Click on WORD or PDF below for full content
In a WSJ Op-Ed, former hedge fund manager says stop watching the market for a few months.
… So which is it now: an efficient mechanism or a manipulating liar? Should you listen to it warning of doom or anticipating renewal? I’d say stick wax in your ears and don’t listen to the market until February.
Don’t get me wrong. The freezing of the credit markets is wreaking havoc on the world economy. Corporate profits are dropping. Central banks are fighting off deflation and may not turn off the spigots fast enough — which could ignite runaway inflation. But because of the credit mess, I am convinced the stock market is at its least efficient today. Don’t read too much into any move. Here are the five biggest dislocations taking place: …
Looking at the pirate’s romp in the Indian Ocean, Caroline Glick says civilization is walking the plank.
… One of the unique characteristics of pirates is that they appear to be equal opportunity aggressors. They don’t care who owns the ships they attack. On August 21, Somali pirates hijacked the Iran Deyanat, a ship owned and operated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards-linked Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Line (IRISL). In September, the US Treasury Department designated IRISL as a company that assists Iran’s nuclear weapons program and placed it under stiff financial sanctions.
Iran Deyanat’s manifest asserted that its cargo included minerals. Yet shortly after the pirates went on board they began developing symptoms such as hair loss that experts claim are more in line with radiation exposure. According to reports, some 16 pirates died shortly after being exposed to the cargo. Just this week, a second Iranian ship – this one apparently carrying wheat – was similarly captured.
Then, too, in September, pirates seized the Faina, a Ukrainian ship carrying 33 Russian-made T-72 tanks. The Ukrainians and Russians claimed that the tanks were destined for Kenya, but it later emerged that they may have been seized en route to Sudan. So, ironically, in the case of both the Faina and the Deyanat, pirates may have inadvertently saved thousands of lives. …
John Fund has fun with the occasional Dem need for the secret ballot.
Stuart Taylor has a look at some of the looney left lawyers who are on the federal bench.
How would soon-to-be-President Obama like it if the courts were to order the Navy — his Navy — to cripple its training in Southern California coastal waters in the use of sonar to detect enemy submarines, and thereby perhaps endanger the Pacific Fleet?
That’s what four Democratic-appointed federal judges in California and two liberal Supreme Court justices voted to do in a recent case, to avoid any possibility of harming marine mammals, not one of which has suffered a documented injury in 40 years of sonar training off the California coast.
And that’s the sort of thing that liberal groups want done by the judges that President-elect Obama will soon be appointing.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court overturned on November 12, in Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the major restrictions on sonar training that the four lower-court judges had ordered. The majority held that with the nation embroiled in two wars, “the Navy’s interest in effective, realistic training of its sailors” far outweighed the speculative harm that the training might do to the plaintiffs’ interest in marine mammals.
“For the plaintiffs, the most serious possible injury would be harm to an unknown number of the marine mammals that they study and observe,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for himself and the four other more-conservative justices. “In contrast, forcing the Navy to deploy an inadequately trained antisubmarine force jeopardizes the safety of the fleet.” …
This story is so good we’ll have at it from two directions. Mugabe in Zimbabwe has told Jimmy Carter to **** off. Contentions first.
… Yet as awful as Mugabe is, let’s take a moment to acknowledge that he has at least performed an invaluable public service by giving Carter a lesson on the limits of engagement.
No doubt Mugabe’s tutorial will be lost on the always self-righteous Carter. But at least the rest of us can learn something valuable from this snub.
Ed Morrissey is next.
… There is no small amount of irony in this snub. Robert Mugabe began his tyranny with the assistance of the Carter administration, as James Kirchick reported at the Weekly Standard last year. Without Carter, Mugabe would likely have been just another terrorist thug chased around in the wilderness for a while until murdered by his own people. …
Morrissey has at Dem secret ballot hypocrisy. And he defends Rush Limbaugh against attacks by Mort Kondracke.
Good post from Todd Zywicki of Volokh on what a GM bankruptcy might look like.
… GM is a classic example of a firm that looks like a financially failed rather than economically failed. We have both physical capital and human capital with high firm and industry-specific value, namely factories and unionized work forces, which value would be lost if those assets were redeployed. It also has at least some going-concern value in its goodwill and namebrands.
What GM needs to do is shed labor contracts, retirement contracts, and modernize its distribution systems by closing many dealerships. It appears to need new management as well. Bankruptcy gives them the opportunity to do all that.
So GM will almost certainly reorganize, as will the other car companies. GM does not look like an economically-failed typewriter manufacturer at this point, but rather a financially-failed company that needs to reorganize and go forward. …
A comment from Contentions suggests the auto managers don’t want a bailout, and are just going thru the motions.
Wesley Pruden tells us how lucky we are it has finally become cold. This might stop the idiots.
Turn up the heat, somebody. The globe is freezing. Even Al Gore is looking for an extra blanket. Winter has barely come to the northern latitudes and already we’ve got bigger goosebumps than usual. So far the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports 63 record snowfalls in the United States, 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month. Only 44 Octobers over the past 114 years have been cooler than this last one.
The polar ice is accumulating faster than usual, and some of the experts now concede that the globe hasn’t warmed since 1995. You may have noticed, in fact, that Al and his pals, having given up on the sun, no longer even warn of global warming. Now it’s “climate change.” The marketing men enlisted by Al and the doom criers to come up with a flexible “brand” took a cue from the country philosopher who observed, correctly, that “if you’ve got one foot in the fire and the other in a bucket of ice, on average you’re warm.” On average, “climate change” covers every possibility. …