"I looked as hard as I could at how states could declare bankruptcy."
Here's an interesting chart of manufacturing productivity (output/hour) and real wage per hour since 1890. Starting in the 1960s, labor stopped obtaining any share of its own productivity gains. For this to happen, there would need to be a totally elastic supply of labor. What a coincidence! This coincides with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. As the Center for Immigration Studies points out, "the 1965 changes unwittingly ushered in a new era of mass immigration."
This is astonishing. The WSJ quotes Michael Genest, director of the California Department of Finance who is stepping down at the end of the year: "I looked as hard as I could at how states could declare bankruptcy. I literally looked at the federal constitution to see if there was a way for states to return to territory status."
General Cable (BGC) is a stock I bought when it was inexplicably cheap in late 2008, then sold way too early in the 2009 rally. I have had it on my watch-list since then. They are offering to exchange $925 of new Subordinated Convertible Notes due 2029 for each $1,000 of outstanding 2012 notes. I'm not following the company anymore, but that offer must be hilariously bad, because only $500,000 worth of notes have tendered for the exchange. That's out of $475 million outstanding.
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