Professor Elam
Accounting & Investing Info for San Antonio A & M
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Category: Economy
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Tuesday April 6, 2010 I titled the first post on this small island, Iceland Freezes Up, Oct 9, 2008. Well seems Iceland is quibbling about the interest rate to pay off England and the Netherlands. Yes entire countries can go bankrupt as I said in class yesterday in the introduction to equity and liabilities. So…
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Monday March 29, 2010 Trump Soho is a multi story hotel condo in NYC, but the rooms did not sell. Now the lenders are selling their mortgages on the property, cheap. The Donald of course was smart enough to talk the lenders into going it alone, no capital from him, note to lenders, watch The…
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Sunday March 28 2010 Camera, Gustavson, Todd,ISBN 978 1 4027 5656 6,2009 This is a ‘coffee table book’ large, heavy, and replete with interesting photographs of people and the cameras that took the photos. Gustavson is the curator of the Eastman Camera collection. Naturally the book had the ‘kodak’ point of view. A few observations…
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Friday March 26 2010 Bill Gross runs the largest bond funds on the planet at PIMCO. Yesterday he said the three decade bond party, lower yields, higher prices, had finally ended. PIMCO that has only offered bond funds is now offering stock funds, so investor sentiment is completely opposite what it was a year ago. …
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Wed March 24 2010 This articles tracks the cost of Credit Default Swaps on state debt. A CDS is a bet that the bond may default. When the premium exceeds 3% of the underlying value of the bond, this is apparently a trigger point of no return, or as Gladwell would say, a tipping point.…
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Wed Mar 24 2010 Here is an explanation of how the govt lets banks borrow for next to nothing to buy low yielding securities bringing the money right back to the govt, good game while it lasts. But no real value is being created as the govt uses this for transfer payments to the unemployed…
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Tuesday March 23 2010 Here is a great article pointing out that companies targeting the high end, Apple, and the low end, Accer, are doing well. Those in the middle, not so well. Nokia has twenty times the market share of Apple in phones but makes the same money. Interestingly the market for luxury cars…
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Monday March 22, 2010 It's official, the US is now paying higher interest rates than Berkshire or Lowe's. So much for the AAA rating, the ratings services are always behind the curve on this sort of thing.
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Sunday March 21 2010 Is there a compelling reason to buy gold now? The cable TV channels have everyone from someone claiming to be a former Treasury big wig to Gordon Liddy, famous Federal Inmate Bigwig, telling us to buy gold. Such magazine cover story headlines usually occur at market tops, not bottoms. Let’s take…
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Sat March 20 2010 Check out this set of photographs of the new lab Applied Materials has constructed in China. Here is a deflationary comment about why Applied is there. Xi’an has 47 universities and other institutions of higher learning, churning out engineers with master’s degrees who can be hired for $730 a month." Applied…
Professor Elam 