Tag: Wall Street

In 2008 when I joined the Obama bandwagon I had this underlying suspicion that he was more about hype than substance. That he was saying things he knew would arouse me but was mainly saying them to get elected. He, like Bill Clinton and George Bush before him, didn’t really speak the words from his heart. You can’t say that about Bernie.

Sanders has a long track record of doing what he says. He also has a record of accomplishments that proves him to be a pragmatist that I believe this country seriously needs today. He votes  based on substance, not party. We have way too much “party” in our politics today.

It seems strange that so many of us are disgusted with the way our current political system operates but are just too fearful of voting for alternatives. Until we vote the IN’s out we will never see any significant progress in our way of doing government.

No, Bernie won’t win any beauty contest. He is not the strapping figures of John Kennedy or even Ronald Reagan. If we really want change then we must vote for it and I am coming to believe that Bernie might be the first step in that process.

It bothers me that Hillary has made millions of dollars making speeches to Wall Street firms and then refuses to release any words she said to them.  It should be absolutely clear to anyone who has been paying even the slightest attention that Bernie has no fans on Wall Street and won’t be asked to give a speech there anytime soon.

I love what Mark Shields said on a recent PBS Newshour. I will try to paraphrase it here:

The mortgage crisis was a terrible thing so we must hunt down those people who perpetrated this fraud and give them billions of dollars.

Bernie and Elizabeth Warren seem to be the only two people in congress who are upset as I and many other are by this logic. Billions were given to pull them out of the troubles they caused and not one person was ever indicted for the trillions it cost the American taxpayer!  I recognize that partisan politics has just become increasingly extreme since the Reagan years. We HAVE to do something to pull it back to some level of sanity if we hope to even exist.

To close out this post, I just want to be able to vote for a person who I know is true to his word and actually believes what he says.  Not a person who says what he thinks will get him elected simply because he/she craves the power of the office. I want to be able to vote for a person with “true” passion for the people.

Right now I am coming to believe that Bernie is the only person currently in this race to meet that objective. Maybe he can’t be elected but we will never know until we try….

Thanks Dan for reminding us what is really tragic.

As Wall Street’s best year in more than 15 draws to a close, few are expecting a repeat performance in 2014, though traders have plenty of reasons to feel optimistic.

SOURCE: Big year ends with Wall Street hopeful for 2014: Fidelity.

I have a fair share of stocks in my retirement portfolio and have seen them go up quite a bit this year. It almost reminds me of the year 1998 when I started thinking about retiring. It is good news to see stocks going up especially since the Feds have bond interest rates stuck at 0% for so long.

But then I look at this year from a political view and things couldn’t have been worse. Total gridlock and the total “do-nothingness” congress. How can these two things occur in the same year? Of course my hero Will Rogers  had already told me but I failed to listen I guess.

Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for. — Will Rogers

In fact he told me even more bluntly and I am paraphrasing because I can’t find the quote right now

The best thing congress can do for the country is take a two-week vacation.

Those yahoos spend more time at home than they did in Washington this year. Maybe that in financial terms is a good thing. But I do kind of wish they would have stayed around long enough to do a little something for the guy out of work and struggling to feed his family.

“Most big corporations trade well above book value,” Warren said, referring to the measure of a company’s assets minus liabilities. “But many of the Wall Street banks right now are trading below book value. And I can only think of two reasons why that would be so. One would be because nobody believes that the banks’ books are honest, or the second would be that no one believes that the banks are really manageable.”

Warren’s comment on bank accounting came after she repeatedly — and apparently rhetorically — asked a panel of top regulators to cite the last time they had hauled a big Wall Street bank into court rather than settled. There were mostly halting responses and promises to get back to Warren with more information at a later time. That question — why there has not been more accountability for top bankers in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown — taps into a deep vein of public anger on both the left and right. And it is Warren’s most potent political weapon.

Source: Elizabeth Warren strikes fear into Wall Street – Ben White – POLITICO.com.

I don’t think I am the only person who is shouting hooray for Elizabeth Warren, the new senator from Massachusetts. Ms. Warren is a former Harvard Law Professor who is currently taking the banking sector by storm or maybe I should say tornado. She is striking fear in the banking sector of both the big bank CEOs and the regulators. It is about time someone struck back for the people.

When the financial sector did an almost meltdown in the last year of the Bush administration there was rage throughout the country. Especially when the government had to fork over billions of bucks to keep them afloat. It seemed the “too big to fail” tag put on them by both the Bush and later the Obama administrations varnished over the severe faults found in the banking sector.  No one was prosecuted or otherwise punished for the gross risks they took in the pursuit of profits or for the regulators who were derelict in their duties in allowing them to do so.

People screamed about the “too big to fail” mantra for a few months and then  our government seemed to move on to the next  disaster without really addressing this one. Within a year the CEOs and upper management of the big banks were back at the trough getting their million dollar bonuses. It was not until this Harvard law professor went after them that anyone seemed to notice.

I loved the way Senator Warren chastised the regulators who were supposed to protect the taxpayers  for not doing their jobs either before or after the meltdown.  When she asked them how many Wall Street banks were prosecuted in court they were too ashamed, or maybe a better word was embarrassed, to say that none were; they settled all the matters out of court with usually a slip on the wrist. To me and I hope many of you, I don’t see any difference between what these guys did and a guy who goes into a local branch and robs it. That guy is probably behind bars for the next twenty years  while all the bankers are back to doing almost the same things they were before.

Here is to you Senator Warren. Keep up the attacks. I hope you can land some of these guys in jail. That would be the only way that future bankers would learn that actions have consequences and those consequences are jail time for them.

Source: ‘Fear’ gauge showing little of it.

Some investors interpret the benign numbers as evidence that worries about gridlock in Washington and the slowing global economy are overblown.

But others worry that the low readings are a sign of complacency, and that the potential for further declines in response to unexpected bad news isn’t reflected in stock prices….

If Wall Street is nothing else it is about worrying.  Those guys buy and sell on the slightest hint of something different happening. The above quote comes from Fidelity Investments as a form of advice to its investors.  What it basically says is that these guys are worrying that they are not worrying enough so something might come up and surprise them. Does that sound like paranoia to you? It sure does to me.

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The trouble with Wall Street is well, Wall Street. Those folks in New York City, especially Manhattan, think they are the center of the universe.

Lets move our financial institutions to Omaha Nebraska.  That will give them more common sense than they would ever be able to gain on that little island in New York.  Warren Buffett has done pretty well with himself by staying there all these years. He has weathered most of the melt-down in pretty good shape. He doesn’t let the flashy lights of fame and fortune cloud his judgment.

The people who live in or near New York City don’t really have any idea of what the rest of the country is about or what our priorities are. I lived in that area for four years waiting to finish out my corporate life before claiming my pension and leaving soon thereafter.  When many in that area learned that I was from Indiana the first question they asked was  “what is there to do out there in the Midwest?”. To them anything outside of  their area is simply a “cornfield with lights”. They don’t understand that there is life without having to live packed together with millions of other people.

I won’t reserve this mentality for only those in the Northeast as those California folks think much the same way but on a different topic. They can’t understand the changing seasons have an appeal to some of us. They can’t understand why any of us would want to live where it gets cold or where there is no ocean.

So, getting back to the original premise of this post lets move our financial district to Omaha. Maybe some saner minds would then prevail for the very fact that not many of those Manhattan folks would follow their jobs to the “cornfield with lights”. But then again maybe I am wrong about that.  Greed is a powerful thing…

But what do I know….

You gotta love all the spin masters on Wall Street these days. I noticed these headline here several times this year.

BIGGEST ONE DAY GAIN!!!

But what they don’t talk about is that the day before was the biggest one day loss so all that the gain did was put us back to where we were the  day before yesterday.  These guys will do just about anything to try to justify their big year-end bonuses.

But what do I know….