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I got a good chuckle from this depiction of financial blog writers (and readers) from Joshua Brown’s Reformed Broker Blog, where, somehow Reader Bunny looks oddly familiar.
On this Easter Sunday (that here and elsewhere is light on religion and heavy on rabbits), also see this item from Der Spiegel about competitive rabbit jumping. I had no idea…
New insight into how Americans feel about stocks and other asset classes is provided in this Gallup poll that shows the fewest number of Americans own individual stocks, stock mutual funds, or stocks in their retirement plan since the survey began in 1999.
Another poll question reveals that real estate is still viewed as the best long-term investment among the general population, but, of the 54 percent that own stocks, housing ranks a close second behind equities.
I still haven’t gotten around to watching that Meet the Press panel discussion the other day featuring former Fed Chief Alan Greenspan and, now, that may never happen after seeing a couple of snippets of him on some of the other NBC news shows where, for some unknown reason (maybe having something to do with his wife, NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell) he continues to be called back as an expert on the economy despite the widely held view in other circles that his appearances are akin to an arsonist analyzing the fire.
The failure to submit to more of the Maestro’s present day musings notwithstanding, and, given the recent premier of the movie “Atlas Shrugged”, it was with some amusement that this item was spotted over at Eddy’s Crossing Wall Street blog in which a younger Alan Greenspan responded to critics of Ayn Rand’s book when it was published 54 years ago.
The movie Atlas Shrugged is opening this weekend. The book came out in 1957 and it was absolutely panned by critics.
Some of the readers didn’t like the criticism. Here’s one such response:
To the Editor (November 3, 1957):
Atlas Shrugged is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should. Mr. Hicks suspiciously wonders “about a person who sustains such a mood through the writing of 1,168 pages and some fourteen years of work.” This reader wonders about a person who finds unrelenting justice personally disturbing.
Alan Greenspan, NY
Yes, this is real.
And yes, I think the world has had enough of the former Fed Chairman for the week, though I’ve been reading good things about the Atlas Shrugged movie, primarily from those who are big fans of the book.
James Grant of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer talks to Consuelo Mack in a video that seems to be popping up all over the place this morning. It should come as no surprise that Grant doesn’t think too much of the direction the financial system is headed and lays much of the blame at the feet of the Federal Reserve who he says is “unconscionably complacent” about the consequences of what it’s doing with its “grotesque” balance sheet.
Here’s a real shocker:
Grant: The shiniest skyscrapers in our most prosperous cultural cities are priced as they were at the peak of the real estate luncay of 2006 and 2007 all over again.
Mack: Which was news to me, but that’s an astonishing fact.
Indeed. Astounding.
Here’s another fantastic graphic at Visualizing Economics, this one on the top marginal tax rates in the U.S. over the last century, coming to you in advance of tax day that, this year, falls on Monday, April 18th rather than Friday, April 15th due to a little known Washington D.C. holiday called Emancipation Day that celebrates the freeing of slaves in the area.
Click for a Ginormous (and readable) Image
Now here’s something I didn’t know about how the tax code used to work:
In the 1930s, there were more than 50 [brackets]. The Wealth Tax Act of 1935, applied the top rate to income over $5 million and had only a single taxpayer: John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
The byline for some of yesterday’s reports on Federal Reserve speechmaking read “Helena” and, with only a little effort it was learned that a Fed bank president had visited the Treasure State’s capital not far from here as detailed in this story at the Independent Record.
At an early Thursday meeting of business and civic leaders, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis said that there’s very little inflation pressure currently in the U.S. economy, which would seem to indicate that the Federal Reserve will keep its target interest rates low for the near-term future.
As a current voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee, Narayana Kocherlakota is in a unique position to influence the nation’s economy, and as such his every public utterance is subject to close scrutiny. Shortly after his remarks at Hometown Helena, reporters from Reuters and Bloomberg had stories on the wire passing along Kocherlakota’s latest reading of the tea leaves.
But the president’s claim of few inflationary pressures wouldn’t seem to jibe with what Montanans and all Americans are seeing at the gas pump, where prices have surged 70 cents a gallon or more in the past few months.
Kocherlakota explained in the morning meeting and again in an afternoon interview that from the perspective of setting monetary policy designed to keep inflation in check and unemployment low over the intermediate term, gauged as three or four years, food and energy prices do more harm than good when taken into the equation. They may be two of the most obvious examples of price increases and decreases for individual consumers, but on a large scale, prices of those goods are too volatile to be used for longer-term forecasting.
It’s easier to argue that easy money from the Fed is the right prescription for what ails us because gas is still relatively cheap in Montana – about $3.60 a gallon per GasBuddy. But, offsetting the “low” gas price is the the fact that people drive longer distances here, many high school sports teams routinely traveling for hours to meet an opponent.
By Tim Iacono, Since 2005
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