Friday Lite

Another week draws to a close, the days slowly grow shorter, and the nights become cooler. The leaves begin to change, an election nears, and life goes on. Everything changes, but everything remains the same.

It's not clear what that introduction was supposed to mean.

What is clear is that it is Friday, and it is lite.

Finally, News You Can Use

It's about time. Finally, there is a single source of central bank news for the millions and millions of internet users around the world who just can't get enough news about their favorite monetary authority from the overwhelming volume of financial news outlets and government websites.
They say that people increasingly rely on them to track the activities of the Federal Reserve, ECB, Bank of England, Bank of Japan, and other central banks. They must do a heck of a job tracking these guys - annual subscriptions start at the tidy sum of $1,900 per year.

It's Only Money

Most of the time you just glance at the headlines and think nothing of it - war, pestilence, more or fewer planets in the solar system. It's only when a couple of headlines result in an unintended theme that you start to wonder what's really going on.

These two headlines appeared on the front page of Yahoo! yesterday:

• Congress approves $70B for Iraq, Afghan wars
• Only billionaires occupy Forbes 400 list

Like the departed Carl Sagan referring to the cosmos, the use of the word "billions" seems to be all too casual these days. How many years will it be before an American trillionaire is declared? Are the central banks of the world just printing too damn much money? Why does it cost so much for a subsciption to a website where you can probably get the same news elsewhere for free?

Does this Guy Creep You Out?

Does anyone else think that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is a little creepy?. Here he is in front of a classroom full of Chinese students and teachers telling them who knows what about U.S.-Chinese trade relations and the benefit of freely floating currencies.
OK, if you don't think that picture is creepy, try this one from the Treasury Department website. But, brace yourself and consider first turning down the brightness on your computer monitor (don't say you weren't warned).

Is This Really Helping?

This story in the local paper seems to come with the best of intentions, but is this really helping the situation that even the Senate Banking Committee now calls a "housing bubble"?

First-time home buyers in Ventura County can now borrow more money under a state program designed to help people buy their first residence. The California Housing and Finance Agency has increased loan amounts from $561,000 to $592,717 for people buying first homes in Ventura County.

Interest rates are fixed at below-market rates, and the loan amount can cover down payments and closing costs in addition to purchase price. The program offers people a chance to buy a home with no out-of-pocket costs.

Haven't we learned anything about letting the market set the price of assets while the government sets the price of borrowing money?

Down with Hedge Funds, Up with Walls

Neal and Aaron have combined forces over at the Autodogmatic blog, offering up some interesting fare in recent weeks.

Regular readers probably recognize Aaron's name from the comments section of this blog - it is not often that one comes across someone even more displeased than your humble scribe when it comes to the monetary shenanigans that are commonplace in government and business these days.

Neal prefers things a bit lighter, offering the image of a limp marionette as a site mascot - something that has captured the imagination of passers-by for some time now, including yours truly.

On the Amaranth hedge fund meltdown, Aaron writes:

The debacle is now widely being blamed on the main trader responsible, Brian Hunter, and the very act of participating in the natural gas futures markets. Very few have suggested that maybe the unsoundness of the bets (i.e. too much reliance on credit and leverage) had something to do with it. Don't be fooled. This is a distraction away from the fact that these practices are widespread, if not part of the foundation of the financial system at present.

Neal wonders about the 700-mile wall that has been proposed for the U.S.-Mexico border:

Wouldn't it be terribly ironic if, in the midst of building this wall, the U.S. entered into a sharp recession? Suddenly, illegal immigrants and citizens, alike, might be heading for the border -- to leave the United States. What a sight that would be.

That marionette, though. Why is it that thoughts of the Autodogmatic blog are dominated by that image? It is feared that a latent childhood memory has been stirred, and that a circus clown may somehow be involved.

I Want My HDTV

After eleven years of faithful service, the ProScan television with the sometimes-flickering picture and blurry images around the periphery has been retired to the spare room, awaiting its ultimate fate. We're not sure if the 150 pound behemoth will be disassembled and stuffed like body parts into the weekly trash bin or if a specialist will be summoned to remove it. It didn't really deserve such a fate - the old CRT gave everything it had right up to the very end - it was just time.

In its place now stands an embarrassingly large LCD TV that has introduced one more household to the joys of HDTV. The unit that occupied that spot in the family room for more than a decade had no way to compete against this sort of television picture wizardry and seeing the fare that is now available on The Discovery Channel, HBO, and other content providers, sometimes we wonder why we waited so long.

About half the buttons on the new remote are still not understood and there are way too many connectors on the back panel - getting an HDTV picture to show itself was met with high-fives, amazement, and then the sad realization that another American household had succumbed to the siren call of more and better consumer electronics to enable the more and not necessarily better entertainment.

The picture really is beautiful.

What Does Harvard Know?

Does the manager of Harvard University's $29bn endowment fund know something that maybe your run-of-the-mill investor should know too? According to this report, it seems that Mohamed El-Erian, entrusted with (uh-oh, here it is again) billions of dollars to invest, has recently increased his exposure to commodities.

Mr El-Erian, who became president of Harvard Management Company earlier this year, said he has also boosted the fund’s exposure to “real assets”, including increasing the allocation of commodities from 13 to 16 per cent. “We’re tweaking the neutral asset allocation mix to reflect recent and anticipated changes in global economic conditions,” he said in an interview.

Bubble, shmubble. Mr. El-Erian just increased Harvard's endowment exposure to "real assets" by a cool billion dollars. He probably knows what he's doing.

Look Who's Getting Around

These first time appearances sometimes make a humble blogger and nascent investment website administrator giggle like a little girl. Here's the Chicago Fed "wealth creation technology" story as it appeared at SeekingAlpha.

Click to enlarge

The rating has slipped to 4.7 after more votes were tallied. A quick perusal of other stories and their ratings indicates that this is not bad at all.

Here's what it looked like at Yahoo! Finance - the omission of the photo clearly enhancing the reading experience.

Click to enlarge

Having no idea how articles are selected at SeekingAlpha or how some of them eventually wind up at Yahoo! Finance, it's hard to know what to do or what not to do to if getting more work published at these sites were a goal to be worked toward. In the absence of such knowledge, the likely inability to adapt, and the overall lack of a clear plan when it comes to increasing the audience size for the fare you are now reading, the advice of many bosses through the years will once again be heeded, "Just keep doing what you're doing".

[Insert shameless plug for the Iacono Research investment website here.]

Checking in with the Search Engines

A quick check of search engine results for the phrase "Friday Lite" shows some deterioration in standing relative to the hat-trick achieved a couple months ago - looking again just could not be resisted. While Google and Yahoo! look solid, on the MSN search, this blog comes up short.

Current rankings: #1 at Google, #1 and #2 at Yahoo!, and #4 at MSN

The decline at MSN is nothing to be concerned about as the hope of understanding anything about how Microsoft does searches on the internet ceased to be a topic of interest many months ago when suddenly a simple search on the word "Greenspan" resulted in a change in ranking from #3 (where it clearly did not belong) to nowhere to be found (you be the judge on that).

Fifteen Simultaneous Work-Study Jobs

This story from The Onion tells of the great lengths that Saints running back and former Heisman Trophy winner Reggie Bush went to in order to have some spending money while playing football at USC.

The biggest charge against Bush—the question of his family's ability to move from their small San Diego apartment to a $757,000 home in Spring Valley during Bush's junior year—could, according to Bush, be explained by his "cushy" job in the Student Activities Office, which Bush admits was "pretty easy," saying he "literally did nothing for $11 an hour."

"When I find the shoebox with all of my time sheets and pay stubs, I will be vindicated of any wrongdoing," Bush's statement concluded. "Unfortunately, most of these hundreds of boxes seem to contain new pairs of shoes, but they have to turn up sooner or later."

Trojans head coach Pete Carroll, who took reporters' questions as an opportunity to praise his former running back's "impeccable work ethic," said he was unaware the running back was making so much money, adding that he assumed the Hummer limousine in which Bush arrived at practice every day was simply provided by his agent.

Hummer limos. What are the odds of Hummers and Hummer limos showing up in encyclopedias twenty or thirty years from now as one of the many cultural symbols of the times - kind of like platform shoes and leisure suits from the 1970s.