Zero Hedge’s Tyler Durdan says not so fast. An unemployment rate of 9.5% might look good, but consider the “… 10 Year Average Labor Force Participation Rate Implies 11.8% Unemployment Rate!”
Then read why Andy Grove thinks we have a BIG systemic problem in America with employment.
This just in The Portland Sentinel will print its last street edition for March and It’s still up in the air if the website will be up after the end of March. The editor has seen ad revenues decline in this economy two years in a row. “The Sentinel is 100% print advertising-driven, and it is now clear that we can no longer provide services to our readers and advertisers at our current level of quality.”
I’ve liked the paper for in-depth studies about the north and North-East Portland area that I don’t read elsewhere. If this is truly the end, the community will lose as well as the Roosevelt Roughriders for e\whom the paper always had lusty support.
Here’s an idea I like a lot: CardHub
“It’s the GOOGLE for Credit Cards! I Can’t believe how easy it is to filter through cards.
Card Hub is not a credit card company, nor are they a front for any credit card company, merely a portal to the credit card industry.
Retail maven Howard Davidowitz:
Please enjoy the video and comment below, follow me @movermike and Khrono Stock Mike Landfair
Here’s The Car Connection on the rule of law:
There’s simply no precedent for President Barack Obama’s heavy-handed intrusion into the legal bankruptcy process with Chrysler. His micromanagement has turned contract law on its head, and created a monster that will kill companies, argues George Mason University law professor Todd Zywicki in today’s Wall Street Journal.
Here’s a link to that article in the WSJ by Todd Zywicki.
Please enjoy the article and comment below, email me at landfair3554@comcast.net or follow me @movermike
Mike Landfair
The NY Times has an editorial about home health care, Costly Home Health Care, writing
Health care reformers have long advocated providing more care to patients in their own homes or communities instead of treating them in costly institutions like hospitals and nursing homes.
Then the editorial goes on to cite abuses and says
(Home health care providers) average margins were about 16.5 percent a year between 2002 and 2007, and, even after some rate adjustments, are expected to exceed 12 percent this year in the midst of a recession.
Just what is the proper margin? Is it 10%, 6%, 3% or 25%. The government would like you to believe it can determine accurately the proper margin. It can’t! What does happen in the market place is a swarming to areas of high margins by companies seeking profits. The large suppliers of any product drives the profit margin down, in the absence of regulation or barriers to entry, and companies who can’t survive at the lower margins fail.
Government meddling restricts competition and rewards failure, and the consumer and tax payer suffer.
UrbanSurvival is a must read each morning and today writer George Ure shares information in Who Are the “PowersThatBe”? about a new book coming from an “insider” to the markets and Hedge Funds. I thought this part fascinating:
If I give you $200 to invest in stocks, and you put $100 on each of two stocks and one doubles, while the other falls to half its value, how does your return look?
The answer is the first $100 goes to $200, while the other goes down to $50, so at the end of the day, your stock picks are worth $250 - or a hefty 25% return, even if you get only 50% right. Sweet, huh?
Since stocks can make a great return with 50/50 odds on the upside, the hedge traders make their long side bets in the stocks, but because the odds of success run more like 25-1 against you on the long side of bonds, they make their bearish bets in bonds… they couldn’t do this until the CDS (Credit Default Swap) market developed, which allowed traders to “go short” in the credit markets.
What was developed to be a hedging product turned out to have such a good risk/return profile for bears that we now have the weird situation where the short-side bets against some bonds can be 10 to 50 times the size of the bond issues themselves.
Imagine, a $50 million bond issue and $500 million to $2,500 million of those bonds are sold short. This is crazy. What happens if the company is taken over or interest rates go down? I guess those things don’t happen in this kind of market.
I first wrote about the Amazon Kindle in November of last year. At that time it was priced at $399.00 and many wondered if it would sell. TechCrunch is telling us it’s thriving, that over 240,000 units have been sold!
Doing a little back of the envelope math, that brings total sales of the device so far to between $86 million and $96 million (the price of the device was reduced to $360 from $400 last May). Then add the amounts spent on digital books, newspapers, and blogs purchased to read on the device, and you get a business that has easily brought in above $100 million so far. (Each $25 worth of digital reading material purchased per Kindle, add $6 million in total revenues).
I went back through my invoices since just the first of the year, and I may be typical, or not, but I’ve purchased over $319 in books including $88 for shipping. That’s about 20 books. If they were all available on the Kindle, my cost would have been $200 and no shipping. That’s a pretty good incentive to buy a Kindle. Granted I wouldn’t have piles of books around my house and I couldn’t have loaned a copy of my latest find to a friend and I couldn’t have smeared jelly on some of the pages.
It also would have been environmentally friendly, as my daughter pointed out in November.
Citi analyst Mark Mahaney estimated in May that Amazon would sell 189,000 units this year and 467,000 units in 2009 and 2.2 million in 2010. He says those numbers will have to be revised significantly upward. I wonder how much of this good news is reflected in the price of the stock?
Michael Hall tips me to The Source and their article about Welfare for Builders. Bend builders pay an upfront fee to the city based on the value of the home they intend to build. These fees are called Systems Development Charges (SDCs).
These are fees builders pay…help cover the cost of new roads, sewers, water mains and other stuff made necessary by new construction. In the City of Bend, SDCs can run upwards of $13,000 on a new house.
The builders, in tough times, want the SDCs deferred for nine months, when the house is sold.
The Source thinks this proposal deserves the “golden balls” award for a singular achievement in the field of chutzpah.
I like this story in the
Christian Science Monitor. There’s a relatively new perk offered by employers called employer-assisted housing (EAH) programs. To encourage employee loyalty, home ownership and living near the job, employers are combining “counseling services with some sort of down-payment assistance – typically in the form of a loan that’s forgiven if the employee stays with the company a certain amount of time.” The government also steps in to offer $0.50 tax credit for every dollar they invest in EAH.
Why not? Employers offer stock options, subsidized company car leases, and when I was a stockbroker, offered upfront signing bonuses to change firms, that were forgivable over time.
