Thoughts In Grey

Brief Notes

It's been a rough few weeks, dominated by difficult "family" situation.

• Clio being diagnosed with cancer seems to have cost me about two weeks of my life. As is always the case with me, the tough part was the 5-6 days during which we didn't know what was going on. Now the challenge is to find the best course going forward, for however long that may be.
• But going to use this as an opportunity to get back online.
• Can't really say I care much about the GM IPO today, except to note that Barry again has it right. It's what we should have done to the banks.
• My brother's been having fun in Tokyo. Check out Jon's Tokyo Diary.
• My new Mac has been really showing its colors as I slowly scan and start processing some of my old negatives, to recreate the stuff I once was able to do only in the darkroom with noxious chemicals.
• But it really does suck that Nikon no longer supports their film scanners on current Macs. I understand that some companies cant be bothered to writer drivers for newer operating systems. With consumer products, more often than not it just isn't worth the trouble, but these are professional photo equipment, used by their "best customers," and they've terminated support on the platform used by most professionals? The same professionals who Nikon wants to retain as customers for high-end photo gear of all sorts? Dumb.
  The ill-will this obviously generates (just check out the various messageboards discussing the topic) would have been worth the cost of writing a stupid driver. The reason I've stuck with Nikon cameras for so long is that they DO still support my photo equipment roughly back to the beginning of time! If that's no longer the policy, maybe I don't need to be quite so loyal?
• Was really looking forward to finally skiing this weekend, but looks like I'll have to hold off for a bit due to the cat craziness around here. Snow base still not all that great anyway.
• Perseid meteor shower tonight! Hoping some of these clouds go away.

-mg

Brief notes

I've been offline and mostly sick for over a week, so just to catch up quickly:

• The big news is the Mac that I'm writing this on. See below for my first impressions.
• Markets continue to move up and down rather aimlessly. My own take is that people (both of the "political" and "business" camps) want to try to take us back to a place which we can't go back to.
• The same is true for housing. As the Tom Petruno suggests in the LA Times today, it may finally be time to stop trying to support the unsupportable and allow housing to decline to a market clearing price. Yes, it would be painful, but the pain will happen no matter what. Let's get it over with.
• I really enjoyed my friend Nigel Swaby's presentation at Ignite Salt Lake about his involvement with Casey Serin. The online discussions of Casey are where I got to know Nigel, and really regretted having to watch the video feed from home because I was too sick to fly out. Casey was, and in many ways still is, the personification of the financial delusions that have led us to where we are today. I found his bizarre "how the hell could this happen?" story to be as fascinating in it's own way as that of Martin Frankel.
• Chaos is on Prozac. Not something I really relished doing, as he's just being a cat after all. Unfortunately, he's gotten into a very bad anxious cycle since major surgery in March. Hopefully we'll get him back to a normal routine and slowly wean him off it.
• Dr. Beth Hagenlocker at The Cat Practice is amazing!
• I've been slowly continuing my energy audit. The results are not particularly shocking. The refrigerator is using about 30% less electricity after a good coil cleaning and slight increase in temperature. The cable boxes continue to be a major culprit. Simplifying my desk around the new Mac should also help.
• Credit is still there if your credit is good, though they're obviously still fishing for people who will make a mistake and pay hundreds of dollars in interest on a "zero interest" deal. Apple's credit parter Barclays gave me double what I needed for my Mac purchase. They're certainly betting I'll miss a minimum payment and not survive the "12 months interest free." I'll certainly schedule payments to make sure I do.
• This year's birthday trip was pretty light-weight. A few days with friends on the American River. A day in a raft, a couple of others in an inner tube. Just what I needed.
• Looking forward to the Bay Area, Utah and maybe Denver in September. New York in August. Haven't been away for a while.

mg

HP and the End of the Imperial CEO

A decade ago I worked at HP (NYSE: HPQ) and have naturally followed the craziness related to ex-CEO Mark Hurd's rapid resignation and departure since the new broke on Friday.

I'm anything from an HP insider at this point. I left just six months into Carly Fiorina's reign as would-be queen of tech-land because the reality of the coming disaster was written on the wall from day one. Even most of my old friends are no longer there, but lots of us are still quite in touchespecially within the services organization headed by Ann Livermore.

With that disclaimer in place, I have to agree with my friend Herb Greenberg's opinion that we are, to some degree, being "spun" when told that it's all about some falsified expense reports. Admittedly, HP does have much higher standards than most places I've worked with regards to such things, and even five years of Carly Fiorina did not destroy that. Hurd, to his credit, seemed to realize that when he took over the CEO post and from what I've been able to determine, had tried to re-instill some of the old HP values of trust and honesty even while cutting heavily, though he hit a major stumble last year.

But HP's values and relatively low tolerance for such stuff is the minor issue. The bigger issue is that he has hit major stumbles in recent years and the loss of employee trust is only one of them.

 

Brief Notes

Stuff that's on my mind, which is tending to wander this morning:

• The Europeans continue to founder. I've been critical of much of what this country did when the financial crisis hit us, but I'd have to argue that sometimes doing anything -- even just having a coordinated "no comment" -- is better than doing nothing. At this time the Europeans are doing nothing, or at least nothing that is coordinated in any way. As noted in yesterday's Brief Notes, this European unraveling may undo decades of capital mis-allocation and be a good thing in the long-term, but the short term pain resulting from an apparent lack of any stabilizing force is going to be painful for the entire world.
   
• Why do I have a feeling that what they're going through is something we will go through as well?
   
• Why do I also have a feeling that we will see the same results here, where the strong sections of the country will have to bail out much of the rest, but that severe cuts will be needed?
   
• And if that's the case are you better off being in one of the places that gets bailed out? (Somewhat speaking my book here, as I'm in California, which probably tops the "needs to be bailed out" list.)
   
• Incidentally, this may very well make the whole immigration question somewhat moot. Historically, immigration has been an issue at the end of booms. When the economy is growing, nobody cares and once it's stopped growing for a while, the problem tends to go away because the immigrants (largely motivated by jobs) stop coming. Combine that with a Mexican birthrate that has been dropping like a stone in recent decades (7.3 children/woman in 1962, 3.1 in 1990, 2.1 today) and one has to wonder if the whole thing is worth the debate.
   
• As noted a few days ago, Germany's actions just reinforce the fact that government wasn't doing their job in the first place. Wasn't naked shorting already illegal? If it was (as it is most places), why do we need new laws? This is much the situation as existed here two years ago and to a large degree still exists: laws on the books are unenforced until a crisis hits, and the sudden re-enforcement of those laws during a crisis just makes things worse.
   
• Historically, situations like the current one have represented good opportunities to invest in Korea. It's a binary bet: either tensions get diffused as they have been every time since the Korean War and Korean stocks rebound, or we get a war that wrecks much of the world's economy in which case you have to be holding gold, oil and dollars. The case against investing in Korea can best be summed up as "North Korea has gotten crazier than they were before and are willing to commit collective suicide this time."
  
• I don't believe that Kim Jong-Il wants co commit suicide, even post-stroke. I do believe that those around him are jockeying for position and are willing to provoke the outside world to prove their worth. For that matter I don't think the Iranians are suicidal either. They just know they have the upper hand at the moment and are willing to press their bets as far as they can, realizing that their situation is likely to be temporary.
   
• Of course, the folks in Pyongyang and Tehran are all quite happy to have suicidal loons elsewhere who are willing to do their bidding. We should not make the mistake of presuming that their support of suicidal loons means that they are willing to put themselves in the same position. They all live far too well.
   
• Bet for the rest of the day? With nothing on the table either way and little conviction, I think they'll close the market above the February intraday low at 1044 on the S&P. I have less conviction that they'll hold above it for long.
   
• The only certainty into the close is that there will be at least one cat sleeping through it on my desk when it happens.
   
• Actions for today: continue making a list of stuff I'd like to buy as the sale continues and gets better. Top on the list are the kinds of companies Jeremy Grantham would call "High Quality" value: Microsoft (NasdaqGS: MSFT), Pfizer (NYSE: PFE), HP (NYSE: HPQ), A-B Inbev (NYSE: BUD). Will also be looking into NCR in the wake of David Einhorn's investment. Some guys are worth watching.

mg

Brief Notes

A few new thoughts, a few follow-ups on things I've written about before.

• This article in the LA Times neatly sums up a lot of the reasons I think Foursquare has pretty limited appeal in a way that I couldn't quite put my finger on when I wrote about it. Even if you could get all my friends and venues on the service, it would be of limited use given the local logistics. Of course, the effect is circular: nobody's on it because it's of limited use, which makes it even less appealling and therefore less useful.
   
• Is Facebook really going to adjust in a meaningful way? Actions will tell, as I don't at this point trust their words. As I noted a couple of weeks ago, combining granular controls with easy controls is not impossible, as others have done it. The most important thing I take from this is their concession that giving me an easy way to block all third-party sharing of data is a feature that is desired. After all, even my bank gives me this option (not as easy to exercise as it should be, but it's there as a matter of law), and so do the credit agencies for a nominal fee.
  
  In fact, I think this could be a source of income: want a completely free Facebook? Give up some degree of info to get it. Want complete privacy? Pay a fee for the service. This idea actually lets the market work things out, as it lets a customer know what Facebook thinks the ability to share your information is worth and you can make a fair economic judgement about how you choose to pay for the service: directly or indirectly. This isn't all that different from allowing paid subscribers to not be subject to popups and other annoyances.
   
• Strippers Declare Inflation Dead! Business headline writers need to have fun too.
   
• Though, on that note, an old neighbor who moonlights as a "gentlemen's entertainer" tells me that even in the usually impervious Westside L.A. market, demand for her "services" is extremely slow these days.
   
• Transparent ratings are the kind of thing my friend Dennis at Institutional Risk Analytics has been promoting for some time. I'm not sure if Bloomberg's move into this business is good for him, but it certainly is good for us. Removing the importance given to the incompetents at the big ratings agencies would be a plus for everybody except those who are in on the sleazy "AAA" rated deals.
   
• One of the more interesting things I've read recently is a piece by Charles Gave, forwarded by John Maudlin. I won't reproduce copyrighted stuff here, but the upshot of the commentary is that the European crisis is a good thing, as it'll end the severe mis-allocations of capital that went along with the notion of a "single Europe." As he notes, ending the mis-allocation of capital into places like Greece is no different from ending the severe mis-allocation of capital into Miami condos that we experienced. Eventually the crisis forces us to start doing the right thing. The downside from my perspective? There's a lot of pain to be felt before the positive benefits of capital reallocation are realized.
   
• Spring has sprung, though it apparently snowed in the mountains here last night as well as in my "home" mountains outside of Salt Lake. Sadly, I think I'm done with skiing for the year. Might change my mind if Memorial Day plans fall through though.
   
• My best advice for energy efficiency in warmer climates? A simple ceiling fan. I just replaced mine yesterday after more than five years of good service. The new one is super-efficient, quiet and drops the temperature in the place 5-10 degrees. Been putting my money where my mouth is: installed one in each room for my brother and having them put into mom's place in Manhattan during her renovation.
   
• I've been grilling lots of lean meats and veggies. Because I'm on a diet? Well, a bit. Mostly because now that the weather is nice, it's pleasant to grill and the grill is so much easier to clean than the kitchen.

Now, if only the wind would calm down a bit so I could get the kayak out for the first time this spring.

mg

Confidence Lost

So our friends in Europe have jumped in today to halt trading activities that are harming the Euro and their big financial institutions. They seem to think this will restore confidence. They should have learned from us, or from the many, many times in history that this has failed, as it did today.

In truth, there's not much wrong with what they did. It's how they did it and the selective nature of enforcement that is causing the problem. Last I checked, naked shorting was illegal in Europe as well as here. Enforcing that law is a good thing. But letting it go on unabated then selectively enforcing the law with regards to ten "blessed" financial institutions does not help "restore confidence." It sends the message that something is really, really wrong with those institutions, that in fact something is so wrong that it justifies sudden and selective enforcement of laws that were ignored until now.

And much the same is true of the restrictions on naked CDS trades. There's little if any justification for the existence of these conduits for expanding risk with no benefit to any actual holder of the underlying asset. But to suddenly and selectively prohibit a few CDS products from trading sends the message that there's something seriously wrong.

I hate to harp on Taleb the second time this week, but his Ten Principles for a Black-Swan-Robust Society, (reproduced as Postscript VIII in the second edition of The Black Swan) makes the point quite bluntly:

Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to "restore confidence."

...Governments cannot stop the rumors. Simply, we need to be in a position to shrug off the rumors, be robust to them.

Easier said than done.

Taleb should stay off TV (and we're all worse for it)

Taleb was on TV briefly yesterday. I actually turned up the volume on CNBC to hear what he had to say. I should not have bothered.

Not because Taleb doesn't have a lot to say, he most certainly does. Not even because his involvement with one Universa Investments, who may or may not have had something to do with last Thursday's momentary crash, prevents him from commenting on some things that might be interesting.

Taleb shouldn't go on TV because there's just no point. Taleb's ideas are as complex as the financial mess the world finds itself in right now. Inviting him in to discuss one point in time, or to try to draw simple cause-effect conclusions just doesn't make much use of him or provide any illumination for the viewers. It's most likely why he's spent a good chunk of time recently avoiding TV appearances altogether, he knows that the vast bulk of media consumers just don't want to hear that the problem is far more complex than any one individual can possibly understand or solve.

Taleb and others like him are where the solutions -- or at least the pieces of the solution -- lie. Whether it's the world of finance, healthcare, immigration or just about anything else that plagues us right now, the situation is complex and the solutions will be too. That just doesn't come across well in a media world that has conditioned us to believe that meaningful content can be shared in 140 characters or that every question has an answer in a 20-30 second sound bite.

Unfortunately, Television and most of our media falls for what Taleb calls "The Ludic Fallacy," which is the notion that everything has an anecdotal and easy to follow explanation. The TV medium as it has been constituted today is simply unsuited for doing much beyond "telling a story." When the story fails to follow a clear "plotline" with obvious cause-and-effect relationships, it fails and is forced to grasp for something else, as the interviewers on CNBC did.

When I present this problem to some people, the response is that the people with the good ideas will need to adjust. They'll need to figure out how to explain complex and multidimensional problems by splitting them into little 20 second bits. I take the opposite view. Our problems are going to continue to escalate until we are willing to recognize that there are no easy solutions and that sound bites won't save us. I suspect further crises will need to happen before we get to that point.

It's too bad, but until we are willing to dispense with the notion that there are always simple solutions, Taleb should stay off TV. Those of us who want good analysis of the realities of the world have to look elsewhere, which is too bad.

mg

Quick Friday Notes

The weekend couldn't have come soon enough.

• It's good to hear of at least one friend whose job has been "created or saved" this year. In her case, "saved," though her employer is a non-American company it will undoubtedly be counted as a victory for the "stimulus." Congrats Kara!
• Apropos my earlier post, Barry Ritholtz is demanding a well-deserved apology for those who smeared him, David Einhorn and others over their well-researched questioning of Lehman and its execs prior to the meltdown.
• Barry also notes the endgame of the chicanery and fraud that has been tolerated for far too long:

  All in all, the entire system failed. The situation is utterly disgusting, and if the investing public pulls its money out of the completely corrupt public markets for a generation or more, it would not surprise me . . .

  That's not a happy prognosis if you believe the markets serve an important function in providing funding to businesses that need it. But perhaps it's indicative of how far we've come from that basic thesis, that in fact the markets no longer are serving the "main street" interest of financing businesses all that well. Instead they've discovered it's more profitable to run a casino where the little guy is always betting against the house and they make money either way while providing no social utility to anybody. And maybe the public would be right to just go elsewhere until they actually do something anybody outside "the club" finds useful.
• And all this should serve to remind us that nothing's new. It appears now that Lehman may very well have been technically insolvent years before their problems became known, just like Enron. And their unwillingness to control risk is long-standing, extending back to this incident in 1998 and probably earlier. As Jim Grant noted at the time, on Wall Street there's no constituency for the truth.
• Lenny Dykstra's ego and penchant for coming back long after he overstayed his welcome is perhaps second only to Casey Serin's. His latest? He's hoping to sell you a subscription to a scammy newsletter far more expensive than the one he used to sell through TheStreet.com, but he's doing it without their help as even Jim Cramer's often-maligned web empire won't touch the guy. This, all while trying to get out of bankruptcy. Of course, this time you get an autographed baseball if you sign up, which may be the only tangible benefit to the whole thing.

And now it's time to head over to "The Palm Tree" where we will celebrate a job saved!

mg

The Short Sellers Didn't Do It!

So, the results are finally in, and it seems that short sellers, speculators, Wall Street insiders and all the rest had pretty much nothing to do with the collapse of Lehman.

It seems that Lehman's executives and it's auditors were pretty much responsible, just as I thought when it happened.

Maybe now we'll question Vikram Pandit over at crippled and government-supported Citi (NYSE:C), who still claims that the institution is and was always fine and that the reason it nearly collapsed and needed more government money was a bunch of short sellers.

Or perhaps we'll consider that the reasons for the Euro's decline is not a bunch of short sellers thinking they could move the $2t a day currency markets, but rather because Greece, Portugal and maybe Spain are complete basket cases who have been falsifying their books in a manner that would make the Lehman and Enron guys look like angels, and the various European bureaucracies have been no better at calling them out on it than the Auditors of those private firms were. I mean really, if you had a bunch of Euros and you saw this coming, wouldn't you sell them? Just as I saw what was coming and got rid of the Toyota? If you have a brain you would have.

Maybe we'll even apologize to Soros for blaming him for "breaking" the pound, when the reality is that it was political pig-headedness and a desire to have the impossible that led to the pounds unsustainable rise and inevitable collapse. We might even recognize that the "breaking" of the pound presaged the British boom of the late 90s and early 2000s.

But for now, it's easier to blame "speculators" for causing all these problems. The reality is that most of them aren't that smart. They're just smarter in most cases than those who caused the problems and imagined that they could maintain the unmaintainable and sustain the unsustainable. They hate the speculators not so much for making money off their scams, but because the speculators are necessarily the ones who are yelling that the emperor has no clothes and that's bad for business.

I'm not much of a fan of a lot of what goes on these days on Wall Street. As far as I'm concerned all the "prop traders" of various types should be kicked out of any insitutions that get any government support or favorable treatment (by which I mean, any access I don't personally have) and forced to either make it or break it on their own. But I'm happy there are guys like Soros, Ackman, Tilson & Tongue, Einhorn and many others who are willing to stand up and note that the emperor has no clothes and get me away from the parade before the riot starts. I haven't always agreed and I've sometimes even made money betting the other way, but they make the debate and they shine light in lots of places where others prefer no light be shone. That's a good thing, the Greeks, Citiwhores and Lehmanfrauds notwithstanding.

mg

Again, the Solution is Obvious

They're at it again.

Once again, they're trying to pretend that the battle between network affiliates, other local TV stations and the cable companies that deliver their content to most households has to do with anything more than strong-arming the American public into padding their profits and buying content we don't want.

As I've noted before, there's a really simple way to resolve these conflicts, whether they're between Fox and Time Warner, ABC and Cablevision, or anybody else.

Stop demanding that we buy "packages" of stations in a way that subsidizes content we don't want and elimiates any ability to really vote with our wallets about what content we do want and what we're willing to pay for it. Want to save me money Cablevision? (Or Time Warner?) Easy. Let me opt out of all the expensive stations that I never watch. That'll save approximately $4 a month (or so I'm told) on ESPN because I never watch sports. Probably a few bucks for the local independents and their incessant Seinfeld reruns. Probably would drop the network affiliates too, as network programming is completly worthless. In fact, I'd probably drop all the "Broadcast Basic" stations that I never watch and which represent much of the "baseline" product I am forced to buy before I buy anything else.

It'll save me money, it'll deliver the content I want and it will allow the marketplace to work, because nobody will need to debate, discuss or argue about what consumers are willing to pay for any network. We'll vote with our wallets and you'll know how much or how little we value your product.

Quote of the Day

From my friends at Institutionl Risk Analytics, by way of Barry Ritholtz' Big Picture blog:

It is pretty clear from the leaks that populate book’s such as David Wessel’s fine tome, In Fed We Trust, that the decision process at the Fed is entirely short-term and reactive. We could take some comfort were the players at Treasury or the Fed or even the White House really purposeful, ideological socialists. But instead we have a group or politicians who collectively are almost entirely ignorant of American history or economics making structural decisions about the US economy based entirely on today’s crisis or expediency.

Christopher Whelen inadvertently brings up a point I've often made in the past year or two, as charges of "socialism" get tossed around. My grandparents were socialists when they met in the 20s. Back then, this manifested itself in demands for better worker safety, an end to child labor and de-facto indentured servitude and other reforms that arguably improved both the lot of workers and the economy overall. In latter years my grandfather described his early political leanings as well meaning but a bit naive. Probably a good description of socialism, and probably many other political ideologies that speak to how things should be, but fail to be grounded in how they are.

What they, and other "good socialists" never would have advocated for, is giving trillions to bail out banking institutions that had failed, along with their bondholders and employees.  They never would have suggested that bailing out those people who bought investment properties they never planned to live in, or who took on loans with no money down hoping for a "quick flip" would have been good social policy (my grandfather built his own house and never had a mortgage).  They certainly would not have considered that tax breaks for huge blingy vehicles were good policy.  These things may be interventionist and stupid, but socialism they are not.

So, as Whelen does, let's distinguish this hypocritical, kleptocratic, crisis-driven, "live for the moment and forget the future" mess from socialism. It's an offense to all the naive, but good-minded socialists everywhere.

mg