The nightmare is over

At 6:30 Pacific Time, they called Ohio for Obama, and that's all I need to see. There's no way McCain can get to 269 electoral votes, so I am calling the election for Obama.

When I look back at the last eight years, I find it hard to believe our country could have declined as it has. This didn't happen because we didn't work hard enough. It happened because we have had piss-poor leadership. Our banks were run by idiots. Our auto companies were run by idiots. Our airlines have been run by idiots. And most of all, our country has been run by an idiot for the past eight years.

Case in point is Elizabeth Dole. She was appointed to one important job after another, and never accomplished anything. Whether she ran the Red Cross, or she was Secretary of Transportation, she didn't know her elbow from her asshole. She even ran for president (briefly) and then dropped out, whining that she didn't have enough money. Somehow she got elected to the Senate, but then people in North Carolina used to elect Jesse Helms, too. Tonight, she was beaten badly by Kay Hagan, but not before her last desperate ploy of accusing Hagan of "godlessness." Senator Dole, good riddance. You won't be a senator much longer.

Our society promotes incompetent people to positions of authority in corporations and in government. How can bankers be stupid enough to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in worthless securities? Why is it that Toyota can make a profit by building cars in America, but our own auto industry needs another $25 billion bailout to avoid bankruptcy? Most ot all, how could 50+ million people have been stupid enough to vote for Bush, not just once, but twice?

I just went to see the Oliver Stone movie, W. The review said it presented a sympathetic view of him. I still can't understand what I was supposed to be sympathetic about. He was a drunken frat boy who quit or botched every job his father set up for him. When he was arrested for DUI, his father fixed it. When he got a girl pregnant, his father fixed that, too. Only Republicans can get away with that crap. As long as they say they're in favor of family values, it doesn't seem to matter what they've actually done.

Now we will finally have a president who earned his position in life based on merit. Obama, like Bill Clinton before him, didn't start life with every advantage possible. And while I'm on that subject, let me point out that Clinton started with nothing, came from a broken home, and made it all the way to the White House. He turned around a bankrupt economy, created 23 million jobs, and left a growing surplus in a country that was respected around the world. He would have gone down in history as a great president if he had kept his pants zipped.

It's Obama's turn now. I think of him as the Jackie Robinson of politics. It wasn't enough for Jackie Robinson to be a great player; he also had to have the temperament to let all of the insults and abuse roll off him. Obama is the same way; he has to be perfect. In the debates, McCain could snarl and glare all he wanted, and Obama just had to stand there and smile. Well, tonight Obama is going to be doing a lot of smiling.

On the one hand, Obama has a very small pair of shoes to fill, but on the other hand, Bush has left him an incredible mess to clean up. The budget deficit will be near $500 billion, and with the government spending needed to make up for the shortfalls in consumer spending and corporate investment, the following year's budget will be close to $1 trillion. The legacy of our foreign policy is Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, as well as two wars that Bush screwed up royally.

Fixing the economy is going to take a long time. The variable-rate mortgage resets will go on through at least 2011, so the housing market will be under pressure from foreclosures for some time to come. We will continue to see large budget deficits for several years to come, and the recent strength in the US dollar will be reversed. Now that the election is over, I expect the widespread government interference in the equity and commodity markets will be reduced, and resource stocks will resume their secular bull market.

New sheriff in town

Last week I mentioned that Mike Singletary, the new head coach of the Niners, would not tolerate underachievers. Unfortunately, Vernon Davis doesn't read my blog. Davis, if you don't follow football, plays tight end for the Niners. If you look up the word "underachiever" in the dictionary, you'll probably see his picture there. He is an amazing athlete, with a freakish combination of speed, strength, and agility. A couple of years ago, he was the Niners first-round draft pick, sixth overall. He signed a $23 million contract, with $15 million guaranteed, and that may be part of the problem.

His career to date has been mediocre. He's being paid like a star, but his performance has only been average. He got away with that when Mike Nolan was the coach, but now there's a new sheriff in town. Last Sunday, Davis drew a 15-year penalty for slapping an opposing player. Shortly thereafter, Singletary sent him to the locker room, telling him the team would be better off with him taking a shower and then coming out to watch the game from the bench, than if Davis were out on the field playing.

After the game, Singletary game an interview that will go down in history as an all-time classic. Better than Jim Mora's "Playoffs??" and at least the equal of Dennis Green's "They are who we thought they were!!" meltdown. You can find it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYaDJ-WuuSY

Anyone who is old enough to remember Mike Singletary's playing days could have seen this coming. He was a fixture in the Pro Bowl and the leader of the 1985 Chicago Bears, the best defense ever. He is the most intense, no-nonsense competitor out there, and the Vernon Davises on that team are going to change their ways or leave town. I predict there is a beer commercial in Mike Singletary's future. We will hear his "I want winners!" speech for years to come.

BTW, even though the Niners have a bye week coming up, and they won't be playing for two weeks, they just had their best practice of the entire season. I think Singletary's message might be getting through to them.

Another coach fired

On average, six NFL coaches are fired each year. They used to wait until the season was over, but not any more. The Rams and Raiders fired their coaches after four weeks, and the Niners just fired their coach, Mike Nolan. The Niners organization is not as dysfunctional as say, the Raiders, but this is one franchise that has fallen a long way.

Mike Nolan followed almost precisely in his father's footsteps. Dick Nolan played for the New York Giants, and became the head coach of the Niners. Mike was the defensive coordinator for the Giants before taking the top job in San Francisco. During his tenure, the Niners brought in some expensive free agents, and they have a fair amount of talent on both offense and defense. Far too much talent for their 2-5 record. Which is why they fired Nolan.

But it wasn't all Nolan's fault, and he's not the only one who deserves to be fired. He was a good defensive coordinator, and aside from his quirk of wearing a suit and tie on the sidelines, I thought his biggest failing was the non-development of Alex Smith. Therein lies the real problem with the Niners. Their quarterback is J.T. O'Sullivan, a journeyman who has played for more teams than I can remember, and wasn't very good on any of them.

When you have the first pick in the draft, and you select a quarterback, and invest mega-millions in him, he isn't supposed to get beaten out by a career backup. That's a personnel decision, and that is on the general manager, not the coach. Nolan and Smith came to San Francisco together, and it looks like they more or less left together, too. I think Nolan needed to have more patience with injuries and poor play to develop a young quarterback. When I look back at the first selection overall in the draft, it looks like a crapshoot. In 2003 the Texans took Carr, in 2004 the Giants took Manning, and in 2005 the Niners took Smith. Result: one Super Bowl MVP and two guys who got run out of town.

But I think there's plenty of blame to go around in San Francisco. The offensive coordinator is Mike Martz, who ran the Greatest Show on Turf when the Rams won the Super Bowl in 1999. The trouble is that he must still think he's in St. Louis. The Niners have traditionally been a passing team, and that works fine when you have Montana, or Young, or even Garcia at quarterback. It doesn't work so good with J.T. O'Sullivan at the wheel. The Niners have an excellent running back in Frank Gore, and he should be carrying the load to take the pressure off an inexperienced quarterback.

Instead, Martz has him throwing the ball all over the field, with predictable results. O'Sullivan is leading the lead in interceptions, and the Niners are losing one game after another in the fourth quarter. If no one can convince Martz to run the ball, he should be the next one to go. At last the Niners brain trust made one inttelligent decision. They bypassed Martz, and hired Mike Singletary to replace Nolan. If anyone can command respect, it's Singletary. He's only the interrim coach, but if he can get the players to respond, the job will become permanent (at least in NFL terms.) Singletary is a leader of men, and I don't think underachivers will last very long working for him.

With O'Sullivan at quarterback, this season is effectively over for the Niners, and since there is more housecleaning to do, the end of the year would seem like a good time to purge the front office as well. This organization has gone nowhere in four years, and it wasn't all because of Nolan.

The best team in the NFL!?

The end is near. For this blog location, anyway. AOL is terminating this service, so I am moving the blog to www.blogger.com. I thought about changing the name, since I haven’t actually been inside the Oakland Flight Service Station in a long time, and it hasn’t belonged to the FAA for even longer than that, and OAK will cease to be next year. But if I change the name, then people wouldn’t be able to find it. So the name stays, as anachronistic as it is.

Now where was I? Oh yes, the best team in the NFL!

Five weeks into the NFL season, the New York Giants were unanimously regarded as the best team in football. The defending Super Bowl champions were one of only two undefeated teams, and had not lost since last December. They were playing the Cleveland Browns, a group of underachievers they had routed in the preseason.

Of course preseason games don’t mean anything, but when both teams had their starters playing, the Giants were up 30-3, and they knocked out Derek Anderson and injured four other Browns. Meanwhile the Browns, whom many had picked to go deep into the playoffs, were underachieving, had lost three times, and were playing without Kellen Winslow.

And so, on national television, the mighty New York Giants laid an egg, losing by three touchdowns to a team that couldn’t even line up properly. The Browns had to set a record for offensive penalties by a team playing at home. I can only imagine how many false start penalties they would have had if they were playing on the road with crowd noise.

This game teaches us two things: 1) never bet on football, and 2) maybe all that talk about Eli Manning being better than his brother was a wee bit premature. This week there was a lot of talk about how Eli Manning is about to receive a contract extension that would exceed Peyton’s $99 million contract. I expect that will happen, but when people start saying Eli is actually BETTER than Peyton, it’s time to take a deep breath.

First of all, I have always liked Eli, always considered him to be the franchise quarterback, even when he was terrible. Dan Marino aside, all young quarterbacks go through growing pains. There were many games when Eli threw 3 or 4 interceptions, but I remember the same from John Elway, Bert Jones, and Joe Namath. The guys who said Eli was a bum, that he was adopted and his real name was Eli Leaf – they were wrong. Just as the pundits who jumped on the bandwagon this year and said he’s better than Peyton are wrong. Eli is a good quarterback who can have an occasional horrible game, but plays great when it counts. As far as I’m concerned, he can be the Giants quarterback for the next ten years, but he isn’t going to be Peyton. But that’s OK, because it took Peyton 9 years to win a Super Bowl, and Eli did it in 4 years, and with a lesser supporting cast as well.

The bottom line is that the Giants aren’t as good as they were made out to be, the NFC East isn’t as dominant as expected, and the NFL has achieved parity. The NFL season still has 11 weeks to go, and I expect to be watching my DIRECTV Sunday Ticket for all of them.

The day the Euro cracked

Today was the day the Yen carry trade started to unravel.  Once upon a time, you could go to the Bank of Japan (otherwise known as the U.S. Fed East) and borrow a bazillion yen at a very low interest rate, say none per cent.  Then you invest the money in Australian bonds that pay 6% interest, making an easy 5+% interest.  A bazillion times 5% is a significant amount of money.  But this scheme only works when the yen is stable or declining against other currencies.  If the yen starts to appreciate, the trade blows up.

 

Today the trade blew up.  BTW, it isn’t just the Australian dollar that suffered.  Institutions and hedge funds were using borrowed yen to speculate in stock markets all around the world.  Today virtually every currency outside Asia was down sharply against the US Dollar, which itself was off 4% against the Japanese yen.  With the yen approaching parity (1 US Dollar = 100 yen) all of those yen were on their way back to the land of the rising sun.  In doing so, they sucked all air out of the global stock markets.

 

Gold resumed its normal role as a hedge against catastrophe, and was up nearly $40 at one point today, as we had the unusual spectacle of gold and the US Dollar showing great strength at the same time.  The Euro suffered as gold is now approaching an all time high in Euro terms.

 

To make this even more ludicrous, the futures price of gold on the Comex was $840 while the price of physical gold in Asia was $960.  Bullion banks and investment banks have sold unlimited amounts of futures contracts on the commodity exchanges to depress the price of gold and silver, while the metals themselves have disappeared from the marketplace.  Coin dealers around the world have run out of inventory, and when transactions do take place (on eBay or anywhere else) they are at stiff premiums to the phony Comex price.

 

The only question now is when the US Dollar heads down again.  There will be another rate cut this month, either an emergency cut any day now, or at the month-end meeting.  A 50 or 75 basis point cut will be coordinated with the ECB, since their currency has to depreciate, too.  The only question is whether they can continue to manipulate the price of gold and silver until after next month’s election.

 

The latest rumor I have heard is that a consortium of Russia, European, Asian, and Arab countries have plans for a gold-backed currency.  It’s hard to imagine all of those countries agreeing on anything, but it is more likely the Russians could introduce a gold-backed ruble, or the Arabs a gold-backed dinar.  To compete with a real currency of that nature, the US would have to raise interest rates substantially, something our government desperately does not want to do.  In any case, gold and other commodities will appreciate strongly in Dollar terms.

Yippee! Bailout package fails to pass House!

A wise man said:

"These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people, and now that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people’s money to settle the quarrel."

Why am I glad that the bailout package didn't pass, sending the market down almost 800 points?  Because it was a terrible bill, and we can do better.  This was like putting an arsonist in charge of putting out a fire.  This bill would not only have bailed out the institutions that deserved to fail, but also the failed executives that ran them into the ground.  Worse yet, it would have given near-dictatorial powers to an unelected official, the Treasury Secretary, whose actions would not be subject to Congressional oversight or judicial review.  A blank check for $700 billion, with no questions asked.

No thank you.  There will be another bailout package (and this won't be the last one, either, but that's a subject for another post.)  In the meanwhile the market went down 7%, but the companies with real assets and real balance sheets will come back.  Those who don't, like commercial banks, brokerage firms, insurance companies, investment banks - sorry, almost forgot, we don't have any more of them any more; one investment bank failed and the last two changed themselves into holding companies - will go out of business anyway.  I stopped adding up the total bailouts when they went over $1 trillion.  Lehman, AIG, the FDIC, the auto companies...there are a lot more to come with no end in sight.  The only reason the US Dollar hasn't gone off a cliff is that Europe and Asia have their own problems, and all currencies are weakening together.  Gold (and silver) should be soaring against ALL currencies, but those are kept under wraps on the futures exchanges. 

The answer is to buy physical metal, like coins and bars, but I think everyone else has figured that out now.  Coin dealers are generally sold out of silver, and don't have much gold left either.  When you CAN find silver, like on eBay, it sells at large premiums to the phony spot price.

The quote that opened this entry wasn't spoken this past week by some outraged taxpayer.  Some 90% of Americans were against this bailout, and I am disappointed that both McCain and especially Obama supported it.  The Congressmen who are assured re-election supported the bill.  Fortunately, there were enough Congressmen in tough re-election races that they were afraid of a public backlash in November, and voted it down.  For once they actually listened to their constituents.

So where did that quote come from?  Abraham Lincoln said it in a speech to the Illinois legislature in 1837.  The more things change, the more they remain the same.

For those who enjoyed seeing Hitler lose his shirt in the market, he managed to raise another stake and try again.  For another look at You-know-who's problems in the stock market, visit:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfvIstgOugc

 

When in doubt, win the war!

I have been remiss from writing this blog, but I have a good excuse.  I have put the time to good use, and finished revising my third novel, which I call "When in Doubt, Win the War."  I shipped the manuscript to the publisher this week, and I will still have to review the galley proofs, but it is finally finished.  Only took me four years, too.  But in my defense, life kind of got in the way for a couple of those years.

Anyway, I meant to get back to writing about the economy, but so much has happened that I don't know where to start.  We are in the middle of a credit crunch that has knocked the stuffing out of silver, gold, and the related mining stocks.  Oil has gone down as well, but that was because of me.  I organized a one-man boycott and did not buy any gasoline in June, July, or August.  You can do stuff like that when you're retired.  The resulting demand destruction caused the oil price to collapse from near 150 to less than 100.

However, we are still in the midst of a secular bull market in commodities, and it is only government intervention on a scale the old Soviet Politburo would have been proud of that is restraining asset values.  The distortions in the market have become so blatant that even Hitler is angry about it.  Really, he is.  Just watch this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVB-SSkkLnY

That's what you get when you use margin.  Ol' Adolf didn't know that der trend iss your friend!  If only he had been able to hold on for a few more days, gold went up $85 on Wednesday.  Such are the fortunes of war.  Speaking of war, the lesson to be learned in times like these is that the time to buy is now, when there is blood in the streets.  Here is a lesson from history.

In 211 BC, Rome was at war with its ancient enemy, Carthage.  The great Carthaginian general Hannibal had already defeated the Romans in battle several times, and had slaughtered their armies.  In 211 he marched his army to the gates of Rome itself, throwing the city into a panic.  As luck would have it, the land outside the city happened to be up for sale.

Someone bought the property despite the fact that it was encumbered by having the entire Carthginian army camped on it.  The buyer must have been confident that Rome would eventually drive off the enemy.  And in the end, the Romans would sack Carthage, burn the city to the ground, and then dump salt in the earth so that nothing would ever grow there again.  The Romans took their wars seriously; no Marshall Plans for them.

But my point is that when things look bleak, that is the time to buy, not sell, as Fortune favors the bold.