Cab Thoughts 4/2/15

Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.--Michel de Montaigne (1533 – 1592)






The countries of Greece, Spain and South Africa all have unemployment rates in the mid 20 percent. 20%! Fortunately they have a high minimum wage.

The Great Gatsby was not always so named. Previous suggested titles had included "Under the Red, White and Blue," "The High Bouncing Lover," "Among the Ash Heaps," and most recently, "Trimalchio."  A late-draft version of the novel was published in 2000 under the "Trimalchio" title. Fitzgerald was borrowing here from a character by that name in the first-century Roman story, Satyricon, thought to be written by Petronius. As "director of pleasures" for Nero's imperial court, Petronius would have had dealings with people of Trimalchio's status and style -- rich and vulgar social climbers who enjoy playing host to an endless supply of party-goers and parasites.

The Tesla Model S can go from 0 to 60 mph in a stunning 5.9 seconds and travel up to an impressive 319 miles on a single charge. The Tesla Model S is shockingly modestly priced by luxury car standards. The basic model has a MSRP of $69,900, but the price tag can quickly escalate to $100,000 with optional add-ons. But at those prices is not a solution to our oil problem.

Fiat currency is shown by negative rates not to be a storage of value whatsoever but only a representation of strength of its respective economy.  As the economy goes to zero so does the value of its currency. 

Expanding your customer base is always a good thing, but doing business overseas is not without peril, and one of the underappreciated perils is the impact of currency movements. A stronger dollar can hurt companies that do a large share of their business overseas because sales in other countries translate back into fewer dollars. The US Dollar Index was up 13% in 2014 and is now near a 9-year high. Collectively, the 500 companies in the S&P 500 get 46% of their sales and roughly 50% of their profits from outside the US.. P&G sold $20.16 billion of toothpaste, laundry detergent, diapers, toilet paper, and razor blades last quarter, but that was a 4% decline from the same period a year ago. Worse yet, profits plunged by 31% to $1.06 per share. P&G warned Wall Street that its 2015 sales will fall by another 5% and its 2015 profits will shrink by another 12%.

Who was....William Jennings Bryan?

A Pakistani lawyer under death threats for defending a doctor who helped CIA agents hunt al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was shot dead on Tuesday, police said. Probably militant Unitarians.

A headline recently read: "Business closings hold steady while start-ups decline." The problem isn’t so much that businesses are failing, but that American entrepreneurs are simply not starting as many new businesses as they used to.  America has always been the hotbed of capitalism, but the US actually is number 12 among developed nations for new business start-ups. Hungary, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Sweden, Israel, and even financially troubled Italy are creating new businesses faster than the U.S..

“When small and medium-sized businesses are dying faster than they’re being born, so is free enterprise. And when free enterprise dies, America dies with it,” says Gallup CEO Jim Clifton.

Lithium has such a low density that it floats on water and can be cut with a butter knife. And when mixed with aluminum and magnesium, it can form lightweight alloys that produce some the highest strength-to-weight ratios of all metals.

Here’s the Fed’s Catch-22. If the Fed can use extraordinary monetary policy measures to force market risk-taking (the avowed intention of both Zero Interest Rate Policy and Large Scale Asset Purchases) AND the real economy engages in productive risk-taking (small business loan demand, wage increases, business investment for growth, etc.), THEN we have a self-sustaining and robust economic recovery underway. But the Fed’s extraordinary efforts to force market risk-taking and inflate financial assets discourage productive risk-taking in the real economy, both because the Fed’s easy money is used by corporations for non-productive uses (stock buy-backs, anyone?) and because no one is willing to invest ahead of global growth when no one believes that the leading indicator of that growth – the stock market – means what it used to mean.--Ben Hunt

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2010/03/managers-of-commerce.html

It’s important to keep in mind the distinction between inequality and poverty.  To confuse the two (as is common today) risks addressing the wrong malady.  Just as we do not blame a cancer victim’s suffering on an unequal distribution of good health - that is, just as we recognize that a cancer victim’s illness is not caused by the good health of others and cannot be cured by making healthy people less healthy - we should recognize that a poor person’s poverty is not caused by the prosperity of others and cannot be cured by making wealthy people less wealthy.  Indeed, recent research suggests that simply transferring more money to relatively poor people in rich societies does not provide much relief; poverty persists for reasons that run far more deeply than the fact that some people earn more income than do others.--Donald J. Boudreaux

"La Marseillaise" is the national anthem of France. It was written and composed in 1792 by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle and became the rallying cry of the French Revolution. Originally known as the "Marching Song of the Rhine Army," it got its present name because it was first sung on the streets of Paris by troops from Marseille.

In the seventeenth century, Virginia sassafras was esteemed for its medicinal value and was the second largest export from the British American colonies after tobacco itself. Years later, its popularity having dimmed, it was used as flavoring for drinks such as sarsaparilla and root beer that were used as substitutes for alcohol -- especially as part of the American temperance movement.

After serving two terms in the House of Representatives, William Jennings Bryan, in 1896, defeated incumbent President Grover Cleveland to win the Democratic party nomination for president. Just thirty-six, Bryan managed to attract the support of mainstream Democrats as well as third party Populists. His historic "Cross of Gold" speech, ("we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold"), delivered prior to his nomination, criticized supporters of  the gold standard for U.S. currency, which he believed benefited the wealthy at the expense of the average worker. He lost twice again, both times to McKinley, but was always well loved and influential. After helping Woodrow Wilson secure the Democratic nomination in 1912, he served as secretary of state. A committed pacifist, Bryan resigned his position in 1915, after the sinking of the Lusitania, as the nation appeared likely to enter World War I.

In 1985, Libby Riddles became the first woman to win the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, the dog-pulling sled race from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska. The next three Iditarods also were won by a woman, Susan Butcher. The race consists of teams of twelve to sixteen dogs pulling a sled driven by a man or woman, called a "musher." The trail involves treacherous climbs through the rugged Alaskan wilderness, and the race lasts for eight to twenty days in subzero temperatures, much of it in darkness and blinding winds.

Growth in Pittsburgh’s technology sector is accelerating among venture capitalists, angels and other investors with $437.8 million invested across 177 deals in 2014, marking a 46% increase in dollars and an 19.6% increase in deals over 2013.
VCs invested $332.9 million into 39 Pittsburgh deals in 2014, a 168% increase in dollars invested and a 26% increase in the number of deals over 2013.  This was the highest level of VC investment in the Pittsburgh region since 2001.
Angels invested $72.9 million in 2014, a 35% increase over 2013.
Pittsburgh start-ups saw $3+ billion in exits over the last five years.

The mountain men said that Indians were often like wolves: Run, and they follow; follow, and they run.

China is now sitting on top of the greatest accumulation of bad debt and overcapacity in history. According to the Survey and Research Center for China Household Finance, more than one in five homes in China's urban areas is vacant, with 49 million sold but vacant units, and 3.5 million homes that remain unsold. Behind those vacant and unsold units is private debt, both loans to developers and mortgage debt. Housing values in China increased on the same perilous trajectory as in the United States before 2008 and Japan before 1991--and they have now started a similar decline. Meanwhile, real estate was 6 percent of U.S. GDP at the peak in 2005; today, it is as much as 20 percent of China's GDP. China today is likely to have an estimated $1.75 trillion to $3.5 trillion in problem loans -- a figure well in excess of the $1.5 trillion of total capital in China's banking system.

Pickwickian: adj: 1. (of words or ideas) meant or understood in a sense different from the apparent or usual one. 2. (of the use or interpretation of an expression) intentionally or unintentionally odd or unusual. Derived from the name of the protagonist in Charles Dickens's novel The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Also a medical syndrome of hypoventilation as a result of obesity. The theory is the abdomen presses up against the chest wall. This makes it hard for a person to breathe deeply and quickly enough. As a result, the blood has too much carbon dioxide and not enough oxygen. They are prone to sleep disorders.

Music softened after WWII; jazz was out and "sweet music" in. People were said top be tired of the frenetic war pace and wanted to relax. A William Morris Agency music booker was quoted in a 1947 newspaper article titled 'Swing Has Swung': 'Ballroom operators complain that the kids walk off the floor when the music gets hot. Kids haven't got so much money to throw around these days. When a fellow pays a couple of bucks to take his best girl dancing, he wants to hear music that makes her want to cuddle up a little closer, not swing.'

In the early twentieth century, America was a decidedly prejudice place -- it had rejected Japan's request in 1919 for a racial equality clause in the Covenant of the League of Nations, and passed a blatantly racist Immigration Act in 1924 (According to the U.S. Department of State's Office of the Historian the purpose of the act was "to preserve the ideal of American homogeneity"). But Japan was prejudiced too; elites such as the young Japanese Emperor Hirohito had been taught from an early age that there would be an inevitable struggle between the yellow and white races for domination.

A bull shark can live in both salt and fresh water by regulating salt and other substances in its blood. A bull shark may have been responsible for a 1916 shark attack that happened in a creek in New Jersey. They have also been found in the Mississippi River.

'We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.' So said Thomas Jefferson about the prospect of freed slaves. One option was repatriation.

 In February 1816, a Massachusetts merchant sea captain named Paul Cuffe sailed his brig Traveller across a stormy Atlantic to the west coast of Africa with a cargo of tobacco, flour, and tools to trade for camwood. Cuffe was unusual among New England shipowners in being the son of a West African father and a mother from the Wampanoag Indian tribe; he staffed his ships with all black crews. Cuffe had made similar voyages before, but this time he also carried thirty-eight African American passengers intending to make new homes in Sierra Leone, Senegal, and the Congo. Cuffe sought to implement a dream that had been nursed by a few black Americans for more than a generation: emigration away from racist oppression to the ancestral homeland. A practicing Quaker, Cuffe also intended his enterprise to promote Christianity in Africa, help stifle the slave trade, and, God willing, turn a profit.

The idea grew. Colonize Africa--recolonize it--with freed slaves. The Virginia state legislature overwhelmingly endorsed colonization in December 1816.
The American Colonization Society emerged and operated, like the national bank and so many other institutions in this period, as a mixed public-private enterprise with federal and state support. In 1821-22, the U.S. Navy helped the ACS purchase from indigenous Africans land adjacent to Sierra Leone in order to found Liberia, with its capital of Monrovia named in the president's honor.

But less than twenty thousand African Americans returned to Africa as part of this movement.

The U.S. continues the 40-year-old banning the export of oil; Adam Smith said this: “The prohibition of exportation limits the improvement and cultivation of the country to what the supply of its own inhabitants requires. The freedom of exportation enables it to extend cultivation for the supply of foreign nations.” So usually exports are really, really good except in the case of oil where it is really, really bad.

AAAAaaaannnnnnndddddd.......a graph, an important one: