Financial topics

[Trevor]

That reminds me: in the 4-year college I was hoping to go to, tuition doubled between 2006 and 2011. For 2012, they increased it another 10 percent and I found out why when i learned that all the administrators are giving themselves fat pay raises. I wouldn't mind so much if it was going towards improving the school, but this is just sad.

As for loan forgiveness... I can see why some think it's a good idea, but it'd be well over a trillion dollars and we're heavily in debt as things stand. We just can't afford it right now.

[mannfm11]

Higgy, I think if there were more miles driven, it was weather related. Warm cars use gasoline more efficiently. There weren't any shut down days here this year.

I was looking at the crack spread for gasoline today. 42 gallons is going over the futures market at $142 a barrel. If I had to guess, Wall Street is trying to drive the price of refiners stock upward. This is their exit from withholding supplies from the market. I really wonder why the US refineries are operating at 82% capacity, if it isn't to drive the price of the refiners themselves up. They know when the gig is going to be up, so they can insure themselves with puts to exit the trade. Rockefeller runs the foreign policy of the US, as evidenced by the presense of Kissinger and Brzezinski. Note if you will, Brzezinski's two sons were the foreign policy advisors for both candidates last election. Note the slimeballs of Wall Street were Obama's economic advisors, Rubin, Raines, Summers and Corzine. Hillary was elected Senator from NY while living in DC, having moved there from Arkansas. Coincidence or conspiracy?

[OLD1953]

It doesn't have to be a conspiracy to not be a coincidence. In the USA, you either graduate from a short list of schools or you will find an impenetrable ceiling in government agencies and in many corporations. That short list doesn't have all that many graduates. Of course they all think alike and act alike and they all know each other. And half of them graduated with the "gentleman's C".

I got interested in the videogaming business yesterday, because I took some developers to task a bit on an open forum due to some simply awful changes they had made in a game I sometimes play. I think the regulars here know I can get fairly rough without being a bit impolite, and I made it quite clear they had failed badly in my opinion. I even went so far as to say they had similar content to free to play Korean games and implied strongly they didn't have any added value over such in their newest release. They got upset and closed the discussions. So I started looking into the "leadership" at Activision.

Lovely example of everything that is wrong about American business. Here's some beautiful quotes from the CEO, Robert Kotick:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008 ... ant-it.ars
The games Activision Blizzard didn't pick up, he said, "don't have the potential to be exploited every year on every platform with clear sequel potential and have the potential to become $100 million franchises---

IOW, forget new games, we want to beat the old ones to death because it costs less and we have less development to do.

http://spong.com/article/18838/Activisi ... -Even-More
Bobby, however, is not one to mince words. "And Tony, you know if it was left to me, I would raise the prices even further."

This was in response to a question about high price points during a time of economic stress on the customers.

This is absolutely classic "who cares about customers, there's plenty of them" actions. So what is the result of this a few years down the road?

http://www.pcworld.com/article/243465/w ... _year.html
Activision Blizzard lost around 800,000 subscribers in its latest quarter—a drop from 11.1 million to 10.3 million subs worldwide

If you don't know their pricing, that's a MINIMUM of 30 million dollars a month they've lost in dropped subs to ONE game over two years. I could have given a dozen other quotes from this character, like the one about "developing games should not be fun" and a lot of stuff about how selling games is exactly the same as selling Tide, but that's enough to show he thinks customers are something he's owed, not something he earns. People keep tellling me about an "entitlement" generation, OK, when did US business decide that they had an entitlement to customers? Think about it that way, it explains a lot, doesn't it? And that article underestimates the actual loss by quite a lot, time played is a much more important factor than mere subscriptions, and that figure is down by about 50%. If the next expansion of WOW is as bad as the last one, they'll be knocked off their pinnacle before the year is out, doubtless crying over "bad economic conditions". Funny how they didn't have any of that from 2006 thru 2009, eh?

Refusing to build a relationship to a customer means they'll go somewhere else, and pretty often that somewhere else is not a US company, in this global world.

[aedens]

A comment from the left: The worst thing you can say about libertarians is that they are intellectually immature.

[Trevor]

If these people are smart, they'll sell their stock options when it's still high, cash out and live out the rest of their lives laughing at the rest of the world. I have no problem making money, so long as it is done honestly, but we know that too many of these people have done the exact opposite.

In my history classes, I remember my professors telling me that thanks to FDR, we had greater income equality. Well, not exactly; much of it was because many of the wealthy in this country and throughout the world lost everything in the Great Depression and become hungry and homeless like everyone else. I expect to see something similar this time around.

[Trevor]

As for education, I have heard that the top 20 schools pretty much guarantee you a decent job, even if all you can manage is a "C" average. Both Bush and Kerry received Cs when they were in school, but they nevertheless climbed to the top. In terms of sheer education, I'm not sure how much of a difference going to a top-notch school versus an ordinary school.

[aedens]

There is a acount, and what of Glaucus, who asked pardon; his answer was given it was bad enough to have tempted the god as it would have been to have done the deed. Nevertheless Glaucus, three generations later had not a single descendant.

[OLD1953]

I feel we are in the eye of the storm. When it breaks forth again, it will be worse. The worst part of a hurricane comes after the eye.

[Higgenbotham]

I feel we are in the eye of the storm. When it breaks forth again, it will be worse. The worst part of a hurricane comes after the eye.

OLD, I would have to agree. I've been doing intensive study all weekend to try to figure out where things are. It seems as if we are entering into that April 1930 moment and may be in the eye of the storm over the next few weeks. That has been put on hold for 2 years, since right before the flash crash. I was listening to an analyst today who said he believes the European banking system was within hours of melting down in late November. The result of saving it is probably a bubble that is more fragile than the one that was present in April 2 years ago.

The contrast between data points is amazing. Today, underneath an article I was reading about campus recruiting being the best it has been in 5 years was an article about record teen unemployment. Earlier, I had seen a discussion about homes near Apple, Google and Facebook headquarters receiving multiple offers while the rest of the metro area languishes. And the latest Case-Shiller city report is interesting - house prices in Detroit have nudged up a little bit in the past year and it looks to be the only city on the graph that has.

[Trevor]

I feel we are in the eye of the storm. When it breaks forth again, it will be worse. The worst part of a hurricane comes after the eye.

OLD, I would have to agree. I've been doing intensive study all weekend to try to figure out where things are. It seems as if we are entering into that April 1930 moment and may be in the eye of the storm over the next few weeks. That has been put on hold for 2 years, since right before the flash crash. I was listening to an analyst today who said he believes the European banking system was within hours of melting down in late November. The result of saving it is probably a bubble that is more fragile than the one that was present in April 2 years ago.

The contrast between data points is amazing. Today, underneath an article I was reading about campus recruiting being the best it has been in 5 years was an article about record teen unemployment. Earlier, I had seen a discussion about homes near Apple, Google and Facebook headquarters receiving multiple offers while the rest of the metro area languishes. And the latest Case-Shiller city report is interesting - house prices in Detroit have nudged up a little bit in the past year and it looks to be the only city on the graph that has.

I mostly agree with you on that, but I would say that we're not exactly in the eye on the storm. The first storm was in 2008-2009 and it was one we barely survived. The second storm has yet to hit us and has not yet built its full strength. We don't see it at all and if we do, we consider it something minor. There are signs if you know what you're looking for.