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adrock3215

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Everything posted by adrock3215

  1. It is refuted. Here is the refutation: me. If markets were rationally efficient, I would not make a single penny as a trader. Here's another refutation: Warren Buffet. Another: Steve Cohen. A few other refutations: Jesse Livermore, Bernard Baruch, Gerald Loeb ("What everybody else knows is not worth knowing"), Nicolas Darvas ("As for good stocks and bad stocks, there were no such things; there were only stocks increasing in price and stocks declining in price"), and William O'Neil ("with hard work anything is possible...your own determination to succeed is the most important element of trading.") EMH has been empirically proven to be wrong. No question about it. Anyone claiming otherwise is an ivory tower wackjob with little to no experience in financial markets. I suggest you read the book When Genius Failed by Lowenstein.
  2. There is a good video here about the financial crisis. It is a panel discussion given at Princeton University. Of course, Krugman is one of the members of the panel, and he sneaks in an attack on Bill O'Reilly, Paulson, and some other politically-motivated attacks against Republicans. God knows why these comments are tolerated at an academic event. It's hard to listen to his smug ass, but still an interesting presentation from all members. Alan Blinder also gives a presentation, as he is a professor of Economics at Princeton. Edit: Krugman begins talking 38 minutes in.
  3. Of course, we can't think that this money goes only to the employees of the banks. That would be selfish. No, some of the taxpayer-funded government money will simply be distributed to shareholders. This is atrocious. This is a hideous transfer of wealth DIRECTLY from taxpayers to employees and shareholders.
  4. Probably taking a page from the book Guiliani wrote in the 80's.
  5. That's a good point. We will see how these equity investments play out.
  6. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=206...&refer=home Nine banks take in $125 billion in taxpayer funded government handouts with the left hand; nine banks pay out bonuses and compensation of $108 billion in taxpayer funded government handouts with the right hand. Most of these nine firms should be out of business right now, and the employees should be shining shoes on Wall St.
  7. I don't have a great deal of time right now, but I can return later and add to my comments. I agree with Myself when he says that you should try to find your own voice. The style and form of prose is not very good, and there are some obvious traces of Rand in there (i.e., the em dash). But I am thinking in particular how Hugo, Hawthorne, Hemingway, Faulkner, Twain, Dickens, etc all wrote with peculiarly individualistic styles. Moreover, I too think that your dialogue feels a bit contrived (see Austen for great dialogue). Your vocabulary is weak. The metaphorical elements are weak, i.e. the religious fanatic and the psychopath, although I enjoyed the military cadet more. A criticism I generally find myself repeating in regard to writers influenced by Rand is the idea of "formula fiction", as if there is a certain formula regarding theme and literary elements that has to be followed in order to write Romantic work. I think that these notions stifle creativity and suppress the development of a writer's personal style. I have no doubt about the former for you, it's just the latter I am hung up on. Now, with that said, I do applaud you for your writing and efforts and wish you great success. I have never tried to write serious fiction, and I commend anyone who does.
  8. At least in part, according to this article, banks are not lending because the Federal Reserve has provided a disincentive toward doing so by essentially paying banks interest on their overnight reserves. The point here is that the rate the Fed is paying on these reserves (1.15) is higher than the rate in the Fed Funds market right now, and just below the LIBOR dollar rate. Here is the data on Fed Funds for the last few days: 10/24 0.95 10/23 0.93 10/22 0.81 10/21 0.67 10/20 0.70 (Source: New York Fed website here.) What's interesting to me is the disconnect. If the Fed Funds/LIBOR rates are so low, then banks are certainly lending to each other (at least on an overnight basis, as the longer-term LIBOR rates are still high). Perhaps the Fed is paying 1.15% interest on reserves to discourage banks from lending in the Fed Funds market at less than the target rate (1.5 right now). But if so much lending is going on, what's with the press saying that no lending is going on?
  9. Certainly no one on earth has ever seen anything like this, so I can only really say: "I have no idea." But since the Bailout Bill passed, you may want to take a look at owning stock in wooden arrow producers or Virgin Island rum distributors. Obviously there is going to be high inflation in the future. For the average investor, typical experience says hold stocks during periods of inflation, because companies have the power to increase prices, and also because owning a bond with a 5% coupon is worthless when inflation is (say) 10%. On the other hand, the Treasury also has those TIPS bonds out, which I have never dealt with. But they are adjusted every year for ifnlation in order to give a certain real rate of return. As a trader, I think that selling short Treasuries will be a very rewarding trade, as bond prices will surely have to drop in order for yields to rise with inflation. The other rewarding trade may be in certain commodities, i.e. wheat, oil, gold.
  10. This is astounding: And here is a chart that shows the same in percentage terms: I didn't fully realize the historical precedent being set until I saw these two graphs on the St. Louis Federal Reserve's website. As it turns out, an article released by econbrowser here states that the Federal Reserve is actually freezing the credit markets through some of its policies. The policy that the Fed has implemented is interest payments to banks on reserve holdings. Of course, the obvious effect of this policy is that banks will stop lending money out in favor of receiving a guaranteed return by keeping their reserves on hold with the Fed. Interest payments on these reserves began on Oct 6, and the interest rate was increased to within 35 basis points of the Fed Funds rate on Oct 22. A blogger here writes about some of the possible implications of this policy by Bernanke. He posits that the Fed may be doing this in order to cause deflation, which will help troubled banks recapitalize. He harks back to the first graph above, noting that the increase in the monetary base is not yet actually in the economy, because banks are not lending. I'm not sure if it is entirely true, but it is interesting to take a look at some of the data and the new Fed policies during this crisis.
  11. I found this video on Youtube about a guy who put a sign on his front lawn saying "They both suck '08". I thought that was pretty entertaining.
  12. That looks great! My wife loves kids movies, so I guarantee we'll be seeing it.
  13. I heard this part on CSPAN. By the tone of Greenspan's voice, I felt like he was saying something different. In my estimation, what he said is true, but not in the manner Waxman wanted. I took it as Greenspan coming to the following conclusion (I am restating what he said and adding the words he left unsaid in front of this committee): "That's precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that central banking can work, and indeed it was working exceptionally well." Just my take on it from the tone of his voice and knowing how smug he is.
  14. Make it short and to the point. You will have the best chance of getting it published that way. I wrote a letter to the Washington Post 2 weeks ago, but never got it published. Interestingly enough, the editor sent me an email saying it was being considered for publication and that it had been editorialized to print. Anyway, I wrote the following about the financial crisis to the editor of the Post:
  15. Maybe a sidenote, but this reminded me of the Andy Warhol prints of Monroe...
  16. After the unprecedented credit expansion occuring right now under Bernanke, we may in the future need another Volcker-style, Fed-induced recession to rid ourselves of the inexorable tremendous inflation.
  17. Oops, thanks for the clarifications guys! I was wrong here...
  18. This quote is from Philosophy:Who Needs It? by Rand. Maybe I'm wrong here. Not sure...
  19. "Self-evident" means "evident without proof or reasoning". These axioms require proof and reason; therefore, they are not self-evident.
  20. I think "welfare statist" is the best description, if we want to group them according to Political Philosophy. Under this category, we could maybe label Obama a Rawlsian (with some Niebuhrian streaks) and McCain an Idiot.
  21. Actually I'm not sure they are self-evident. The only thing that strikes me as self-evident are sensory perceptions.
  22. Any Objectivist who can bring themselves to vote for McCain (in my opinion) has very little understanding of some of the key tenets of Objectivism. McCain represents a complete abrogation of principles as such and the open-armed acceptance of pragmatism. In today's world (in my opinion), the most "ravenous" political force is the rejection of principle and an acceptance of pragmatism.
  23. I agree. He is not particulary a socialist. I think the more fitting term for both McCain and Obama is "welfare statist".
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