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Fiddling With Climate Change and Healthcare While Rome Burns

Dear President Obama, I did not vote for you last November as I’m not a “joiner” and faux-grassroots movements make me cringe (remember the Ross Perot scare of the late 80’s?). I doubt you will read this as it most certainly will not make Rahm Emanuel’s list of approved reading materials.  On the off-chance that…

3 Potential Bubbles for Retail Investors

The “everybody’s a real estate mogul” era started innocently enough, with a distaste for the stock market after the dot com meltdown and an incredibly long stretch of time with 1% interest rates. The leap from trading up in house size to using home equity loans for financing boat purchases certainly didn’t take very long. …

Love Smoking Crack? AND Investing? Allow Me to Introduce…AIG!

Love smoking crack?  Love investing, also?  Well now you can combine two of your favorite activities, enjoying both at the same time! How, you ask? Simple!  Allow me to introduce you to…AIG, the former insurance company stock that now exists purely for trading purposes: Here’s a “stock” that for any reason (or no reason at all) on…

We Interrupt This Rally To Bring You The Following Personal Bankruptcy Stats

Since everyone loves a growth story, I thought I’d chime in with this lovely statistic on personal bankruptcy filings: According to the American Bankruptcy Institute, total bankruptcies will exceed 1.4 million for 2009, this is the highest number since 2005, and represents a 30% jump from last year’s total of 1,074,225. Now before you get excited and say, “well then I guess things…

7 Terms That Should Never Be Used To Describe A Finance Pro

A successful career on Wall Street is as much about the failures as it is about the wins.  Anyone who tells you differently is either hiding their past mistakes or is about to experience their own epic collapse, made even worse by the fact that it will be wholly unexpected to them. This is good…

Breaking: Buffett to Acquire the Rest of Burlington Northern Railroad

It’s not for me to tell you what Warren Buffett must see ahead for transportation, energy and economic activity, you must draw your own inferences.  What I will say is that this is Berkshire Hathaway‘s largest-ever purchase so you may want to come up with some kind of thesis to encompass it. From MarketWatch: NEW…

Quick Question re: the Stock Market

Quick question for those following the stock market today… Does any of this activity even remotely resemble rational buyers and sellers pursuing their own interests in a logical fashion?  Or am I simply looking at computers trading against other computers ad infinitum? Nice way to start the week: Ford surprise profit vs CIT not-surprise bankruptcy…