Malkiel

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    • Thu Jun 12th 11:33 AM
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      LA Times' Madness Is Brand Suicide
      It isn't the place of the "business side" to throw out journalistic standards, these are a professional obligation of the creators of the content. Inserting paid content as though it were editorial content, like too many of the news magazines do today, is an example of this...
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    • Wed Jun 11th 15:42 PM
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      Commercial RE To Follow "Jingle Mail" Trend? [Housing Tracker]
      The "jingle mail" phenomenon is still, so far, urban legend not backed up with solid evidence that it's really happening in the residential market. Let's not legitimize the fairy tale by using the term until the facts on the ground justify the sound...
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    • Wed Jun 11th 11:31 AM
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      What Is Wrong With Tribune's Math?
      Don't assume that newspapers serve the same function in all markets. While newspapers may not seem "local" in a metropolis, in suburban and rural communities the newspaper may be the only source of news on local affairs and local government, and people (including generations who don't use the internet and social classes who can't afford web access) will loyally subscribe to their local paper. Free papers like the Advocate seem to thrive on a free distribution model because again, they offer the only source of information on neighborhood entertainment and local affairs. It's all about the local, identifying what that is and addressing the content and advertising to it.

      The piece of the puzzle that needs to be looked at is the cost and method of producing the paper product itself. When papers are printed in magazine sizes and distributed by the US postal service or UPS rather than their own delivery fleet, that will be more like what needs to start happening. Having the publication be printed on spec by local outfits who are licensed to download and deliver the content is another way to get rid of owning infrastructure...
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    • Fri Jun 6th 16:42 PM
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      Evidence of Front-Running on Wall St.
      Why should the SEC reveal any information to the markets about an impending trade by the ceo? Let them keep that confidential, which is under their control, and insiders won't have the advantage--how hard is that? These days with all the after hours and back-channel trading which is being allowed, it shouldn't be any hardship for the ceo's to manage the sale of their shares without tipping off the street in advance...
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    • Fri Jun 6th 12:54 PM
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      Why Microsoft Will Never Win (Again)
      What Microsoft desperately needs is to lose its last link to the garage days, Ballmer, and be run by a team of cold corporate professionals like any other large corporation who will do the responsible things that work, such as having a small team study issues like netdocs before committing investment to it. With Gates and Ballmer it's all play money, but people who have to give a damn about shareholders will approach these issues systematically and rationally. Vista and Yahoo and netdocs and all the other bad, subjective guesses which Ballmer/Gates mishandled likely wouldn't have been with professional managers at the helm. If Gates has no more ingenious technical insights to add to the operation then he needs to retire from the team and take amateur-hour ceo Ballmer with him...
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    • Fri Jun 6th 12:37 PM
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      How Bad Is the Oil Shock of 2008?
      We received another wakeup call this week when it was reported elsewhere that population increases and prosperity would require the world to produce 50% more food in the next couple of decades. It doesn't take advanced analysis to see dramatic consequences from this for all countries and economic sectors. The other commodities, including petroleum, used in current food production methods will face competition for supply and inevitable price increases...
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    • Wed Jun 4th 15:47 PM
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      Are Subsistence Wages Killing the US?
      I'm looking out on an economy where people are borrowing $10,000 to go to trade schools to learn plumbing, electrical, HVAC, nursing, or truck driving, then finding that those jobs now are being corralled by companies paying $14/hour with few or no benefits. Subsistence wage is right, and if we want any skilled jobs of any kind in this economy we'd better be prepared to be good socialists and pay for schooling to train people, because at those wages the private trade schools won't be around much longer...
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    • Wed Jun 4th 15:20 PM
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      Credit Cards: The Next Subprime?
      In the 90's there was alarm because credit card debt per capita was skyrocketing as credit card middlemen Visa and Mastercard whipped up tons of new debt for their bank customers; then those customers got out from under their debt by using cash from mortgage refinancing, new debt that mortgage company middlemen whipped up for THEIR bank customers; now the consumers are getting out from under their mortgage debt by transferring debt back to their credit cards. There are two interesting points here: firstly, banks are suckers for the machinations of middlemen; second, all forms of debt are probably being shouldered by the same few dumb banks, so expect more writeoffs for credit card losses from the people who had to write off mortgage losses...
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    • Tue Jun 3rd 12:31 PM
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      Homeowners Associations: Villians Or Victims in Foreclosure Crisis? [Housing Tracker]
      As a former condo owner and long-term condo board member I can tell you that mke039's misguided attitude is typical but unhelpful--once the developer is out of the picture, which is the case with most older condo's, there's nobody to blame but yourself if things aren't managed the way you like--attorneys and management companies work for the board. If you want to know the enemy, look in the mirror--have you ever served on your board? If not, shame for ever blaming anyone else for how things are managed.

      I agree, however, that condominiums are a form of ownership fraught with danger because they are truly run by amateurs, the owners, and have all the problems of a small town, including paralyzing policy disagreements, with few of the powers needed to correct big problems. Condominiums should be viewed as an investment much more so than a house, and buyers should be prepared to take a turn serving on the board and taking part in meetings. If you're not prepared to do these things, you'll find your investment at the mercy of the judgement of others. I bought a house and left the condo partly because as a board member I understood the nature of the beast and didn't want to continue with it. I have to think these types of ownership will lose favor over time as the precarious nature of their organization causes failures and hardships...
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    • Thu May 29th 11:46 AM
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      Housing Market Shows No Signs of Life
      The current inventory is piling up because foreclosed homes are being thrown into the mix, a combination of homes people couldn't make payments on and homes they no longer wanted to make payments on because they were too far "upside down" in relation to market value.

      At its heart, "speculation"... is a guess that a trend will continue rather than a studied calculation that it could. Home builders who continued to build when the prices got way beyond the median income of the local market were making a guess that whatever factors beyond their area of expertise that drove the mortgage market would continue. They might be wishing now that they had done more research and less guessing...
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    • Thu May 29th 11:11 AM
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      Microsoft Loses Library Indexing to Google
      Maybe publicity was a problem for MS--how can I work in a library and never have heard of their project?

      Google's effort has the problem that the scans of old, out-of-copyright materials are not reading quality; one could go blind trying to read the poorly-contrasting scanned text and illustrations. Speed was chosen over quality, which may hurt them in the future if leisure readers rather than researchers are the audience...
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    • Thu May 29th 11:00 AM
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      Is it Better to Remain a Renter or Buy a House?
      Everyday Finance above makes a good point, the original purpose of no down payment/ARM mortgages was to give borrowers who have variable income or better investment opportunities elsewhere (like their company's stock bought at discount) a mortgage product that lets them capture their profit elsewhere. Lloyd should have calculated a no-down payment low interest scenario as well as a low-down payment fixed interest scenario vs. the stock market average returns. Both of those would have been more realistic than postulating that the buyer would have bought the place with cash outright. Since most real-world buyers have to use a mortgage for some form of leverage, we may as well know how those real-world situations do against renting...
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    • Tue May 13th 16:12 PM
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      Dueling Views on Housing: Buffett's Expert Sees Rebound Underway, Jim Rogers Sees More Pain
      Someone needs to take a look at what's happening at ground level; anecdote seems to indicate that buying is grinding to a halt because first-time buyers are having trouble getting mortgages due to various requirements lenders and insurers are adding on, making it impossible for existing owners to move up for lack of a buyer on their current house. The food chain can't digest all this inventory if new buyers are cut out; prices will free-fall if lending becomes prohibitively restrictive. Right now it's nobody's business to worry about what's happening on street level, but that's where the problems are...
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    • Tue May 13th 15:34 PM
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      How To Burst the Rice Bubble
      The domestic US panic was caused by small restaurant operators fearful that they would run out of supply for an essential ingredient in their menus. To alleviate that problem, order Won Ton soup and Chow Fun noodles for a few weeks...
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    • Tue May 13th 10:29 AM
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      NAR's Lawrence Yun Continues to Mislead on Housing
      Real estate doom and gloom now has its "fanboys" just like Apple computers and Linux software, people who are determined to make their bias stick through sheer force of will. Mr. Cornelison is right, the majority of America's markets are now reasonably priced, so there isn't a rational reason to expect further deep collapse nationwide--except for the troubling detail that the lending market can't seem to reconstruct itself due to a collapse of confidence. Investors are not yet willing to buy mortgages from brokers again and mortgage insurers are slapping arbitrary conditions like 20% down payments on certain classes of mortgages (especially, for unknown reasons, condominiums) which take first-time buyers out of the equation.

      While Mr. Yun is an easy target, I didn't see any analysis justifying some of Mike's predictions, especially where interest rates would be in 3 years. More sophisticated analysts elsewhere on SeekingAlpha have given detailed arguments as to why ARMS resets may have already done their worst. The point about the long-term effect of inventory is worth further discussion, especially if mortgage originators really do tighten their standards on a permanent basis. Given the behavior of credit card companies since the late 80's, where profit trumps sound practice at every turn, I wouldn't expect the mortgage market to stay "reformed" for very long...
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