Malkiel

America's On Sale - and the World's Buying

I noticed some of the back-channel commentary two years ago mentioning that US markets actually have a lack of product (available shares from public companies) in comparison with the demand (private pension vehicles and foreign investors). At that time the issue was share buybacks, which seem to be on hold for now (but why? The discounts are outstanding today). It would seem that the recovery, whenever it comes, is structured to be a roaring bull market grab for the shrinking pool of equity shares in US companies...

A Tale of Two Coasts

It's a good point about why those cities should be proxies for their regions--we all know that the designation of metro areas by the census bureau and others is a patchwork of political, demographic, and even geologic factors that aren't consistent from place to place. I don't have any idea whether "New York" includes Northern New Jersey and Fairfield county, Connecticut; but "Los Angeles" almost certainly doesn't include just the incorporated city of Los Angeles. "Mavericks" above had a good point that San Francisco might be a better match with New York if we confine "New York" to the 5 boroughs; Dunno if that's feasible using standard census data.

I can tell you as a resident of the New England zone between metro New York and metro Boston that housing prices are within a comfortable range of affordability here, much lower than the metro zones, though not within the ideal range posited by mortgage calculators (think 3.5x income rather than 2.5x). That's still a lot better than outlying areas of metro LA or SF on the mirror side...

The Two Housing Crises

"A typical 1500 sq ft house truly only costs about $70,000 to build"

Not by a longshot, friend. Try the calculator at www.building-cost.net/ and see if you can get anything that size built in any part of the country with finished walls and a heating system.

And it's always amusing to read people rant about "their" dollar. The currency is a creation of the government and has no value without government policy. Jefferson had it right above that no form of currency exists in a vacuum; in his era when currency was issued by private banks, private banks could manipulate it's value by their policy. And read Marxes' "Communist Manifesto" at least once in your life if you want it clarified what the "value" of money is...

Food Prices Will Only Rise: The Time to Buy is Now

Buy? Forget that, START EATING!...

Can m-Commerce Kill the Retail Industry?

None of these are any simpler than the charming lady who announces over the loudspeaker that there's an in-store special in aisle 7 for the next 15 minutes...

The Start of a Run for Gold

Over the last year gold hasn't behaved as the refuge from fire, famine, inflation, etc., that the gold bugs believe because too much of it is owned in leveraged form. Whenever speculators get that margin call at each market crisis point they end up liquidating their gold ETF shares to make margin, driving the price down. For gold not to appreciate in a crisis the way Joe Main Street hopes is not a good selling point for cable tv infomercials...

Making Starbucks Exciting Again

You forgot to add: do away with the hokey Italian size names. It creates confusion when "tall" and "grande" are sizes on the same menu, but not the sizes you would expect from their english equivalents. It gets even more infuriating when you say "medium" in English, hoping to get what you're accustomed to, and they fire back the question "'tall' or 'grande'"?

Blogonomics: The Seeking Alpha Model

David, we appreciate the value of your format, where we get articles from a wide variety of authors. This site is truly a valuable compendium of stock market journalism, not a canned product like WSJ or CNBC. It's also great that you let the readers take shots at your journalists, I hope we don't scare too many of them away...

No Breaking News Here: Katie Couric Likely to Leave CBS

It would be a bright future for America if we could have multiple left-leaning socialists in the media, but--alas!--there aren't any to be found today. Couric is about as apolitical as it gets, her problem is that her strange disconnected persona is the opposite of the authoritative gravitas that viewers expect from a news anchor.

CNN Stakes a (Contested) Claim to No.1 News Network

CNN has one thing which matters immensely but seems to be flying under the radar of the business analysts: it's become the de facto "acceptable" channel for companies that present big-screen tv in dining rooms or coffee shops. In my own area Dunkin' Donuts, McDonald's, and the college cafeteria all all tuned to CNN all day long because it's the least objectionable general news channel. Multiply that by thousands of McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts and whatever, and you've got a lot of eyes...

Housing Market Tracker - Subprime is 'Collective Bankruptcy" - OECD Head

Can we be a little more careful here about how we use the term "subprime"? We've known for months now that the lending problems weren't confined to just subprime borrowers, that substantial elements of the crisis, like bubble pricing, were caused by prime borrowers overreaching due to risky products. Those features change the nature of the problem and make it a general lending problem not confined to just high-risk borrowers...

Signs That Foreclosures May Be Peaking

While it may seem like a glimmer of hope for some resets to not tip the borrowers because of interest rate declines, the pressure of inventory on prices may start tipping borrowers into negative equity territory that makes foreclosure the best option. I'm sure someone could do some research to quantify these issues, but nobody in financial journalism apparently gets paid to crunch numbers the way the ivory tower guys would...

The (Further) Politicization of the Fed

Given how intense public interest in the mortgage crisis is, it's inevitable that Congressmen are going to want to talk to him outside of hearings, and what would you expect him to do--turn them down? Hobnobbing only with the titans of Capitalism is just as much a political choice as hobnobbing with the people's elected representatives...

Alan Greenspan Responds to His Critics

I disagree with the theory that declining interest rates made a speculative bubble inevitable. We have ample evidence that the severity of our current credit problem was caused by fraudulent activity in the real estate market, as well as failure of institutional lenders to adhere to institutional standards. So questions of corporate governance and government regulation are tied to the genesis of this speculative bubble in a low interest-rate environment when they are separate issues. Just as Sarbanes-Oxley chokes off certain avenues of excess in corporate governance, tighter regulation of lending transactions could have choked off speculative excess in the recent housing market, and probably will in future markets. Instead of accepting the wisdom of a level playing field mediated by government regulation American capitalism will stumble from one crisis to another until most of the regulatory bases have been covered through post facto legislation designed to fight the last war...

Jim Rogers: Fed Policy is 'Outrageous'

None of the comments from this "guru" are about anything other than emotional reaction divorced from strategic thinking and analysis. The FED is reacting to specific problems and issues; its actions aren't going to demonstrably "solve" problems, they are intended to influence certain trends in certain directions. This approach has kept America economically powerful in every era where we were doing things "wrong" by Rogers' view, such as the high-inflation 70's and 80's. The history of the FED over the last 3 decades is that its efforts have sparked the most prosperous economic era in our modern history--but every boom is unstable, and when it falters for a while we got to listen to blowhards like Rogers and all of his moralizing acolytes above wagging their tongues about moralities that have no relevance to the economic order...