Thursday, November 14, 2019

Thursday Bonus Links

  • My suspicion is that Bloomberg with do this: Run hard for the Dem nomination, but if he doesn't get it, he'll run third party with the intention of pulling away enough votes from the Dems to put Trump back in office. I suspect he prefers Trump to anyone on the left, because he knows Trump won't tax him into oblivion. It was when Warren became the front runner and start spouting off about her tax the billionaires plan than Bloomberg suddenly started talking about entering the race again. This is not an accident, and I'll bet Bloomberg got a LOT of phone calls from other billionaires begging him to run right after Warren released her tax plan. Warren scares the heck out of them, and they think she's serious. [Sailer]
  • It's surprising how few times in history we've observed record market highs, while at the same time, our measures of market internals were unfavorable, fewer than 60% of individual stocks were above their respective 200-day averages, and the weekly total of individual stocks hitting 52-week highs had contracted by more than 30% from its 6-month peak. In recent decades, those instances include (exhaustively): today, the September 2018 pre-correction peak (immediately followed by a nearly 20% decline during the fourth quarter), September 2017 (uneventful), July 2015 (followed by a 12% correction over the next 6 weeks), February 2015 (uneventful), October 2007 (the precise bull market peak, followed by a 55% market collapse), December 1999 (a few percent below the ultimate 2000 market peak, yet nevertheless followed by a 9% correction over the next 8 weeks before the market staged its final advance), and July 1998 (followed by a 19% correction over the next 6 weeks). To find another instance, one has to look as far back as November 1972 (about 4% below the January 1973 market high, and followed by a 50% market collapse). [Hussman]
  • [F]armers carry it on incessantly, without challenge or reprisal, and the only thing that keeps them from reducing us, at intervals, to actual famine is their own imbecile knavery. They are all willing and eager to pillage us by starving us, but they can't do it because they can't resist attempts to swindle each other. Recall, for example, the case of the cotton-growers in the South. Back in the 1920s they agreed among themselves to cut down the cotton acreage in order to inflate the price - and instantly every party to the agreement began plainting more cotton in order to profit by the abstinence of his neighbors. That abstinence being wholly imaginary, the price of cotton fell instead of going up - and then the entire pack of scoundrels began demanding assistance from the national treasury - in brief, began demanding that the rest of us indemnify them for the failure of their plot to blackmail us. [Mencken Chrestomathy]
  • James Dagnon, another Boeing executive, said that engineers had to accept that they were no longer the center of the universe. "We laughed," Sorscher recalled. "This is an engineering company—these are complex, heavily engineered products. Of course we're the center of the universe. But he wasn't kidding. We didn't get it. Who is the center of the universe? It's the executives." [New Yorker]

3 comments:

eahilf said...

Re the 2020 election and Trump/Bloomberg: remember that ex-felons can now vote in FL, one of the key states Trump won by a relatively small margin in 2016 -- I read this means > 1m ex-felons will now be able to vote in FL; if even a smallish fraction of them register and then vote for the democratic candidate, Trump will lose FL (also: how many Puerto Ricans have moved to FL?) -- for the other closely contested 'Rust Belt' states, exactly what has Trump done to motivate people to vote for him again? -- how do you think his idiotic bleating about record low black unemployment goes over with the mostly despised ("basket of deplorables") and still largely downtrodden white underclass in those states?

So re 2020, Trump has problems, but they have little to nothing to do with Bloomberg.

One plus for Trump is that all the democratic candidates are certifiable.

I won't vote for him again, even if he is or appears to be again clearly the lesser of two evils.

CP said...

Trump could win without Florida, but then he would need to win all the rust belt states from Wisconsin to PA.

eahilf said...

Cuck.

https://twitter.com/ShaneGoldmacher/status/1196104499082997760