Click CMA for information on that exam.

Click CIA for information on that exam.

click IMA site

Click IA site

for information on these career choices.  

You do not need the CDs or online matieral from Gleim, just the books which for students are four at $35 each.  I suggest you order now so that you can use them as companions as you study your coursework. I get nothing from Gleim for my recommendation, I just think he has the best material. I used it to pass the CPA exam the first time I took it, so I am a satisfied customer.

Certified management Accountant and Certified Internal Auditor are serious certifications. And you can take them with a BBA degree, it does not require 150 hours.  Frankly I think these are more realistic certificaitons for the non traditional students we have here at A & M SA. \

I believe that most of you are looking to join substantial organziations with long term stability and career growth. CMA nd CIA are growing quickly as recognized certifications for business.  CPA is for an external accounting firm, I doubt may of you will want to land at such a firm quite frankly.

so it is not accident that our advanced accounting elective will be either a second audit class or a second managerial class.  I have joined the San Antonio IMA chapte. I will present a program at their next meeting Thursday Oct 16, netowrking starts at 5:30, dinner is served.  Any student that would like to accompany me is welcome, yes you have to pay the 15 bucks for the meeting, special student price. I will be attending monthly, great chance to network. They meet each month on the third Thursday, click here for meeting schedule.

UPDATE TO COMMENTS FROM STUDENTS For some reason the answer function is not working so I will answer this way

Yovela, you  are correct the meeting is next thursday Oct 16, i would be delighted for you and or any others to join me, meeting schedule is here

http://www.ima-sa.org/gpage.html

Yes I think having different options is very important, we will be working on increasing the number of job opportunities while in school

We can certainly add an adv tax if there is demand, Dr. Green and I discussed just that today,

thanks for the input from all of you.

The  financial Planner who signed up my account when I was recently at another school was stunned that I did not put all my money in the stock market.  He said his was in the BRIC countries. I had some money in gold and commodities and exited early, very early, this year. Let''s see how he is doiing.

Brazil    EWZ    Down 100-40

Russia    RSX    Down 60-20

India    INP    Down 115-40

C     China    Down 62-30

Wel you make the call.

You will notice I have assigned a book report. And I recommended one of Jim Rogers books to several of you, how are you coming on that by the way?  Rogers was suspect about india, too much red tape and regulation.Russia he said was due for 30 years of civil war. I commented in a recent post that the high oil prices had made pseudo players out of back benchers like Russia that really had no economy other than commodity exports. Now that is obvious.  And it is obvious that most of those countries were beneficiaries of the Western economies. Really reading and learning about both our world and the technical analysis and all these factors will make better students. Honest.

so is BRIC a buy now, or just good for the proverbial  bounce?  That of course is THE question.

good reading!

IN testimony yesterday, the former Lehman CEO testified that his pay since 2000 was closer to $350 M than $480 Mhich th ecommittee cited. He said most of 2007 was paid in now worthless stock, gee, will he get an ordinary or capital loss on that I wonder, either way his basis was zero.

It is simply incredible that this man can look into the camera and claim to have been working for the stockholders as he personally raided the Lehman bank acount, then took the firm to bankruptcy literally this hear. As someone said on television this morning, you would think he could at least make a contribution to all the Lehman employees now out of work and health insurance, no sign of that coming so far.

Look for this guy to be even more demonized as the market trumoil continues.

A WSJ blog reports ;who will be handing out the $700 B, wanna guess?  Yep Paulson searched the entire country and picked, a Goldman employee.

I hvae mentioned in class that Presidents change but Goldman always has a presence in any administration. that continues today. By the way, you can vote for McCain or Obama, but you cannot vote Goldman out, just wanted to amke that point.

I write a weekly newspaper column, this one appeared last friday before the monday meltdown.

Change You Can Believe In The Times they are a changin’ – Bob Dylan We are Change! – Obama / Biden and McCain/Palin I

ndeed, each set of candidates is trying to outdo the other in claiming to be the genuine change agent. We suspect that either way, the public and the elected team are going to get more change than they bargained for or expected. Here is why. We predicted a few weeks back that oil, rather than going to $200 from $145, was more liable to go to $100. Indeed that has occurred. We reached that conclusion by letting the market rather than talking heads on television reveal its hand. While everyone was all agog over the Biden – Palin debate, the real news was overlooked yesterday.

The Dow Transports tanked 400 points, confirming the move down in the Dow Industrials. Put another way, the weekly and monthly Exponential Moving Averages have crossed to the downside. This is the first weekly change since 2003, so it must be respected In addition the Baltic Shipping Index has crashed back to previous lows. Those indices are telling us to expect a severe slowdown in shipping, which is to say commerce, which is to say, the economy. Corporate and municipal bond prices are already breaking long term uptrends. This will be a substantial change in the very fabric of our lives. I am talking about a period akin to 1972/4-1982 or perhaps 1929-1939. Each period was characterized by a peak in stock prices, then a drastic decline, followed by a decade of sideways movement.

The decline from Dow 390 to Dow 41, 1929-1932 was particularly severe. The lack of FDIC bank insurance literally wiped one third of the money supply out. The decline from Dow 1,000 to 577 from 1972-1974 was a 50% decline, less severe given the financial safety nets in place. The Dow has already dropped 25% and no one seems really worried about it, would another 3500 points do the trick? Don’t laugh, that is where the DOW was in 2003! Indeed the social and financial safety net is so complete it is possible to ignore the obvious. What would be the better announcement of a Wall Street collapse than for the exponents of investing, Merrill and Lehman, to go bust? They have. What would be more prescient than to see the promoters of ‘home ownership,’ Fannie and Freddie, to go completely out of business? They have. The parallels abound.

The White House changed hands in 1932 as it did in 1968. Since FDR no party had been elected three times in a row to the White House, so look for George and his Republican Company to exit. What am I saying, the bailout bill and all sorts of promises from the candidates will not save the economy? Yes that is what I am saying, just ask GM or Ford or Toyota, sales down all round 30% last month. The party is over. As Bernard Goldberg remarked today, ‘no matter how well we are doing in Iraq, the public is tired of the war.’ Or wars for that matter, both candidates are promising to carry war on in Afghanistan after Iraq, and perhaps Pakistan, and then hey, let’s defend Georgia from our old nemesis, Russia! Where will the money, much less the will, come from? In 1974 America was tired of Viet Nam.

The commodity inflation made temporary players of strictly third party back benchers like Russia and Venezuela, who have no real economy other than oil. Indeed the price of oil is down simply because the world can no longer afford it. The price of oil is derived from the weakness, or strength, of the US Dollar. The dollar has rallied as the world scrambles for dollars. But all this spending will weaken the buck again, and then expect oil to rally. But it will be dollar, not economic driven.

Today the Dow Industrials closed below their 50% level of the entire move from the 2003 low to the 2007 high. This suggests lower prices ahead as support has failed. The Transports joined in a new weekly low for this move. That constitutes a Dow Theory sell signal. Expect a brief rally in stocks and the general mood between now and the election. As I write the markets are terribly oversold after crushing volatility of hundreds of points in each direction per day. That rally will be enough to convince everyone that the ‘fixes’ are working, the bailouts, the bank rescues, the income re-distribution schemes. But after the election, look out for more reality checks.

Australia cut a key lending rate a full one pe%rcent reversing an early 3.7% slide to finish its day up 1.7%.  Japan left its rate unchanged at .5%  So did that action in Australia calm everyone down?  I doubt it but the news is the news, the markets here rallied considerably the last hour as I mentioned in class last night.

Markets move in patterns that reflect human behavior, that is what socionomics is all about. But the media is always looking for a 'news event' to justify what has happened.  Did a rate cut on an island nation of 20 people calm the world, well that is the story, I would suggest that most of the selling had abated but as market technicians say, there is always a fundamental news event to justify what has happened technically in the markets.

After the crash of 1987 the stock exchanges adopted similar limit moves to the commodity exchanges for one day of trading. Right now that is 10% which would be S & P 997. We did hit 1008 on the spx and now it has rallied to 1040 with 35 minutes to go. 

 The price earnings ratio is a measure of optimism.  The more one is willing to pay for one dollar of earnings of a company, the more optimistic one is. Today all price earnings ratios fell, a lot. Optimism is on the decline.

1434 CST SP 1000 has turned out to be support for now. I wish all of you could have sat here and watched this story unfold today, a real study in psychology and markets.

Market Close, I think patterns to the downside are complete but just for the time being, we need some recovery before going lower again, we shall see,

Not surprisingly skyscraper building is tied to the optimism reflected in the stock market. Just as real estate speculation grew with each move up in the stock market, the desire to 'top' the last skyscraper built is another manifestation of popular culture.

Now were else but Dubai plans a skyscraper two thirds of a mile high.

THis comes as their previous all time effort, a skyscraper three football fields high is scheduled to complete in the next couple of years.  Such projects are of course planned years in advance and take years to complete. And the underlying assumption is that the economic trends that support such optimism will also continue of not accelerate.

Interestingly one of the 'disaster movies' that celebrated the bear stock market of the 1970s was The Towering Inferno. Featuring then big screen stars in their only pairing together, Steve McscQueen and Paul Newman battle a fire in the tallest building in the US.  Such disaster movies, Poseidon, Volcano, etc. seemed to bring the economic difficulties to the big screen as we watch people fight for their very lives in a parallel to the times.

Now wonder the latest HBO series is True Blood, all about mainstreaming vampires. Lately each week another town member has been killed, the ultimate violence. Such programming reflects the popular culture.

SNL summed up the entire sub prime debacle in this skit. The portrayal of the various 'vicitims' has it exactly right.  You can watch this and learn more about this than in dozens of newspaper columns.

UPDATE Tuesday Oct 7  An alert Yovela Rico notes that the SNL skit is no longer on line, I checked both SNL site and You Tube and I could not find it either, gee, too correct for Washington to stand, I guess so after the stock market meltdown yesterday. Geez, censorship in our time, it reaally hit home on the

real cause of FNM collapse-Democrats refused more oversight and regulation

kind of folks getting loans – deadbeatsg

scam of creating Colslaterlized Debt Obligations and selling them as real securities, one couple laughingly said they made $19 B, so who was the victim, why er a Wachovia that bought the CDO of course

Bush in the skit is as usual seemingly clueless

Pelosi and Frank hush the entire thing up whispering Bush does not know

The Smothers Brothers television show went off the air as did they after a particular criticism of the Viet Nam war under LBJ. Apparently that was too much for Lyndon as the two had to apologize on air that next week. That was their last season and they were apparently black balled from tv as a result. Under the FCC I am wondering if this was the response by NBC which has been criticized for promoting the Obama campaign. This skit was remarkably right on blaming Dems for failing for agree to more supervision of FNM.

Now a bootleg copy has appeared.

Warren Buffet remarked that we are having an economic Pearl Harbor on the Charlie Rose show this week. At the same time he has bought preferred stock with common warrants on both Goldman Sachs and GE just this morning. Everyone else is selling, he is setting his own terms and buying.

BRK will get a 10% dividend on the preferred and millions of options to boot, apparently the strike price is the current price of GE and GS.

If we are having an economic Pearl Harbor why isn't some of this traffic parked somewhere else?

I don't see that the current situation is to that extreme, yet. And if it is I cannot imagine that one bill passed by the govt will change all that.

For those of you duped by the story that this is equal to the Great Depression

click on Russell Lee to see the photos he took for the Farm Security Administration.  The Govt wanted to highlight the necessity of helping Americans. click to enlarge and you will see some foks that had something to be depressed about!