He sees you when you’re reaching…

Hey you… Yes you, with your whole arm up to the elbow in the Yield Cookie Jar…cut it out. Bernanke sees you and is monitoring the situation. Here’s what he told an audience at a Chicago banking conference:  “In light of the current low interest rate environment, we are watching particularly closely for instances of…

Two Market Extremes To Be Aware Of

When people cite things like the AAII poll or even institutional investors’s surveys, I click off the TV. Just kidding, it’s not on to begin with. But seriously, I don’t give a shit what people say they’re doing, I pay attention to what they’re actually doing. The Sicilians say “Watch what they do, not what…

Goodbye, Alan

Legendary Barron’s columnist Alan Abelson has passed away today at the age of 87. I was at a conference with Michael Santoli a week ago and Alan had come up in conversation – Abelson hadn’t been filing his weekly Up & Down Wall Street columns regularly as he had since the 1960’s. Now we know…

Oy Vey.

The May 11th cover of The Economist. Related story linked below, good night. Source: Wall Street is Back (The Economist)

depends where you’re standing

This cartoon perfectly captures this particular bull market era. The question is, which will win out? Does the economy stay muted and drag stocks back to earth or do more people begin to feel the wealth effect and change their habits? Unclear as yet. Source: Chappatte in “International Herald Tribune” hat tip: Jason Zweig

Lay off Paulson already

I have a quote or two in this MarketWatch piece about “celebrity hedge fund managers” – I think the criticism of John Paulson has been way too harsh and totally relentless. People forget that a) there’s a human being beneath the “hedge fund titan” veneer and b) the guy is a real investor and real…

The Cost of Incarceration

The market strategists at ConvergEx Group, a global brokerage company based in New York, have put together quite a run of stats on America’s prison population and what it’s costing us. The numbers are, as you might imagine, outrageous. The War on Drugs has had a disastrous outcome in exchange for less-than-zero success. Hopefully the decriminalization of…