A Tainted Season

Not even The World Series is immune to the filth of modern politics. It wasn't enough that the ceremonial opening pitch turned out to be an advertisement for the Obama administration -- minus the president, of course, because the last time he threw out an opening pitch -- St. Louis, wasn't it? -- he looked so ridiculously effeminate that his handlers barred him from doing so.

So they got his much more masculine looking wife into the act, pimping a noticeably disabled Veteran for an emotional hook. Undoubtedly this was some young geniuses strategy to shore up those plummeting approval ratings, to convince Americans that the president and his administration really are Americans, too. Because you sure wouldn't be able to tell by his actions.

Even CBS radio had talking points. Baseball is a sport for statistics junkies, but what of this non-sequitir: "The Yankees haven't won a world series with a republican in the white house since Grover Cleveland..."?

So inherently innocent and pure is Baseball that, when something dirty is done that involves it, it cannot pass unnoticed. And we felt pretty muddied up after wading through the political cesspool that was the opening of the 2009 World Series. Put an asterisk next to this one in the history books.

At least the Yankees remain a first class operation, looking better than ever.

Dispatches from the Abyss

Item: It was reported, from California, that a 15 year-old girl was raped as she left her high school homecoming event, by upwards of 20 teenage boys. There were passersby. Some did nothing. Others captured the event on cellphone video cameras for posting on the Internet.

Item: While standing on the 14th St Union Square subway platform at about noon, looking into the tunnel for signs of a train, we notice the lanky black man leaning against the last I-beam is urinating on the platform. We turn away. Then we turn back, deciding not to give him the benefit of tacit approval by ignoring him. He is scrawny, but wearing clean clothes. He hides behind the next nearest I-beam pillar. God bless him -- at least he has a sense of shame, a sign of humanity.

Item: On that pillar, we notice the following, scrawled in thick black magic marker. It is the only graffiti on the pillar:

F**k you MOM! I hope you die B**TCH!

The writer then goes on, in the same literary style, to graphically described his planned dismemberment of his mother.

Well, then. These, apparently, are the sorts of things that are on the "minds" of some of your neighbors.

We can't help but marvel at the patience of the Almighty.

A Wall of Worry

Ancient (and timeless) Wall Street lore teaches us that "bull markets climb a wall of worry." It may not be all that is necessary for a bull market, but we certainly have plenty to worry about these days. So don't be surprised if the market continues to surprise us all.

A Method to Dollar Madness

Bloomberg reports that the tumbling dollar is helping spur Chinese exports, owing to the yuan peg to the dollar (they've yanked the story so we can't link to it).

Since it's apparent that the Treasury has adopted an aggressive posture of appeasement toward the Chinese monetary authorities, we'd say this stands to reason.

But at what cost to Americans?

Revisiting the VIX

Bloomberg reports: "VIX Posts Worst Losing Streak in Four Years as Dow Tops 10,000"

We posted a long time ago about the VIX as an inverse "moral hazard" meter, implying that is has effectively been correlated with the dollar. Think about it. A falling dollar is the manifestation "moral hazard," "plunge protection," the "Greenspan Put," TARP, or however else you refer to the availability of monetary support of asset values.

So, the VIX is measuring risk as though this were the old days, when the dollar was king. But is it still? And if not, is the VIX still accurately reflecting risk? Is the US National debt a problem, a great big problem, and mightn't that mitigate the true value of monetary support for markets? So perhaps the curious might want start watching CDS spreads on US Treasuries a bit more closely. And I'll bet there's a trade there, between the VIX and Treasury CDS spreads.

disenfranchised

Since the NFL has, for the first time in its history, decided based upon public comment to whom a team franchise can be sold, and Rush Limbaugh has been denied the right to purchase one, can it be said that the white, conservative, politically astute and outrageously popular radio talk show host has been "disenfranchised?"

Is this affirmative action in reverse? Reparations? Does interference in commerce somehow right the wrongs of the past? Perhaps in the calculus of this brave, new, post racial America of Barack Obama it does.

Easy for you to say.

Question: In a market panic, what happens to asset prices, in general?

We wager that even the most casual observer can deduce the answer.

However, if you have a PhD from Columbia university, like Lisa Borland, PhD, Evnine and Associates, you would say it this way:

...A significant anti-correlation between dispersion and cross-sectional kurtosis is found such that dispersion is high but kurtosis is low in panic times, and the opposite in normal times. The co-movement of stock returns also increases in panic times. We define a simple statistic s, the normalized sum of signs of returns on a given day, to capture the degree of correlation in the system. s can be seen as the order parameter of the system because if s = 0 there is no correlation (a disordered state), whereas for s different from 0 there is correlation among stocks (an ordered state).

Talk like this gets you a half a million a year on Wall Street.

Nobel goes to Zero

Amazingly, the Nobel Peace Prize was "awarded" to president Barack Hussein Obama.

We are reminded of the Green Acres episodes in which Mr. Douglas would wake up and find everyone talking gibberish as if it were normal. He would shake his head just to rouse himself and then attempt get on as best he could amidst the temporary, almost conspiratorial insanity that surrounded him.

We think that describes the world today. Global Hooterville.

Red Sox/Angels 2009 ALDS

Angels Stadium. Not only is that fake rock sculpture out past center field tacky, not only does it make the place look like a scene from the Flintstones, but those little fireworks that go off when a home run is hit out there are a really juvenile touch.

And people find fault with the Yankees?

Chicago 2016: The Agony of Defeat

The Olympics are about winning -- you know, the Thrill of Victory. Olympians are champions -- they have to be, just to be Olympians.

And champions understand that, if Victory isn't everything, you won't be a winner. You'll be a loser. "Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing."

But Mr. Chicago, Barack Obama, recently told the world, he's "not interested in victory." So is it any surprise that the world, when looking for a city to host the 2016 Summer Olympics, blew him and his city, and his country, off?

It shouldn't be.

[addendum: This is the first Summer Olympics where women's boxing will be an official event. We say, it's best that America doesn't host that kind of barbarism.]

The Great Deleveraging of Human Capital

U.S. job losses continue at a frightening rate, albeit on a seemingly "less bad" trend, even though last month's losses were slightly more than expected. How long can this go on?

It's not likely the economy will die in one fell swoop. There are centuries of economies of scale and a multitude of expertises that civilization depends upon; a legacy of assets including intellectual capital, a healthy and a well-educated labor force.

Unless civilization itself were overturned or refashioned (say, by some epochal shift in economic incentives -- eek, I think we've seen about three in the past few years), all this machinery will shake, rattle and roll on. At some point, it won't be necessary to "deleverage human capital" any further -- the demand for goods and services of the ordinary business of life are too great (how much more so in a world that is still developing?). However, we sense that expecting a reversion to historical norms (in composition of work force if not employment rates) would be presumptuous, considering the sheer scale of economic events in just the past decade.

Presidents don't make economies. History does. But historical (and historically bad) presidencies will affect them.

Google posts unemployment data here in a way that makes it easy to use, especially for doing state-by-state comparisons historically.

Culture Corner.

Train of Thoughts makes a brief stop in the artsy district.

More hilarious T-shirts at the link, which is also the graphic. No, we aren't being compensated (but if they insist, we'll talk).