This excerpt from Yves at Naked Capitalism sums up the disgrace of our so called capatalistic, free market system;
And when people are paid bonuses annually, with no clawbacks for losses, and banks show profits a fair bit of the time, who is going to question bad metrics when the insiders come out big winners regardless?
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/05/jp-morgan-loss-bomb-confirms-that-its-time-to-kill-var.html
Mr. Dimon is in the middle of an after hours conference call, explaining how JP Morgan is taking a $2 billion mark to market loss on what they call “synthetic” positions. I am no Warren Buffet fan, but there is a reason why he called Credit Default Swaps and derivatives ” financial weapons of mass destruction.”
These scum banksters are getting access to funds via the Fed at 0% and getting their faces ripped off trying to trade. Just think, Dimon earned $23 million last year. These are the geniuses we are supposed to look to to get us out of our financial mess. God give us strength.
That was the highlight of a news blurb I saw this morning on Bloomberg. Given all the buzz I’ve been hearing lately about gas prices, I was kind of surprised by that number. I would have thought it would be much more.
When you think about it there is almost nothing in our modern society that “gives” like a gallon of gasoline. One gallon of gasoline can get you a distance of 20-30 miles and in conjunction with an internal combustion engine get you there in less than 60 minutes.
Inexpensive gasoline has been the building block of our modern society. Gas is cheap at more than twice the current price. Just a little context here. I was chatting with a business associate earlier this week. He was in the process of paying a few monthly bills.He was complaining about some of them . For example, his cable, mobile phones and Internet package comes to $400 +/month. That’s right, almost $5k a year on TV, phones and Internet connectivity.
Get mentally prepared for higher prices at the pump. They are on the way.
Powerful piece from Jesse on Sophie Scholl:
On 22 February 1943, Scholl, her brother Hans and their friend Christoph Probst were found guilty of treason and condemned to death. They were all beheaded by executioner Johann Reichhart in Munich’s Stadelheim Prison only a few hours later, at 17:00 hrs. The execution was supervised by Walter Roemer, the enforcement chief of the Munich district court. Prison officials, in later describing the scene, emphasized the courage with which she walked to her execution. Her last words were:“How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to offer themselves up individually for a righteous cause?
Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go.”
The White Rose
Fourth Leaflet
Munich, 1942
We will not be silent.
“…It is the time of the harvest, and the reaper cuts into the ripe grain with wide strokes. Mourning takes up her abode in the country cottages, and there is no one to dry the tears of the mothers. Yet Hitler feeds those people whose most precious belongings he has stolen and whom he has driven to a meaningless death with lies.
Every word that comes from Hitler’s mouth is a lie. When he says peace, he means war, and when he blasphemously uses the name of the Almighty, he means the power of evil, the fallen angel, Satan. His mouth is the foul maw of Hell, and his power is at bottom accursed. True, we must conduct a struggle against the Nazi terrorist state with rational means; but whoever today still doubts the reality, the existence of demonic powers, has failed by a wide margin to understand the metaphysical background of this war.
Behind the concrete, the visible events, behind all objective, logical considerations, we find the irrational element: The struggle against the demon, against the servants of the Antichrist.
Everywhere and always demonic powers lurk in the dark, waiting for the moment when man is weak; when of his own volition he leaves his place in Creation, as founded for him by God in freedom; when he yields to the force of evil, he separates himself from the powers of a higher order; and after voluntarily taking the first step, he is driven on to the next and the next at a furiously accelerating rate.
Everywhere, and at times of greatest trials, men have appeared, prophets and saints who cherished their freedom, who preached the One God and who His help brought the people to a reversal of their downward course. Man is free, to be sure, but without the true God he is defenseless against the principle of evil. He is a like rudderless ship, at the mercy of the storm, an infant without his mother, a cloud dissolving into thin air…”
“God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment. And it seems that I can hear God saying to America, ‘You’re too arrogant! And if you don’t change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I will place it in the hands of a nation that doesn’t even know my name. Be still, and know, that I’m God.’”
Martin Luther King, It’s A Dark Day In Our Nation, 30 April 1967
The American Mullah. He is beyond delusional.This is what is paraded in front of us as leadership?
I ask that question frequently in the course of my daily business conversations and more often than not I don’t get answer to my question. I find that many companies in the B2B space don’t even attempt to calculate this metric.
(There is a method to my madness. My company has been experimenting with a pay per lead model. When initiating this type program with a client it is important to know what a lead actually does cost to acquire.)
The new HubSpot 2012 State of Inbound Marketing E-Book raised my eyebrows a little when they stated, according to their recent survey, the average cost of acquiring a lead via traditional “outbound” channels (Trade Shows, advertising) was $346.
2012 The State of Inbound Marketing
What is even more remarkable is the lack of close looped systems to measure the percentage of closed business by lead source. In so many cases lead creation and lead conversion is one big mystery.
Over the past couple weeks we have been treated to daily updates detailing progress on the debt talks between the EU and Greece. There is a deal. Oh no, the deal is off. What gives?
This is the situation, the Greeks have a 14+ million Euro payment due on March 20. They don’t have the money. Their economy is in shambles, unemployment at 20%+ and tax revenue is collapsing. As a result the”powers that be” are negotiating a debt restructuring aka “a bailout”.In this scenario that EU will send the Greeks funds to honor bond payments to the banks. What we are looking at is piling more debt on top of existing debt… kicking the can in other words. The EU is asking the Greek people though to take “austerity” measures as a condition for these bailout funds. Austerity measures meaning: a 20% drop in minimum wage, a cut in public sector jobs a decrease in social services among other things.The Greek people are rioting in the streets.
So what is the benefit to the Greek people if this deal gets done? The answer, “there isn’t any”. This entire charade is about protecting the banks who:
1) Lent the money— the Greek Bondholders—primarily European Banks
2) Wrote credit default swaps against the Greek debt— the Too Big Too Fail Banks
Either way the Greek people get no bailout. It’s all about the banks.
As far as the banks are concerned, Jim Sinclair wrote a great piece a week or so ago pointing out that either way there is an impending undeclared default of 5 major US Banks coming. It’s worth a read.
This snippet from today’s Washington Post story documenting the decline in Maestro Alan Greenspan’s image since he left the Federal Reserve tells you all you need to know about the “best and the brightest” of our generation:
The Thursday release of transcripts of Fed meetings in 2006 shows that top leaders of the Fed — several of whom continue to hold key positions today — had a limited awareness of the gravity of the threat that the weakness in the housing market posed to the rest of the economy. And they had what turned out to be an excessive optimism about how well things would turn out.
The meeting transcripts reveal a level of group think and cheer leading that borders on the inept. What is scary is that Greenspan’s acolyte, Ben Bernanke has assumed control of what I would describe as an economic experiment hatched out of the ivory towers of academia. The only problem is that the puppeteers from the Princeton Economics Department are running an economic policy experiment and the rest of us living in the real economy are all poorer for it.
Crony capitalism - a capitalist economy in which success in business depends on close relationships between business people and government officials.
(Source: lewrockwell.com, via theunconquered1)
E-Marketing in the B2B World, plus other items of interest: faith, life, markets, literature and the Philadelphia Eagles.
