http://www.7-eleven.com/Locator.aspx
I count about 15 in manhattan. That's pretty rare considering the city's density. I've seen exactly one in 10 years here. But I suppose it depends how you define rare, so whatev.
If you come out with a new laptop everybody yawns. If you come out with a new tablet people invest money. If you come out with a new pink sleeve for an iPad your stock will soar. Investors are like a big stampede, and if you wave a red flag in the direction they're all running in you'll get lots of money.
I hope you're not implying that Apple fits in that category of 80% overvalued "trendy" companies... AAPL's one of the cheapest stocks out there when you consider real earnings and real growth trends. People haven't invested in Apple because tablets are hypothetically cool, they've invested because tablets (well, iPads) are actually cool, as determined by the millions they've sold.
Indeed. Hopefully they (and the banks, via the embarrassment) have learned their lesson about over-hyped tech companies with iffy business plans and insane valuations...
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Citi are at the top of the list of banks making use of Federal Reserve loan facilities. If they are and were so healthy why are they at the top of the list of heavy users?
Um, because you don't really understand those facilities. It's not long term loans because they need it, it's short-term loans because it provides liquidity into the market, and lets those federally-insured banks be far more effecient.
I'll just point out that the Federal Reserve was created for exactly the purpose of transferring risk to taxpayers by exactly the banks who made most use of it.
Source? The point was and is to provide liquidity by the only entity sufficiently large enough (and able-to-print-money-if-they-need-to-enough) to do it. Liquidity makes markets efficient which saves everyone money. It is furthermore, a tool to enable monetary policy in various ways, and to help regulate the banks (if they want such lending, for example). And it is not a major risk for taxpayers, because it's entirely collateralized (with a relatively high standard). (Meaning, if the borrowing bank went bankrupt, the Fed would have first say over that collateral, in order to recoup any money the bank was unable to pay back.)
Oh and JP Morgan did everyone a favour for taking Bear Stearns over a $2 a share, financed again by the Federal Reserve? Oh please.
Yes. At the time, they were taking on a ton of unknown risk. They didn't want to do it, but agreed to because there was plenty of potential reward, they had a very very strong balance sheet themselves, and the Fed backstopped their losses to some extent (but certainly not entirely). No one else could have done it, which was made apparent when Lehman went down because the Fed couldn't convince anyone to take them on, and that's when the economy took the biggest hit. Also, they ended up agreeing to $10 a share, just saying.
There was a lot of publicity related to the $2B loss, but the bank can write a check for that amount from the profits they made off other investments that weren't news. Win some, lose some.
Yes, in this case (though the amount they've lost has supposedly more than doubled, since then). The bigger problem is that they were given free reign to make this sort of bet (and it was a prop bet, whatever Dimon claims) in the name of hedging. Yes, hedging needs to be possible, but no, we don't need to let (government insured) banks take whatever positions they want to do so. Hedging should always be extremely conservative, and that clearly wasn't the case here. Dimon said it himself when he said the position were put on to make money (and had been in years past).
Oh come on. People need to stop citing "bail out" money paid to these banks (well, JPM/GS at least, I'm not so sure about MS). JPM didn't want the money, they didn't need the money, the government forced them to take the money primarily to make it not look so terrible for the banks who did need the help. The strong banks, JPM/GS/etc. (at the time anyway), paid it back as soon as they were allowed to, with interest. Not to mention, in JPM's case, they actually bailed out the taxpayers to some degree, by agreeing to buy Bear Stearns.
Also, these banks are not taking loses on the IPO. Their clients are. They got people to buy from them at around $38, but they didn't hold onto very much, if any, of the stock themselves. Their loss in this case, is to their reputation, since they basically convinced their clients that this was a good price.
Though I don't disagree with you that things haven't really changed for the better, given JPM's recent (unrelated) losses
Re: Corruption. I agree, if there's any significant kickbacks it's quite possible this is a bad deal even for the two places that take the deal. However, this behavior (as another poster mentioned) is adequately described by the prisoners dilemma. So, in this case, the simplest explanation is probably best. The most likely reason for these sweetheart deals is simply that they city does in fact get a lot out of it, but only in so far as the alternative is to get nothing if the company goes elsewhere because it can pit cities or states against each other.
It's not a cost on the cities/towns that take the deal. They got to negotiate (with the entire state's tax revenue) how much they'll need to make it worth their while. Plus the jobs are always a big plus these days. I highly doubt the little costs you mentioned are going to cause it to be a loss for them.
On the other hand, it is a huge net loss for the state as a whole. Every other city is losing out on tax revenue, despite still providing roads and such that Amazon needs for deliveries. (And infrastructure for its website.)
Interesting theory. But I'm not sure it actually works like that. I don't think the underwriters can actually decide after the fact to execute that option. And I'm very sure they can't sell stock that they haven't actually bought yet. Especially because the SEC doesn't allow options trading within the first couple weeks of an IPO. I think it's more likely that they did end up getting stuck with more stock than they want. But if you have a source for the above, I'd love to read.
The social web is highly fickle. All it takes is something else to seem "cooler" and the next generation will switch. High school kids don't want to join a social network just because everyone older than them is on it (in fact, that's probably a negative). So, it's up to the arbitrary whim of the next generation's idea of "cool". If facebook gets the UI right, they win another term, if not, they lose, and it all goes downhill from there, very quickly. But it's mostly just pure dumb luck.
In my opinion, FB's interface is looking more and more MySpace-like these days. Info is just strewn everywhere, supposedly in chronological order, but that's not really meaningful for most of it. Pages are starting to lack the conformity that won people over from myspace in the first place. Just saying, it's an interesting comparison. Maybe it's right this time, but who knows.
If it weren't for the fact that the underwriters had to artificially prop it up by putting millions of buy orders in at 38.00.... If it weren't for that, it would've gone significantly lower.
He went public because he had to. US law requires companies with a certain number of shareholders to go public. That's pretty much the only reason they did.
Google also hired someone who knows business to run the company. Zuck has insisted on doing it himself and made it very clear he still doesn't give a crap about making money (and probably never will). That's may be laudable, but not something to invest in. Also, google had growing profits at least going back to 2000, so not sure where your numbers come from.
It can be used today because the government has legal tender laws and taxes "capital gains" if the government devalues the dollar relative to gold or silver.
I assume you meant can't here. So you're saying that all Ron Paul is really arguing for is to remove cap gains on commodities? I mean, I don't really get the legal tender part, you can always exchange gold or whatever for dollars, if you want to use that to pay your taxes. Or are you saying, it should be a law that you're allowed to use anything you want to pay for anything else? That seems like utter chaos...
Either way though, that seems like a far shot from what he typically talks about with fiat currency being the primary cause of asset bubbles.
Interesting, thanks for the explanation. But personally, I find it all too... contrived. I just have a feeling something else is really going on. Especially given that the realm it applies to is so restrictively tiny that the slightest perturbation of the experiment can change everything, it seems equally likely that we're just missing something. Until there's some real, practical, use for these results, I'll remain highly skeptical.
I still don't really understand entanglement. Any time I hear it explained it sounds like it's really nothing like instantaneous anything. It seems like it's no different than putting two numbers in a hat, pulling one out at random, and then sending the hat to someone and say . . . when I look at mine and send you that info, we both know what yours is!
Most (all?) private modes don't actually turn off the cache (that's usually rather impractical), they just clear it out when you're done with the session. However, that means the files did exist on your computer at some point, and could theoretically be found with an undelete program. I don't know of any browsers that run purely in RAM, but probably one exists somewhere (or would be interesting to create).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm 100% okay with an exodus of fat people from my city.
http://www.7-eleven.com/Locator.aspx I count about 15 in manhattan. That's pretty rare considering the city's density. I've seen exactly one in 10 years here. But I suppose it depends how you define rare, so whatev.
Actually, 7-11's are very rare in NYC. Just saying...
Oh and if you work in one of the shitty states that lets the employer fire you for any reason, I suggest moving.
To one of the only 11 states that aren't "shitty"? Gonna be crowded!
If you come out with a new laptop everybody yawns. If you come out with a new tablet people invest money. If you come out with a new pink sleeve for an iPad your stock will soar. Investors are like a big stampede, and if you wave a red flag in the direction they're all running in you'll get lots of money.
I hope you're not implying that Apple fits in that category of 80% overvalued "trendy" companies... AAPL's one of the cheapest stocks out there when you consider real earnings and real growth trends. People haven't invested in Apple because tablets are hypothetically cool, they've invested because tablets (well, iPads) are actually cool, as determined by the millions they've sold.
I just want them to fix my cable box. The current software is mind-bogglingly stupid.
Indeed. Hopefully they (and the banks, via the embarrassment) have learned their lesson about over-hyped tech companies with iffy business plans and insane valuations...
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Citi are at the top of the list of banks making use of Federal Reserve loan facilities. If they are and were so healthy why are they at the top of the list of heavy users?
Um, because you don't really understand those facilities. It's not long term loans because they need it, it's short-term loans because it provides liquidity into the market, and lets those federally-insured banks be far more effecient.
I'll just point out that the Federal Reserve was created for exactly the purpose of transferring risk to taxpayers by exactly the banks who made most use of it.
Source? The point was and is to provide liquidity by the only entity sufficiently large enough (and able-to-print-money-if-they-need-to-enough) to do it. Liquidity makes markets efficient which saves everyone money. It is furthermore, a tool to enable monetary policy in various ways, and to help regulate the banks (if they want such lending, for example). And it is not a major risk for taxpayers, because it's entirely collateralized (with a relatively high standard). (Meaning, if the borrowing bank went bankrupt, the Fed would have first say over that collateral, in order to recoup any money the bank was unable to pay back.)
Oh and JP Morgan did everyone a favour for taking Bear Stearns over a $2 a share, financed again by the Federal Reserve? Oh please.
Yes. At the time, they were taking on a ton of unknown risk. They didn't want to do it, but agreed to because there was plenty of potential reward, they had a very very strong balance sheet themselves, and the Fed backstopped their losses to some extent (but certainly not entirely). No one else could have done it, which was made apparent when Lehman went down because the Fed couldn't convince anyone to take them on, and that's when the economy took the biggest hit. Also, they ended up agreeing to $10 a share, just saying.
There was a lot of publicity related to the $2B loss, but the bank can write a check for that amount from the profits they made off other investments that weren't news. Win some, lose some.
Yes, in this case (though the amount they've lost has supposedly more than doubled, since then). The bigger problem is that they were given free reign to make this sort of bet (and it was a prop bet, whatever Dimon claims) in the name of hedging. Yes, hedging needs to be possible, but no, we don't need to let (government insured) banks take whatever positions they want to do so. Hedging should always be extremely conservative, and that clearly wasn't the case here. Dimon said it himself when he said the position were put on to make money (and had been in years past).
Oh come on. People need to stop citing "bail out" money paid to these banks (well, JPM/GS at least, I'm not so sure about MS). JPM didn't want the money, they didn't need the money, the government forced them to take the money primarily to make it not look so terrible for the banks who did need the help. The strong banks, JPM/GS/etc. (at the time anyway), paid it back as soon as they were allowed to, with interest. Not to mention, in JPM's case, they actually bailed out the taxpayers to some degree, by agreeing to buy Bear Stearns.
Also, these banks are not taking loses on the IPO. Their clients are. They got people to buy from them at around $38, but they didn't hold onto very much, if any, of the stock themselves. Their loss in this case, is to their reputation, since they basically convinced their clients that this was a good price.
Though I don't disagree with you that things haven't really changed for the better, given JPM's recent (unrelated) losses
Re: Corruption. I agree, if there's any significant kickbacks it's quite possible this is a bad deal even for the two places that take the deal. However, this behavior (as another poster mentioned) is adequately described by the prisoners dilemma. So, in this case, the simplest explanation is probably best. The most likely reason for these sweetheart deals is simply that they city does in fact get a lot out of it, but only in so far as the alternative is to get nothing if the company goes elsewhere because it can pit cities or states against each other.
It's not a cost on the cities/towns that take the deal. They got to negotiate (with the entire state's tax revenue) how much they'll need to make it worth their while. Plus the jobs are always a big plus these days. I highly doubt the little costs you mentioned are going to cause it to be a loss for them.
On the other hand, it is a huge net loss for the state as a whole. Every other city is losing out on tax revenue, despite still providing roads and such that Amazon needs for deliveries. (And infrastructure for its website.)
Interesting theory. But I'm not sure it actually works like that. I don't think the underwriters can actually decide after the fact to execute that option. And I'm very sure they can't sell stock that they haven't actually bought yet. Especially because the SEC doesn't allow options trading within the first couple weeks of an IPO. I think it's more likely that they did end up getting stuck with more stock than they want. But if you have a source for the above, I'd love to read.
The social web is highly fickle. All it takes is something else to seem "cooler" and the next generation will switch. High school kids don't want to join a social network just because everyone older than them is on it (in fact, that's probably a negative). So, it's up to the arbitrary whim of the next generation's idea of "cool". If facebook gets the UI right, they win another term, if not, they lose, and it all goes downhill from there, very quickly. But it's mostly just pure dumb luck.
In my opinion, FB's interface is looking more and more MySpace-like these days. Info is just strewn everywhere, supposedly in chronological order, but that's not really meaningful for most of it. Pages are starting to lack the conformity that won people over from myspace in the first place. Just saying, it's an interesting comparison. Maybe it's right this time, but who knows.
Exactly. Mod parent up.
If it weren't for the fact that the underwriters had to artificially prop it up by putting millions of buy orders in at 38.00.... If it weren't for that, it would've gone significantly lower.
He went public because he had to. US law requires companies with a certain number of shareholders to go public. That's pretty much the only reason they did.
2) Did you really just compare myspace to Facebook and imply Facebook will go the same route? That's laughable for the foreseeable future.
I'd love to hear why exactly that's so out of the question.
Apple pays dividends. But your point is silly and not true, go understand investment and ownership better.
Google also hired someone who knows business to run the company. Zuck has insisted on doing it himself and made it very clear he still doesn't give a crap about making money (and probably never will). That's may be laudable, but not something to invest in. Also, google had growing profits at least going back to 2000, so not sure where your numbers come from.
It can be used today because the government has legal tender laws and taxes "capital gains" if the government devalues the dollar relative to gold or silver.
I assume you meant can't here. So you're saying that all Ron Paul is really arguing for is to remove cap gains on commodities? I mean, I don't really get the legal tender part, you can always exchange gold or whatever for dollars, if you want to use that to pay your taxes. Or are you saying, it should be a law that you're allowed to use anything you want to pay for anything else? That seems like utter chaos...
Either way though, that seems like a far shot from what he typically talks about with fiat currency being the primary cause of asset bubbles.
(shakes head, not quite understanding the draw of this vs universal email that is just about as fast and just as easy to use.)
The draw is when some pretty girl texts you, you don't give her a lecture about how it's a big con, you just suck it up and text her back.
Interesting, thanks for the explanation. But personally, I find it all too... contrived. I just have a feeling something else is really going on. Especially given that the realm it applies to is so restrictively tiny that the slightest perturbation of the experiment can change everything, it seems equally likely that we're just missing something. Until there's some real, practical, use for these results, I'll remain highly skeptical.
I still don't really understand entanglement. Any time I hear it explained it sounds like it's really nothing like instantaneous anything. It seems like it's no different than putting two numbers in a hat, pulling one out at random, and then sending the hat to someone and say . . . when I look at mine and send you that info, we both know what yours is!
Most (all?) private modes don't actually turn off the cache (that's usually rather impractical), they just clear it out when you're done with the session. However, that means the files did exist on your computer at some point, and could theoretically be found with an undelete program. I don't know of any browsers that run purely in RAM, but probably one exists somewhere (or would be interesting to create).