LOCUS DEMENTIA

Testimony today by Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, has him quoted as saying there are "Grave threats" to our economy if we don't act on this $700 Billion dollar MBS purchase deal. Let's go back in time when Ben Bernanke came into power. What was the first big decision he made? Raise interest rates. How many times did Ben Bernanke and his buddies at the Federal Reserve raise interest rates? Over 11 times! [1] In mid-2004, when the US housing bubble was in full swing, the typical mortgage holder could get money for as low as 3.5% and banks were getting it for 1%. Many home buyers purchased mortgages with a variable interest rate and were told that the rate was unlikely to go up that much. When Bernanke took hold of the purse, his only trick was to raise interest rates. He kept claiming that inflation was out of control and that raising interest rates would help contain raising inflation. Clearly, this myopic and sophomoric view of the US economy le...

Today I heard that the US Federal Reserve is accepting stock as payment on loans to banks [1]. I am still not able to understand the reasoning behind this change of policy. First of all, a single share of stock in a company is a share in that company's DEBT . It's not ownership in anything, it's not a guarantee of pay back, nothing. It's just a share of debt that the company thinks will be worth more than the strike price at some time in the future. That is, if you choose to purchase stock on the long. The difference in the stock price at sale versus purchase is the interest rate on that debt. If I am the Federal Reserve and I am LOANING money to a company, then I have leverage on that company in terms of DEBT. This is the same thing that happens when a consumer gets a loan on a car or house. Yet, in the Federal Reserve situation, there is no collateral , so this is UNSECURED DEBT . When the company issues stock, it is releasing debt in micro amounts so as to amortize ...

I like people who can talk straight and take it standing. There's not enough straight talkers in the world, and certainly not enough in the USA. It seems as though our opinions are illegal if they are not in-line with the normative line of acceptance. That truly seems Orwellian to me. That said, though, this blog is more about race and ignorance than about the Thought Police. There does not exist a more sensitive and inflammatory topic than race . You should read the Wikipedia entry on race as it pertains to humans. It may enlighten you somewhat. The USA has two presidential candidates in its 2008 Presidential race. One of them is sort of a pinkish-white color, and the other is something of a brown color. The pinkish-white one has an American heritage with clear ancestry back to Northern Europeans. The brownish colored one has an Indonesian heritage with some suspected ancestry back to Africa, although he also has European ancestry. Call them whatever race you want. Where I have ...

Today I came into my office to find that my monitors were blank. Thinking it might just be Windows, I rebooted and waited for the friendly screen. Nothing, and no sync on the power button. Fortunately, I had a spare ATI Radeon 2400 Pro hanging around, so I took out my EVGA e-GeForce 8600 GTS and put in the ATI Radeon. Guess what? Everything is happy. This is the second EVGA component, out of two, that has fried on me. First it was the EVGA motherboard, which died after 2 months of nearly no usage at all (not even powered). Now, the EVGA video card is dead after a year. This card is P/N 512-P2-N773-AR, serial 7067732006267. The QA sticker shows it was checked in 2007. Apparently, the EVGA QA department is drunk because this POS should not have gotten past any testing. Words of wisdom for all of you self-building system makers, don't buy EVGA crap. Stick with what you know. I only buy Intel motherboards now, no matter what.