adrock3215

This ban was just extended until Oct 17th. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. However, this is very unfortunate for me, as I am out of work until then. I tried to continue trading the week after the ban first went into effect and I took some big loses that messed with my psychology. The market behaves different with the ban in place, and I wasn't able to adjust.

The Bill in the Senate is 451 pages long. It contains a $45 tax credit for purchasing a dishwasher and a $75 tax credit for purchasing a clothes washer. I'm not kidding about that by the way. See for yourself on pages 218-219: bill.pdf

It isn't that simple, because Stock Exchanges are either privately run companies subject to heavy regulation, operated outright by a government, or organized as not-for-profits. I can't just trade whatever share of whatever company on whatever exchange I want. Each exchange has the authority to decide what stocks can and can not trade on its floor. Plus there is the pesky issue that each government tries to "protect shareholders and investors" by dictating various and sundry procedures for presenting financial statements (which may differ quite drastically from the US GAAP procedures).

Oops, I forgot a really good one: Financial Times.

Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NY Times, CSPAN, Briefing.com, CNBC, and Bloomberg.

I'm not sure this is entirely true. You are doing the very thing to Rand that you accuse her of doing to Kant and Aristotle. While I do agree with you that at some points Rand tends to oversimplify Kant, I don't disagree with her fundamental rejection of him (and likewise, her fundamental acceptance of Aristotle).

I actually found out who "B is B" is in real life: Alan Greenspan.

Which essentially (although not entirely, as you pointed out) kills any hopes of buying and selling stocks. It is not feasible for me to obtain the telephone number of (say) every GE stockholder around the world, call each of them, and compile a list of prices they are willing to sell or buy at. I may be able to locate 3 or 4 GE stockholders and obtain their bids and offers, but of course they will probably not be to my satisfaction. I like the chances much better when there are hundreds of thousands of market participants and millions of buy and sell orders compiled in one place for my perusal.

If anyone saw his blog post titled "Tax the Hell out of Wall Street; Give it to Main Street" they would concur. In it, he says: He goes on to list some figures, claiming that his plan would raise 52 billion dollars a year. But he gives no credibility to the fact that a transaction tax on the Street would cut volume significantly. My suspicion is that many traders would quit and many hedge funds would shut down. Some of these automated Blackbox hedge funds send hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) of orders a day. With this tax, market participation would drop and the spread between bids and offers would be huge (hurting the longer term investors that he wants to protect). If you scroll down you can see many people disagreeing with him in the comments section, and his responses. This really wrecks my opinion of Mark Cuban. Now I know that he is a grade A idiot. The only explanation for this stupidity is that Cuban has gotten his ass handed to him in the markets within the last month. Maybe he was a Lehman shareholder. God knows how he got rich. I guess the sun shines on every dog's ass at some point.

From what I can ascertain from your post, you seem to think that a rational philosophy that rejects the predominant moral code of the last 2000 years will automatically be integrated and accepted by anyone who hears it. In other words: that a truly rational philosophy would be so exact and irrefutable that the simple act of questioning it will cause you to shrivel up and die like the guy who drank from the wrong Holy Grail in one of the Indiana Jones flicks (I think it was The Last Crusade). The problem is that man is a volitional being with the capability of evasion, and he can therefore believe and do whatever he pleases, thank you very much. Simply saying (and even proving) that "Objectivism is the only rational philosophy" does not guarantee its acceptance.

The Old Testament or the New?

Short sellers sell high and buy back low to make a profit. The key is that they always have to buy back the shares that they sold. Since the short interest in much of the market was slim-to-none, there were no buyers for the buy-and-hold guys to sell to. If shorting was not banned, there would have been a large amount of shorts covering (buying back shares) today, and they would have tempered the move down. In short, the market was in full sell mode today, with a sparse amount of bids because no shorts were covering. The move down was therefore sharp and quick.

Look at Pelosi here. She's the one who killed the bill because of this stupid speech. EXCERPTS: "700 Billion: Only a part of the cost of the failed Bush economic policies..." "Bush inherited Clinton budget surpluses, with his reckless economic policies, within 2 years, he turned that around" "Republicans claim to be free market advocates, when it's really an 'anything goes' mentality...If you fail, the taxpayer will bail you out. Those days are over." "Democrats believe in a free market. We know it creates many good things in our economy.." I actually like the one I bolded. Hah.

I haven't been so elated by a piece of news from Washington in the last 5 years. Unbelievable declines in all the markets, even oil!!!! It really fuels my soul to know that, for wahtever reasons, the root of the opposition to this bailout package was the American people. Edit: Without short sellers covering, the stock market has no bids and is taking the biggest dump I've ever seen.

As far as I know, yes. But there is much speculation that they will extend the short-sale ban; my suspicion is that they will. If anyone is interested, you can find updates on the short-sale ban on NYSE's website. Although the website only posts news related to the NYSE, you can get an excel file from there of all the companies that the ban has been put into effect for. In addition, you can notice that every day, from the origin of this horrendous ban, more companies have been added. I think this just proves how quickly regulations can grow out of control.

They added more companies to the list recently. Now we can't short IBM, CVS, or Autonation (AN) (for all the sense that makes).

It looks like Wachovia is the next to go. It could be closed up and sold by the end of this weekend.

Ahh. I understand. In that case, what, specifically, should a Constitution say about this? I take it that it should have stronger prohibitions against governmental intervention than our (America's) Constitution has? That is interesting and I have it marked on my to do list. From a quick browsing of Wikipedia: Do you take issue with the "implied powers" reading of Marshall? To me, it seems somewhat arbitrary.

It's odd that you would take my post personally. Perhaps I misphrased or misunderstood. I meant to say: Given Article 1, Section 1 of the Constitution, which seems to deny the executive branch the power to legislate, how does the executive branch have the power to legislate? If the answer is as unsophisticated as "Because they said so and they have the guns", then that's fine. But I was asking under the presumption that there is general respect for the Constitution, and that maybe there was some (invalid) "interpretation" which "proved" it says one thing but means something entirely different.

Here is my post in the other thread, that nobody answered. But it relates to this same issue:

I have a very limited understanding of Constitutional law. But I know that Article 1 Section 1 states: Section 1. All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives. Given this, how (throughout the 20th century) has the federal government been transformed into a sort of regulatory entity with legislative power? There must have been some interpretation or loophole that enabled the state to expand its powers to what we currently have, where a member of the executive branch (Paulson) can actually propose a piece of legislation ($700 billion bill).

Thanks for the video. The anchor is cute.

They should bail me out too while they're at it. I've had a horrible week in the markets and they are the reason why. Foolish of me to try to trade in this environment, where liquidity is dried up. I'm done trading until the short sale ban is up on Oct 2 (or, whenever it may be, if they extend it longer). The best response to this bailout came from some Republican congressman who spoke in opposition to the bailout yesterday. I saw in the paper he said something to the effect of: "They [Paulson and Bernanke] keep saying we must act now. The last time I heard that I was on a used car lot."

I'm not sure I follow you here Kendall. One issue is that anyone who has any remnant of Christian altruist ethics in their subconscious wants an "absolute" morality in the sense that they want ethical propositions that will give an argument for why red is more moral than blue. You can get around this by saying that moral principles and values are absolute (a woman's right to her own life), but that the application of such principles to actual decisions is contextual. I don't see how this can be charged as moral relativism; surely most people concede that killing is generally wrong, but make exceptions for a serial killer or when our troops are engaging with the Nazi's. "Moral absolutism" does not equal "The Ten Commandments". Some families have the means to raise a child with down syndrome, other families do not. The issue that Nick had a problem with is the way Americans (specifically, the press) portray Palin's decision as absolute moral righteousness.

What sense does this argument make? It's total garbage. Unless I missed something when purchasing my home, buying a house is not complicated at all. I'll give you a hint: If you can sign your name, you'll breeze right through it. Myabe your friends just got some bad real estate agents or something.