Professor Elam
Accounting & Investing Info for San Antonio A & M
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Category: Financial Acct
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Monday Oct 4 2010 Meredith Whitney was one of the first to highlight the banking crisis. Now she joins yours truly in spotting the next disaster, state and municipal obligations. One of my themes is that we are now in a New Civil War. The high tax union shop states (all run by Democrats) are…
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Thursday Sept 23 2010 Blockbuster filed for Chapter 11 BK protection. This is another victim of changing technology. As the market moved form VHS to DVD to on line and rental, the market for physical renting shrunk. And so Blockbuster joins Polaroid, Kodak, Nokia, and Iomega (remember zip disks!) as technology changes the landscape. This article…
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Monday Sept 20, 2010 Mish reports that pension plans are massively underfunded. There was a front page article in the WSJ this weekend saying the same thing. This is a ticking time bomb that is not being addressed. the WSJ article pointed out that plans are still using wildly optimistic return assumptions of 8%. The…
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Saturday Sept 11, 2010 Bexar Met the county water company, falsified its earnings according to the external audit report. My reading of this article is that the write got the debt service ratio reversed but the point is that Bexar Met is now in violation of its requirements to cover debt service. This is a…
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Thursday July 15, 2010 The headline says that J P Morgan made $4.7 B in the second quarter. Now read the rest of the announcement, JPMorgan Chase & Co. said Thursday its second-quarter net income soared 77 percent to $4.8 billion as a slowdown in losses from failed loans helped offset a difficult spring in…
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Thursday July 15, 2010 On the markets blog and in previous entries here we have discussed the fact that states and cities in the US are out of money. I guess that this fall will be time's up what are they going to do. Sure enough, Illinois plans to float pension obligation bonds to fund,…
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Tuesday July 6, 2010 Employers are deciding that employees are an expensive liability. We study current liabilities in Intermed II Accounting. As you will see, there are more and more taxes s this article explains. The result is that jobs go elsewhere, or people are simply not hired. There have been recent moves of business…
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Thursday May 20 2010 Steve Jobs is famous for taking Apple to new heights, getting canned, being returned to Apple, and then making money as the iProducts came on stream. Here is the story of how he underestimated just how big the future of Apple could be. He traded in higher priced options for fewer…
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Monday May 3 2010 Do you recall the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund? While the admin kept saying Sunday that this is on BP read about this fund which was created for just this purpose.
Professor Elam 