly enough to make a difference, supporters of government efforts to prime the pump argued that tax credits would offer Americans a quick financial shot in the arm. After all, what else does government need to do to process a tax credit except take in applications, verify their accuracy, and then ship the money out the door?
Oops.
In what amounts to the most underreported story of the year, the Treasury Department’s Inspector General testified last week that in an effort to get…

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For 30 years, the Republican Party dominated American political life, winning five of the seven presidential elections before 2008. But the GOP has taken its lumps of late, culminating in its loss of Congress in 2006 and the White House last November.
The party’s future direction is unclear.
But as America struggles to emerge from a financial crisis, any renewal of the right will require Republicans to rethink their approach to the economy. An agenda focused chiefly on tax cuts, as the Republicans’ has been since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, is no longer enough.
In 1980, Reagan…

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Global warming is a myth, or at least far from certain, according to James Altucher, managing director of Formula Capital. “Peak temperatures world wide were hit in 1998 and the world has been cooling ever since,” Altucher says. Over the same t

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If James Altucher had his way, it would still be business as usual at Galleon Group. Instead, the hedge fund is embroiled in one of the largest insider trading scandals in history; the company’s head, billionaire Raj Rajaratnam, has posted $100 million ba

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Many analysts decried the various Bush/Obama stimulus bills with the observation that deficits crowd out private investment. When Washington borrows money merely to funnel that same money back into the market via politically favored interest groups, nothing on net gets added to the economy. This is irrelevant to Keynesians who frequently disavow capital scarcity, but it matters to economists who correlate government spending with tight capital markets.
Now numerous commentators bemoan that banks are borrowing from the Fed only to invest in treasuries, rather than lend those monies…

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The stage is set for too-big-to-fail banks such as Citigroup and Bank of America to take on greater risks in pursuit of profits, counting on taxpayers to make good their losses.

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In his brilliant 1981 book Reaganomics, economist Bruce Bartlett observed that “to the Keynesians, all tax cuts are the same.” Seeking to show why that was not the case, Bartlett took readers on a masterful ride through tax policy in the 20th century.
As Bartlett put it, the “individual entrepreneur is still the basic motivating force in the economy ” and any “measures which suppress entrepreneurship will ultimately cause the economy to stagnate.” With the top tax rate at the nosebleed level of 71 percent at the time of the book’s publication,…

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