Thucydides on TARP

in ancient Athens, Thucydides tells us, they put aside a sum of talents in gold and silver for the use of the army and the navy, and for the defense of the city of Athens. It was treason to suggest that it be spent for any other purpose, and the penalty was death.

They also decided to set aside and keep intact a special fund of 1,000 talents from the money in the Acropolis. The expenses of the war were to be paid out of other funds, and the death penalty was laid down for anyone who should suggest or should put to the vote any proposal for using this money in any other way except to defend the city in the case of their enemies coming to attack them with a fleet by sea. To go with this money they set aside a special fleet of 100 triremes, the best ones of each year, with their captains. These, too, were only to be used in the same way as the money and to meet the same danger, if it should ever arise.
—Book 2, paragraph 24, The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides.

The question is, is this $700 billion (actually, it merely says the US gov’t can only hold $700 billion at any one time, not that there’s a limit on how much it can spend) part of the 1000 talents set aside for the defense of the state, or the 1000 talents set aside for prosecuting the war, or the 1000 talents set aside for infrastructure/rebuilding the Acropolis?

Oh, right. We’re proposing to spend it on paychecks for companies that have misbehaved over the last 20 years.

Freddie and Fannie may be broke

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which are GSEs or government-sponsored enterprises, may be technically insolvent. They have about $5.5 trillion in outstanding mortgages between them and only $80 billion in equity. Technically, the US government guarantees these loans but only implicitly. If Congress decides to guarantee them explicitly, the government will have debts equal to our GDP, give or take a few hundred million. If Congress decides NOT to back these mortgages, they may render 4-10 million families homeless as their homes are foreclosed.

Standard&Poor’s, Moody’s, and other rating agencies have been saying since Reagan was president that they would downgrade the creditworthiness of the US government if the US ever explicitly guaranteed Freddie and Fannie mortgages. Guess what, folks. That reckoning may be about to come due/true.

I would *strongly* advise anyone against major purchases at this time, or locking yourself into purchase plans or layaways of any sort for the next few months. Even frivolous stuff would be inadvisable- it is reasonable to ask “would I buy this if there were two more zeroes just in front of the decimal point?”

This condition is likely to persist until after the election at the earliest, and more likely to continue into the new President’s next term. Hang onto your hats, everyone. And your wallets.

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I am Responsible

There’s a story in Stephen Covey‘s book, the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, about a group of students in England where one group with high IQs was mislabeled by computer error as ‘dumb’, and another group of low IQ students were mislabeled as ‘smart’. Teachers, upon reading the official summaries, acted accordingly. It wasn’t until five and a half months later that the school administrators discovered the mistake. Rather than correct it immediately, they had the students re-tested. Astonishingly, the high IQ ‘dumb’ students had actually fallen in ability, and the low IQ students had risen substantially. The only variable was how the teachers planned and used different methodologies to teach the two groups. In only five months, the smart kids had become disciplinary and psychiatric troubles, while the dumb kids had begun to excel in school. The teachers said that the first couple of weeks of the school year had been a challenge, but that they had adopted new methodologies to fit the knowledge patterns they knew existed in their groups, and taught those methods accordingly.

I told this story at dinner tonight, and one of the kids — a smart one — laughed it off. “Couldn’t happen,” was the essence of his remarks. He was perfectly content to believe himself smart, and capable, and the rest of the world was not as smart or well off as he.

The other kid, though, the one beside me… well, he was beside himself. He looked shell-shocked, like a couple of WW I gas shells had gone off near him. “So, I am responsible?” he half-whispered to himself. “It’s me? I’m responsible for whether or not I’m smart?”

I told him, “yes.”

He sat there a long time. I added. “It helps if you have people who believe in you, or who believe in who you’re becoming. That’s the message of these kids in England: their teachers changed teaching methods when they discovered their kids didn’t respond to normal instruction. But in essence, you decide whether you’re going to be smart or dumb, day by day.”

“So I could be smarter.”

“Yes. And it wouldn’t take very long. You could be a lot smarter in six or ten months if you pushed yourself in that direction.”

“I could do George-style math…” George is a kid here who’s in the highest-level math we offer

“Yes,” I said. “And you could do TIm-style drawings, and Dave-level history.” I pointed out various people in the dining hall.

The smart kid spouted off some complete nonsense about genetic determinism, junked the idea on the basis of some recent attendees who had about as much chance of getting smarter as I do of going to the center of the earth. I pointed out that even those kids had choices, and anyway this wasn’t about the 2% of outliers on the edges of ‘normal’, this was about the 96% that fell somewhere between.

The kid beside me said again, “So the only thing that’s setting whether I’m smart or dumb is me? I’m responsible?”

“Terrifying isn’t it?” I said. “Liberating, but terrifying.”

He smiled. “Now I know what liberating means.”

---

It’s a great story, isn’t it? So… here’s my question. Does anyone have any other evidence that this England story is true? Because if it’s not, it could be quite devastating.

went to our community’s Beltane celebration in central MA, but I’m on duty. It’s been a little annoying, because I’ve been on duty for meals and dorm, but I’ve had lengthy morning and afternoon periods when there’s been virtually no one here. If I could have found someone to cover for me, I might have gone, at least for a little while. Instead, I have to be here.

I’ve been using the time to good effect, though. This morning before the dorm wakened but after Clio’s walk, I watched a Trading Room practicum from INVESTools on risk management. I found it to be quite helpful given what I’ve been trying to do in the market of late. I watched a second one during the morning sports session, and I’m watching a third now. I also worked my way through the first three sections of the Basic Options Course textbook.

I never imagined that learning the stock market would be akin to taking a master’s degree level course, but I’m finding it to be tremendously interesting. Most information is presented graphically rather than numerically. There are chart patterns that are clearly visible when you look at them, and these can give you pretty good feedback on whether you’re about to make a lot of money or a little.

So far I’ve made about $600 in this last month of April; I began trading on March 27, 2008, so it’s been not quite a month. I think — I plan — to match or double that in May, because it looks like the market may be recovering a little from its four or five month-long funk. But we’ll see. That said, I feel like I learned a lot from today’s marathon schooling session, and I aim to double that knowledge tomorrow.

The most important thing I think I learned today was how to set reward to risk at 2:1 at the least. It’s probably the most useful thing I’ve learned since I began trading. Before now, I was worried about setting stoploss orders so I didn’t lose money, but I didn’t think how to set the market so that I gained more money than I lost. Hmmm.

Stock Market

Dad called me today to ask, “How was your day in the market?”

I told him.

He laughed, and said, “You know, I used to be pretty sure I’d never have to ask you that question.” We had a good laugh over that. He was also very pleased with my answer. It’s a very bearish stock market these days, and quite volatile, but I’ve been doing quite well so far.

Big Oil strikes again, indirectly.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/09/business/09conserve.html?em&ex=1208059200&en=3d9398a44796e44d&ei=5087%0A

Farmers are pulling their conserved acres out of wildlife preservation programs and putting it back under the plow, because food prices are so high. The farmers win new dollars — the ducks and pheasants lose nesting grounds they’ve had for years.

Hmmm.

The essential problem again is oil. Oil is a critical part of any modern agricultural program, because it runs the tractors and it creates and transports the fertilizer, and it transports the raw food to the processors, who turn it into the supermarket products we eat.

So, because of the ways in which we’ve tied our agricultural system to the oil system, when oil prices rise food prices also rise. And now we’re learning that when food prices rise, farmers plant more corn, wheat, and soybeans at the expense of wild or recovering-wild habitat.

Hmmm.

I compare this with Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm in Virginia, as described in Joel Pollan’s book, Omnivore’s Dilemma. Joel doesn’t use any oil inputs in the form of fertilizer. He uses his own cows’ manure, and he uses his chickens’ search for grubs and larvae in the cow patties to spread the manure around. He raises grass (no, not like wacky weed, like lawn grass, except not), and places the animals in order to grow the best grass possible. Turns out that process also grows the best meat, the best eggs, and the best vegetables.

But.

But Joel’s methodologies only work within about 100 miles of the farm. Beyond that, it’s not cost effective or appropriate to ship his produce — partly because of his own proclivities, and partly because it degrades his product too quickly. And that’s a problem. The yeast for my bread may be local, but the flour comes from Kansas or Iowa or elsewhere. And food is mighty scarce in New England in winter if the trucks don’t have fuel.

Hmmm.

Freelancing and earnings

I’m working on a freelance gaming project, which is not usual for this time of year. Normally I reserve such work for the summer when I have time. But this was a 5,000 word project, and I figured I could do it. Plus, it was outside my usual set of themes, and I figured this was a chance to try my hand at something new.

Even so, I dreaded starting it for the longest time. Then I had some technical difficulties, and once I was ready to start it, I couldn’t. There were also work-related difficulties, plus a trip to Washington, DC, and what with one thing and another the project got pushed back, basically until the deadline loomed large on the calendar. I wasn’t able to do a rough outline until Tuesday.

Then the thing wrote itself. I filled in my outline on Friday afternoon. I sat down today in three separate sessions, and churned out 3,800 words. I’m going to be able to stride through the last 1,200 tomorrow morning, do some polishing in the afternoon and evening, and turn the whole thing in, first instant Monday. I like it when a plan comes together. I even had time to go get a cup of coffee and do some errands this afternoon.

Clio has been alternately a pain and very patient through this process. She got a shortened walk at 5:15 this morning, and then another around 11:00 am, and another around 5:15pm. There was a longer walk about 8:30, after I had gymnasium duty for school, as well. On all of her walks she has been tremendously excited, and everything she smells or sees calls for unbelievable exuberance. Once back in the house, she collapses in a heap and drops promptly into a nap. I should be so lucky.

My experiments with the INVESTools methodologies continued to work well through Friday. I’ve made about $600 in paper-trading, which is a simulated stock market based on the actual stock market’s numbers, and I’ve made about $150 in (more conservative) real-money trades. It is currently highly time-intensive, because I’m double- and triple-checking my calculations, and hesitating a lot. But I can see how the process could become highly streamlined and efficient once I understand what I’m looking at and how to read the graphs intuitively.

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Investools

Last Saturday, and I got up early and drove down to New Haven, CT, for an Investools.com workshop. was right: it certainly had some of the same format you’d expect from a cult or a pyramid scheme — invite a friend, schedule a 2-hour block, run long, discourage questions, keep pushing the product, pitch a special deal if you sign up today.

On the other hand, what they’re offering is investor education. In the introductory class, they explained some of the basic principles of the market, some of which were obvious (buy low, and sell high [yeah, yeah duh])… but some of which were not so obvious (huge investors like banks and pension funds cycle their money through several industries over periods of weeks, and there are ways to track this movement of money… so as to get in on the rising tide, and get out on the falling tide). I enjoyed myself thoroughly, and I decided to take their two-day class, which will run today and tomorrow.

and dad’s thoughts…
On the other side of this, my dad has been an investor for thirty-six years, and he told me yesterday that we are in a bear market, in a recession. A bear market means a flight to quality and a general depreciation of stock value: investors look to protect their capital by moving it into safe and prosperous companies, and the market as a whole loses a huge amount of value. A recession, as defined by the National Bureau of Economic Statistics or something like that, is two consecutive quarters where GDP is falling. But the NBES only defines the recession AFTER it’s happened. Anyway, that’s not important. What is important is that we have not had a serious bear market and a serious recession at the same time in about twenty years.

So most of the financial managers have not been in business long enough to have seen this sort of market before. We’ve been in a period of sustained growth for all this time. The folks running the economy have never had to manage a lot of money in this sort of market before. As a result, there are going to be a lot of people who think, “this is the lowest the market is ever going to get,” and they’re going to start buying back into the market when they see surges, like we did on Tuesday and Wednesday. But the recession is going to push prices back down again, naturally, because the economy as a whole is sluggish and unresponsive to direction. These swift rises in price, followed by sudden falls, are called recovery rallies, and are a natural part of bear markets. This is managers trying to rush into new positions and be leaders in the market, but not having the investor confidence to really get the market going again. It is, in other words, managers being dumb with someone else’s money.

We are unlikely to be anywhere near the bottom yet. Hold onto your hats, people.