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Category Archives: Recession busters...

John Bogle

John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard,  has published a new book called Enough. True Measures of Money, Business, and Life … download the first chapter here… he writes…
 ~~~~ “The rules under which our system works — which I call, after Justice Louis Brandeis, “ The Relentless Rules of Humble Arithmetic ” — are ironclad: 

The gross return generated in the financial [...]

Open engines…

Openness… the power of transparency…
Is transparency the new engine of economic productivity?
Think about the following…
~~~ “The open source model of operation and decision making allows concurrent input of different agendas, approaches and priorities, and differs from the more closed, centralized models of development….” ~~~~
The use of the term open source is generally applied to the development of [...]

$53 trillion hole…

What is the biggest challenge facing our nation?
You might not guess that it is the national debt… oh yeah… really…
This is a 30 minute version of the movie (I.O.U.S.A) was made to highlight a very serious problem looming ahead… how big is this problem? About $53 trillion dollars… or put more personally about $175,000 per [...]

Mom and Pop come through

 ~~~~ Oct. 17 (Bloomberg) — California, the biggest U.S. state borrower, raised $5 billion to avert a cash shortage by turning to the bedrock of the municipal bond market: its own taxpayers.
California, a bellwether for state and local government debt, was able to boost its offering of short-term notes this week by 25 percent from [...]

Crisis meets the environment

Brilliant…
From the New York Times… ~~~~ ” And all it took was a global financial meltdown.
There it is, a little driblet of encouragement to ride a bike to work — way, way down in House Resolution 1424, also known as the bailout bill:
SEC. 211. TRANSPORTATION FRINGE BENEFIT TO BICYCLE COMMUTERS.
(a) In General- Paragraph (1) of section [...]

Glorious America…

“Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; and adversity is not without comforts and hopes.”
Francis Bacon, Sr. (English lawyer and philosopher 1561- 1626)     
~~~~~~
Our beloved nation… struck low… fearful… confused…Yes… our economic condition is a disaster… this period may be marked as one of the worst the country will endure… historians will look [...]

True bottom?

The bottom of Jupiter…

When the world’s largest bond fund raises $ 5 billion dollars to buy senior tranches of asset backed securities does that signal a bottom? From BBG…

~~ “… The new Pimco fund, dubbed Disco, will focus on commercial loans as well as residential debt that doesn’t carry explicit government guarantees or the implied [...]

Little lending…

Prosper, the peer-to-peer lending platform is going mainstream…
The Washington Post has a lengthy article about the service and how the experience is for borrowers and lenders…
Seems to be making slow and steady traction…
On the borrowers side it offers a potentially lower cost of funds…
And the lender side has a particurly good profile… lenders can make much higher returns [...]

Awaking from the debt slumber…

I.O.U.S.A .. An alarming primer on America’s off-the-charts debt morass … opening Aug 22nd

Quality measures…

       The American economy is all geared to consuming more… quantity is what we measure… and quantity is the benechmark for evaluating economic conditions… and surely we are a “big” nation… in many ways… but maybe there are more interesting measures…
The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) is an economic indicator based on modeling of customer evaluations [...]