patrick.net

Life would be so exciting if the debt ceiling is not raised. No government! No taxes! No police! Food riots will start within 48 hours. Mansions and expensive cars will be torched by angry mobs.

Chris, that's what I have seen also. I have written my positive opinion of Apple above. Presently I think it is a juggernaut. I love making fun of Microsoft since Ballmer was on record making fun of the iPhone, etc.
Under Ballmer microsoft stock nav has been flat or falling. I wonder if they will kick Ballmer to the curb soon.
Apple rocks.

World ends may 21 anyhow

I look at Jobs and Ballmer and I see two totally different personalities. Former is an engineer who can really lead, and latter is more of a politician.

To me it was interesting when several days ago Microsoft acquired Skype, knowing Ballmer there is something big being planned, but I'm really not sure what it is.

Sarcasm noted.

HousingWatcher says

Food riots will start within 48 hours

More like 1,920 hours (give or take a few...). August 2nd is a ways off. Even Bill McBride agrees on this:

More on Debt Ceiling Charade
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2011/05/more-on-debt-ceiling-charade.html

First, even though the U.S. will hit the debt ceiling on Monday, there are games that Treasury can play - so Congress has until August 2nd. And there might even be some more tricks that can delay the date further - like promising to pay defense contractors sometime in the future.

I'm not sure I'd call Jobs an engineer. He has way more tech chops than most people give him credit for, but his real skills are imagination, vision, and hiring and motivating super-talented people who share (or will internalize) those ideas to make them happen.

I see Ballmer as a bombastic B-school guy of totally unknown talent.. All of the years of MSFT success could easily be attributed to Gates' leadership (with Ballmer's presence but contribution unclear), and the last decade of MSFT stagnation attributed to Ballmer's direction or lack thereof. Gates stumbled frequently on the vision thing, and arguably held back the industry as a whole, but he still channeled a fair amount of that exogenous force (moore's law, etc) into products.

I totally disagree about the Skype thing. I think the "something big" is integration with MSFT's existing services that people don't use or care about. That acquisition was a defensive thing. I don't believe that MSFT knows what to do with Skype, nor how to value it...just that Skype has a popular consumer service that they don't know how to build themselves, and don't realize how close it is to being commoditized.

terriDeaner says

More like 1,920 hours (give or take a few…). August 2nd is a ways off.

Can the Fed just forgive some or all of the US treasury debt of ~1.5 T that it holds?
That would lower the outstanding debt by same amount and allow another 1 year of borrowing at the same clip. And then the Fed can buy more T-bills and forgive them again, I guess.

Not just the Fed, btw. Various agencies (the Social Sec. system, Mil. retirement board, etc.) hold another ~3T of US debt is "special book" non-marketable securities. Could they just forgive some of that as well?
Never underestimate what the govt. could do!

Woz was the genius engineer.

Jobs will always be famous to me for one quote, while hiring Scully from Coke he asked him:

Do you want to "sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?

I think this was Jobs in a nutshell, he's the passionate vision guy.

And an updated story about APPL price manipulation:

As we saw in Thursday's post, Apple's (AAPL) share price tends to gravitate with uncanny accuracy toward the closing price that causes "max pain" to option buyers and maximum profit to option sellers -- often in a burst of last-minute trading.

In that respect, Friday's close was picture-perfect.

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/05/15/how-the-market-in-apple-weeklys-is-rigged/?iid=HP_LN

Good point. It would be nice to get a better sense for how dependent states and local governments are on SLGS financing right now. I suspect dependency is not uniform across all users.

Does that mean we should buy guns and canned food?

Troy says

Every $50,000 you cut is going to be somebody’s government job gone.

You figure is overtly optimistic. The bill rate as a contractor to the FAA is between $80 to $120 an hour. That's between $160k to $240k per employee. While i of course no not see that kind of money in my paycheck, this is the rate the contracting company charges the FAA per worker.

Interesting enough, the average Federal Government employee makes somewhere around 80k a year, add in benefits and it costs about 120k per federal employee. By making all employees federal contractors, the government could save 40 to 120k per employee. By transitioning 1 million contractors into Federal employees, the government could save 40 to 120 billion dollars without any loss of services.

Schizlor says

The irony here is that she’ll probably go into the binder for NAr’s next “ethics” seminar, as a case-study in “what not to do”.

The realtor gig is a lot like the Catholic church. Somebody is busted for doing something they shouldn't and they are shuffled around. Not to compare misdeeds of realtors to those of priests (I think that the majority of priests are not child molesters), but they almost always get to continue their "profession" far away from wherever they last soiled their names. An agent with a revoked RE license can just go to another state and get another license. There's very little in terms of reciprocity or communication from one RE board to another.

As for termination from NAR, I can't imagine what would compel them to drop a member and forgo their yearly dues. They're like Amway, and just want the money flow kicking back up.

It's May 16th.

Vicente says

And an updated story about APPL price manipulation:

There were quite a few whistles blown lately about silver/gold price manipulation. This is the first one I see on apple. I guess anything is possible.

TechGromit says

Interesting enough, the average Federal Government employee makes somewhere around 80k a year, add in benefits and it costs about 120k per federal employee. By making all employees federal contractors, the government could save 40 to 120k per employee. By transitioning 1 million contractors into Federal employees, the government could save 40 to 120 billion dollars without any loss of services.

TG, your suggestion will agitate those who do nothing but have connection in FAA so they can make a few millions by shuffling paperwork to place some contractors to work for FAA. The real contractors probably get less than 50% of what FAA pays to the staffing companies. This is just my speculation but I believe this is how it works in real life.

TechGromit says

You figure is overtly optimistic.

yeah, I need to reword that since $5.0T in non-pension spending would be ONE HUNDRED MILLION jobs at $50,000 pr, or 5/6ths the workforce.

joshuatrio says

It’s May 16th.

The fun will last all summer long, don't worry.

Nice hit

What do you think about wfc current price? Who will make it into the teens first, citi or wells?

shrekgrinch says

You may find this hard to believe, but since you don’t supply proof of such correlation and you’ve responded to me with unbacked bullshit anyway in the past, I don’t choose to believe YOU.

Go ahead and stick your head in the sand. Let me know how that works out for you NEXT November.

HousingWatcher says

You mean freedom of choice whether to have an abortion?

If you think allowing 14 year old little girls the freedom to have a surgical procedure without parental consent is "freedom of choice", you need to have your head examined. Can we at least agree that underage children should at least have their parents notified prior to having surgery? Is that too much to ask? How about notifying parents when their kid wants to take hormone-based birth control? Is that too much to ask? Somehow we have taken a womans right to choose terminating the life of their unborn child and transformed that into allowing kids to make adult decisions - who is taking the rights away from whom in this case? Oh yeah, parents are stupid and shouldn't have a choice when it comes to their underage children...

MarkInSF says

Ah, yes, cite the libertarian economic theory, and ignore the reality.

People have had this choice not to insure for about, I don’t know… forever? And they still do. And what’s happened to the price of health insurance?

Mark the problem with insurance was never that everyone did not buy it, the problems are the way our system healthcare is structured. Forcing everyone to buy it changes no fundamentals, there is no reason to drive the price down.

Take yourself into the shoes of a provider network CEO, as long as your customers are paying and you are used to the 11% increases every year (thats the official trend) than why reduce the price? They are in business to make money, not provide affordable healthcare.

Using same reasoning as Obamacare we should force everyone to buy a cell phone because that would make the prices magically go down. When in reality it would mean exact opposite.

The way healthcare reform is made it's really dumb, and it will really really explode the prices in the future. Might as well buy healthcare stocks because thats where all the money will be.

Just like the Pros!

Wall Street used all our pensions for hookers & blow slush fund. Nothing new here.

He was apprehended by the Priceline negotiator, Schatner saw him at the airport, and yelled...

wait for it...

Wait for it...

KAHN!!!!!!

"PERP WALK"

That's what he gets for doing the "Perv Walk".

shrekgrinch says

And if footage showing Obama molesting a Boy Scout were to be aired, you’d probably say, “Hey, the ancient greeks did it all the time. Nothing new here.” as well?

That's uncalled for...

shrekgrinch says

And if footage showing Obama molesting a Boy Scout were to be aired,

I'd be on the phone to FCC about child porn being broadcast.

The same article mentions raising required contribution to the fund, which should make fiscal conservatives giddy. It boggles me that this is even an issue for you Shrek, it's taking money from FEDERAL workers which seem to be the next best thing to child molesters for you anyhow. Multiple times in the few decades they've done stunts like this where they empty one safe to fill another and it did not result in Soviet Russia.

What do you expect to gain by it?
For one, he gains credibility (see also, Roberto, who posts his rental purchases).
Also, this is a real estate blog. We've all been mystified by various anomalies and real estate practices. Sunshine is the best disinfectant.

RayAmerica I have nothing to hide. I purchased my first piece of investment RE when I was 24 second when I was 26, so I too have been at it for a while. This market has been very different than any market before. What do I hope to gain???? Insight into a market that I am having trouble making sense of. Anything I have posted here is true, I have no reason to lie and I'm not going to benefit by concealing any info. I'm trying to understand if other people are experiencing the same unethical behavior that I'm experiencing. Why are mountains of shadow inventory being held back? The second wave of foreclosures is starting to happen so why hasn't this glut of property been released. It seems the banks are trying to control the market prices by holding back inventory which is affecting demand. This is not rocket science Maybe the realtors are just opportunistic and they are going to hold out for the same price points that people who are upside down are holding out for. The banks are the predators and the RE agents are basically acting as plankton, along for the ride. They know the price points are accurate, they know they are overinflated but as long as the banks control the market they are going to follow suit and hope to gain a bigger slice of the pie. I know this because I look at the market, the numbers the comps and they do not add up. A lot of people just take their realtors word as the Gospel, which at this point could be financial suicide if you are with the wrong realtor.

meant to say They know the price points AREN'T accurate. If they were actually using comps they could show them to me. But since the comps don't support their price point, there is nothing to show.

thunderlips11 says

Take a step back for a minute and think about the timing

I do that on every single story that has come down the pike from Washington, Wall Street and abroad.
I mean we do still have Press in this country with integrity right?

But in the meantime, this guy isn't denying anything, he'd PO'd that he had to do the Perp walk and was already at the Airport until he realized he left something back at the Hotel and called to have it delivered.
That was how he got popped. Had he just left his phone behind, he would have fled back to France, where the whole brouhaha would no doubt catapulted his popularity and won him the election.
"The man who stuck it to the Americans and got away."

They should buddy him up with Madoff, they could be cell mates. Think Bernie has been in there long enough to know he'd have to turn Kahn out the first night or lose cell block cred?

Obligatory:

Wells is a Buffet stock this year. But the deals Buffet gets are not the same as mom and pop investors get.

Citi was announcing that they were splitting their shares recently, so I don't know what happened since.

The CBO want's to tax people by the mile they drive.
Do you know who works the farthest from home?
The Poor!

Article is useless without pics:

This poor woman must have been feeling a lttle down but at least she didn't get stuck with the bill.
However, did she recieve a grope discount at the park?
And when exactly did she finger Donald?
And what were Chip and Dale doing at the time? Twiddling their nuts?
Well, I guess I'm glad they busted this Daffy boob before he racked up another feel.
Tough titty, Donald. You should 've gone down town.
Be careful out there, gals, and always travel in pairs.

What a downer. And this is such a quackerjack topic. I'm even getting goose pimples.
Pheasant dreams.

PS: I know ducks can be lame but that's no reason to cry fowl.

Kirk always get the last word:

Interesting idea. Don't forget to factor in for a massive government bailout when the Canadian housing market falls apart.