Says Who?

I read with interest the op-ed piece in the New York Times about how underwater mortgages can be used to help save the economy.  www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/opinion/19hubbard.html

While the idea has many positives going for it, it isn’t without drawbacks, not the least of which is a reliance on mortgage backed securities.  My issue with the idea is how to go about implementing it or any other possible solution.  If the authors of the idea are Republican, the Democrats will be against it and vice versa while Tea party members will raise the usual flags of socialism or government interference, whatever is most likely to win them the race for first place in the daily news cycle regardless of the possible benefit of the idea itself. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson (whose target was the Irish) – The Americans are a fair people –they never speak well of one another.

By Myron Gushlak

Electric Car

The stock price for Tesla Motors jumped 41% in its market debut.  Tesla is the manufacturer of electric cars and is the first American auto maker to go public in over fifty years. www.marketwatch.com/story/tesla-motors-ipo-opens Certainly the ongoing travesty with the BP oil rig plays a part in the public reception of the new company. For others, “Tesla’s IPO harkens back to Silicon Valley’s Internet bubble in the late 1990s, when retail investors snapped up shares in brand-new tech companies with no track record of making any money”. I’d like to be an optimist here for a minute.  Although I’m aware that with current technologies, the market for electric cars is very small, the image of thousands of gallons of gushing oil a day makes me fervently wish for unparalleled success for this company.

By Myron Gushlak

Diversions

I love the New York Times.  I admit it, I really do.  David Brooks’s Op-Ed piece debating the relative merits of the French Enlightenment (Descartes, Rousseau and Voltaire) and the British Enlightenment (Hume, Adam Smith and Burke) is precious. www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/opinion/25brooks. Is it a non-sequitor? Absolutely, and perhaps that is its charm.  Do we really need to listen to the soon to be forthcoming political finger pointing at the response or lack thereof to the catastrophic BP oil spill?  Do we need to hear once again the ravings of North Korea’s Kim Jong-il? (who, sadly, is not just a harmless Mike Myers character).  How about another round from the Tea Partiers? No, we can bypass all of that and still feel one step ahead of the Hollywood Access -Survivor -America’s Idol crowd thanks to the NY Times. I want to feel strongly about David Brooks’s issue, dammit, and I will as soon as I check out Rousseau on FaceBook.

By Myron Gushlak

New Rules

Bob Schiffer on CBS’s Face the Nation cut to the chase with his first question to Lawrence Summers this past week.  With Wall Street reform being debated and the Goldman Sachs hearings underway, Mr Schiffer managed to ask the one salient question. Would the new reforms being proposed and debated have prevented the last financial collapse if they were in place at the time? www.cbsnews.com/sections/ftn/main3460.shtml Does any other question matter?

It seems unlikely that the Goldman Sachs hearings will result in anything except media talking points for the Senators. Already after the first day, they have grown short on patience with “Fabulous Fab”, as Goldman’s French whiz kid Fabrice Toure likes to refer to himself. If Fabulous was smart enough to allegedly.”help a hedge-fund tycoon make a billion dollars by dumping worthless mortgage securities on unsuspecting Goldman customers and then betting against those same securities “ www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/27 I think he can handle the bright media lights of the Senate.

Now that’s the guy who should be writing the new reform laws!

By Myron Gushlak

Stymied

I read with interest Senator Evan Bayh’s editorial in the Sunday Opinion page of The New York Times. (www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/opinion/21bayh.html) Senator Bayh is The Democratic senator from Indiana and son of former senator Birch Bayh. He recently announced that he would be leaving the Senate citing dissatisfaction with the gridlock and the partisan politics of the legislative body. He found it frustrating. I can only imagine how frustrating the American people must be hearing that.  The government has ceased to operate.  Since the election, 290 measures have been sent from the House to the Senate requiring further action and none of them was acted upon.

If a foreign power or Al Qaeda somehow infiltrated the Senate and caused that sort of halt to the governing process, all hell would break loose.  Or I would assume all hell would break loose.  Unless of course, it was Super Bowl Sunday or Tiger Woods was going to speak. You know, something important.

Who Are We Voting For

Maybe Americans should vote directly for their lobbyist of choice and skip the middle men altogether. According to a NY Times article this past Sunday (www.NY Times.com) the speeches of many Congressman voting on the health care measure “echo with similarities.” It seems the speeches entered into the official record of the House debate  by more than a dozen lawmakers were drafted by Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies. The lobbyists drafted one statement for Republicans and one for Democrats. According to the article, Genentech, a subsidiary of the Swiss drug giant Roche, estimate that 42 members picked up on some of its arguments – 22 Republicans and 20 Democrats. I suppose that can be interpreted by the glass half full crowd as being a fine example of non-partisan politics, but it leads to at least one very puzzling question.  How do the lobbyists keep all the strings from getting tangled?

By Myron Gushlak

NPR

I’m suffering from severe NPR-itis. That’s National Public Radio for the uninitiated. www.npr.org Last week I found myself listening for three straight days.  Please remove all barbiturates, razor blades and Leonard Cohen records from my home. First, I listened to BBC News Hour.  Jeez, they’re not kidding.  An entire hour of in-depth news without any break from celebrity breakups or sports.  Not even a commercial to divert the mind. Then I got caught up in a program about Pakistan and Afghanistan.  If you’re feeling a little too cheerful today, I recommend it highly.  A panel of experts couldn’t even agree on what the problem was, never mind what the best approach is to solve it.  From what I can gather, the Americans are paying billions of dollars a year to both sides and the Taliban may or may not have control of a nuclear arsenal by Halloween.

Then I listened to a show about Chicago students in a charter school being harassed daily by gang members.  The victims, apparently, are both the students and the attackers.  The solution is to merely end poverty and fix the drug problem in the United States. I couldn’t resist a little “dessert” of the latest swine flu news.  We’re all doomed, people. Unless, of course, a prominent politician has an affair with a small animal or the Yankees lose every remaining game by ten runs while doing steroids in the dugout.  One can only hope…..

By Myron Gushlak

Winner & Losers

A while ago, I itemized some of the winners and losers of this past chaotic year. But what about on the retail side?   There can be little argument that the biggest retail losers were auto dealers. Empty lots dot American highways like modern day Dresden bomb sites. Department stores are close behind, with furniture and home stores taking more than their share of the fallout. Building materials stores have fallen as well as clothing stores. And the winners?  Warehouse stores. Computer stores (perhaps surprisingly) though they were helped mightily by Nintendo’s Wii and Guitar Hero sales. Restaurants and bars are doing okay.  And liquor stores are doing just fine. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/10/03/business/

It seems people will drink in good times (to celebrate presumably) and in bad (to commiserate). Or perhaps it is just a sign of the times that it is simply too expensive to stop drinking.

I’m reminded of the late comic Sam Kinison who once said “I called a Detox center- just to see how much it would cost. $13,000 for three and a half weeks! My friends, if you can come up with thirteen grand, you don’t have a problem yet.”

By Myron Gushlak

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!