"Efficient market theory is correct in that there are no gross inefficiencies," Simons told the Greenwich Roundtable last year. "But we look at anomalies that may be small in size and brief in time. We make our forecast. Then, shortly thereafter, we reevaluate the situation and revise our forecast and our portfolio. We do this all day long. We're always in and out and out and in. So we're dependent on activity to make money."
Mmm yeah I used to love Kiyosaki... but there is somthing very dodgy to the guy, it comes out in the details. In an article on yahoo he said the NYMEX is a place where "orange juice, pork bellies,... are traded" http://finance.yahoo.com/columnist/article/richricher/9775
However, some other nice authros/people I've found after him, who have actually had a history of success. Bill/William Bartmann - Total rags to riches - drop out gangster - millionaire - to in millions of debt - to billionaire (Founder of CFS and on forbes 400) - Company went down as a result of a friend of his who engaged in illegal activites. Amazing story. He setup America's whistle now - http://www.americaswhistle.com/main/board5.html
Dan Pena - I haven't got his book yet, it's $200 somthing lol but he's setup $400,000,000 energy companies. Lives in a castle in scottland( http://www.guthriecastle.com/) and is a chairman of some investment firm - http://www.theguthriegroup.co.uk/
The guy doesn't advertise and runs exclusive mentoring programs
It was in the Cards By Jeff Passan, Yahoo! Sports October 28, 2006
Jeff Passan Yahoo! Sports
ST. LOUIS Only here, in the land of the improbable, can two girls, cute little blondes no older than 10, double-fist bottles of beer, douse one another and win knowing glances from everyone else who is too drunk on euphoria to care. Here is where two brothers, Californians with that preternatural cool, just lose it and spill tears into each other's shoulders, and here is where the runt, the one who has never owned a new car, drives into the sunset in a yellow Corvette, and here is where a team that lost 78 games during Major League Baseball's regular season, an all-time underdog, wins a World Series.
What should have been wasn't, and were any beauty salvaged from a series that could have used a face lift, tummy tuck and case of Botox, this was it. The St. Louis Cardinals dug and ground and burrowed their way to a 10th championship Friday, stunting the Detroit Tigers one final time, 4-2, to close out the series in the fifth game at Busch Stadium. And though the series hinged on errors committed by the Tigers, its roughest edges found sandpaper in the form of the Cardinals, who needed Jeff Weaver, one of the Californians, to bamboozle the team that drafted him, and called upon David Eckstein, all 5-foot-7 of him, to drive in two more runs and win the series MVP.
There were others in the crew, too, retreads and has-beens, a motley bunch to surround Albert Pujols, who, it turned out, had little to do with St. Louis' first championship in 24 years. It was a team in the strictest sense, cobbled together by St. Louis general manager Walt Jocketty and helmed by manager Tony La Russa, who convinced the Cardinals what no one else believed: They could.
So they did, and there they were, in the third incarnation of Busch Stadium, celebrating, the men in uniforms or suits, the women in jerseys or couture, the kids wearing Budweiser.
ADVERTISEMENT "It just shows you this is the best game in the world because you can't predict it," Eckstein said. "You get a bunch of guys on a mission, going out there, playing as hard as they can, as smart as they can, until the game ends, and anything is possible."
Probable, on the other hand, it wasn't. Everyone knows the story. The Cardinals finished 83-78, nearly blew an 8½-game National League Central lead over Houston in the season's final 12 days and dragged their ready-to-be-buried corpse into the playoffs for a quick funeral against San Diego.
Only the Cardinals won the series opener.
"And it's more fun to believe in yourself," La Russa said. "When I saw our club respond the first game in San Diego, I thought we had a shot.
"No, I knew we had a shot."
An onyx sky settled over downtown Friday afternoon with the long shot long gone. This was an opportunity to finish off the Tigers and avoid a trip to Detroit, where Kenny Rogers, all of a sudden the postseason maestro, awaited in Game 6. And it was a chance to soften the 21-year-old memories of Don Denkinger's blown call against Kansas City, one that still peppers local conversation.
Before he went to the field, La Russa rubbed a bronze statue of his dog, Res, who died in July. He needed Weaver released earlier this season by the Los Angeles Angels so his brother, Jered, could join the rotation to keep stopping the Tigers, whose batting average in the series skulked around .200 before the game. He needed Yadier Molina, the breakout player of this postseason, to keep hitting like he has, deep enough to the gaps that he can lug his weight for extra bases. He needed Eckstein, the nuisance, to annoy.
By the second inning, La Russa felt rather fulfilled. Weaver struck out four of the first six hitters he faced, and Molina stood on third base when Eckstein launched a ball inside the line. Tigers third baseman Brandon Inge laid out to field the ball, only to rush his throw and skip it 3 feet to the right of first baseman Sean Casey.
Of all the errors in the series and they were certainly its hallmark the gravest came two innings later. Casey's two-run home run had given the Tigers a one-run lead, and Detroit starter Justin Verlander pitched to Weaver with one out and runners on first and second. Weaver hit the ball at Verlander, who pirouetted and tried to catch the lead runner. Instead, Inge never took his foot off the bag, and the ball skipped into left field for a run, and Eckstein would drive in another on a groundout.
"Picked a great time to mess up," Verlander said. "I don't ever remember throwing one of those away, to be honest, aside from spring training practice. I always thought it was a pretty routine play for me."
For all of the Tigers it should be. And yet for the fifth consecutive game, a pitcher botched a routine play, and it led to at least one run scoring.
"The sick part about it is 99 times out of 100 we all make the play, and this was five times in a row we didn't," Tigers closer Todd Jones said. "It's going to be a T-shirt, I'm sure, somewhere."
In big, bold letters: E-1.
The atmosphere shifted following Verlander's faux pas. The crowd that earlier gasped when Stan Musial nearly fell throwing out the first pitch cheered every Weaver twirl, sure, though muffled itself with the anxiety that accompanies the first World Series victory in a generation.
Once more, in the seventh, did the Cardinals give reason to cheer. Eckstein, who hit .364 with a team-high four RBI in the series, scored on a single to right field by third baseman Scott Rolen.
"You ever have that fly in the car?" Cardinals outfielder Preston Wilson said. "You're riding in the car, and you left down the window and you think he's gone, and two minutes later he's still in there, and you're swatting, and you're like, 'I can't get it.' That's David Eckstein."
Warming up in the bullpen was Adam Wainwright, who last year was in St. Simons Island, Ga., watching with his family as the Chicago White Sox won the World Series. A rookie named Bobby Jenks closed for them. Like Wainwright, he was a late-season replacement with no playoff experience, a heart palpitation waiting to happen.
After Weaver polished off Craig Monroe looking at a third strike and Carlos Guillen swinging at one to end the eighth inning, it was Wainwright's time. He loped in from the bullpen, almost the anti-Jenks, long and sinewy.
Wainwright had finished off the New York Mets in the NL Championship Series by catching Carlos Beltran staring at a curveball, and his presence inspired enough confidence for one man in the right-field stands to light a victory cigar before Wainwright had recorded one out.
The first was Magglio Ordoρez, one of the players who had turned the Tigers from perennial losers, along with manager Jim Leyland, into a compelling group of their own. Walks to Casey and Placido Polanco (who went 0 for 17 after winning ALCS MVP), and a groundout by Pudge Rodriguez, brought up Inge, still kicking himself for the error at third.
On the first strike, swinging, the buzz returned to the stadium. On the second, looking, it crescendoed. Because on the third, swinging at a slider, a perfect pitch like the curve to Beltran the 46,638 at Busch did not know whether to yell or cry, whether to grab for all the confetti the blue and yellow and green and orange and white and purple or just go for the red.
"I'll never throw another curveball or slider," Wainwright said, "without thinking of those two pitches."
Wainwright threw those two pitches only because of a season-ending injury to Jason Isringhausen. Starter Mark Mulder missed most of the season as well, and his absence necessitated the Cardinals to find an adequate replacement. At the time he signed, Weaver looked more like a jalopy, bought at bargain-bin prices and operating with little success.
Such were some of the Cardinals pitchers, or so it seemed until the postseason. San Diego hit .225, and the Mets' mighty bats managed a .231 average against St. Louis in a seven-game NLCS loss. Worst of all were the Tigers, who hit .199 against the Cardinals, impatient bats their weakness, St. Louis' strike-throwers their downfall.
Weaver, after the 30-second embrace with Jered, bounded toward the stands and helicoptered his hat. Chris Duncan, almost the goat after two misplays in right field, laughed because he could, his contributions rendered inconsequential. The Cardinals always managed to do that: Bury the bad by answering with runs when scored upon, whether a game-winning single from Wilson, the doubles Thursday from Eckstein, a triple in New York from Scott Spiezio or a home run against the Mets from So Taguchi.
"This is probably, on paper, our worst team of the last four or five years," Rolen said. "And this is the team that wins the World Series."
The last time they were there, in 2004, Rolen went 0 for 15. That zero was the closest any Cardinal got to a ring.
"Now I got one," Pujols said. "Awesome. Great. But I want to keep getting more."
It's easy to get greedy, overwhelmed by the championship and forgetful of what it means to St. Louis. Outside the stadium, in brick squares that lined the walkway down South 7th Street, were the truest feelings, etched in permanence.
There was Lucille Waeltz, whose brick said she was the Cardinals' greatest fan, and the Emge family, five generations of Cards fans. There was the Schrage family, of Waverly, Iowa, which said that games finish and seasons end, but memories will never fade, and there was Robert Turner, who was at Game 7 of the 1982 World Series, the last year St. Louis won, and promised that he would cherish forever a champion.
Then there was Donna Botkin, whose message was simple: It's not just a game.
And it wasn't. On the night the Cardinals won the World Series, the night a police chopper settled above the city and strangers honked horns and opened car doors to high five one another until 3 a.m., it was about the improbable, and how one night in St. Louis, it actually happened.
Jeff Passan is Yahoo! Sports' national baseball writer. Send Jeff a question or comment for potential use in a future column or webcast.
No. 1 lesson from this World Series -- almost every team can win By BEN WALKER, AP Baseball Writer October 28, 2006
ST. LOUIS (AP) -- Busch Stadium had pretty much cleared out by midnight. Just a couple hundred fans remained, hoping to personally greet the World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals.
As horns honked beyond the center-field wall and around the Gateway Arch, a curious song started to play over the ballpark sound system.
"The Gambler." Nice touch, huh?
Because that was the only noise coming from anyone named Kenny Rogers on Friday night.
Instead, the singer's namesake sat silently in the Detroit dugout. The lefty ace who became a scourge over a smudge watched MVP David Eckstein and the Cardinals beat the Tigers 4-2 to clinch the title in Game 5.
"They're a good team," said Rogers, one of the few Detroit pitchers who did not make a costly error. "St. Louis had the components to do well in any series. They could beat anybody.
"Their lineup is good. Their pitching staff is good," he said. "I don't think the 83 wins during the regular season was indicative of their talent at all."
Ah, those puny 83 wins. Fewest by a World Series winner ever. Count all the Cardinals' victories since opening day and it adds up to 94, still one shy of the Tigers' total from the regular season.
Which is why this is the No. 1 lesson from October: Most anyone can win the World Series these days.
Manager Tony La Russa's team with the famed birds-on-the-bat logo marked baseball's seventh straight different champion. No matter that 12 teams posted more victories in the regular season than St. Louis.
"No, it doesn't cheapen the World Series," New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter said during a midweek awards ceremony at Busch.
"It goes to show -- I think we won one time with 80-something wins. Like I've always said, time and time again, the best teams make it to the playoffs, the hottest team wins," he said. "So it doesn't really make a difference what you've done in the regular season."
It might affect who watches, though. This cold weather Series is expected to draw chilly TV ratings, hurt by a lack of drama and megastars.
Cardinals slugger Albert Pujols homered in the opener, but did not connect again and batted .200. One of his best friends, Tigers infielder Placido Polanco, went 0-for-17 after being MVP of the AL championship series.
After the Boston Red Sox and Chicago White Sox ended long droughts the past two years, the Cardinals won their first crown since 1982.
Back then, future Hall of Famer Ozzie Smith played shortstop in this baseball-crazy town. Now, it's the 5-foot-7 Eckstein.
"No one believed in our club," Eckstein said.
Certainly not when St. Louis limped into the playoffs after a late-season collapse that threatened to put it into the record books for the wrong reason.
Same was true for the Tigers a few years ago. In 2003, they lost an AL-record 119 games and looked like a dormant franchise. Smart drafts helped the turnaround, and so did the signing of free agent Ivan Rodriguez before the next season began.
Manager Jim Leyland took over the team this year and the Tigers ended a run of 12 straight losing seasons. They stumbled down the stretch, too, and wound up taking the wild card.
The Tigers roared into the World Series with a seven-game playoff winning streak. But they got a full week off after sweeping Oakland in the AL championship and when they returned for real, they looked more rusty than ready.
Before Game 5, Rodriguez admitted he was surprised Detroit was facing such a big deficit.
"Well, yeah," he said. "I think we have a great team. I think our team is very solid, it's a complete team.
"But that's baseball. That is the beauty of baseball, and being in the World Series, anything can happen."
The green loved Red By JIMMY GOLEN, AP Sports Writer October 29, 2006
BOSTON (AP) -- Through 16 NBA titles and more than half a century, no one meant more to the Boston Celtics than Red Auerbach.
The coach who lit up cigars to celebrate an unprecedented nine championships. The general manager who acquired Hall of Famers Bill Russell, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish and Larry Bird. The team's president when it won its league-record 16th title, in 1986, and when he died of a heart attack Saturday at the age of 89.
ADVERTISEMENT "He is the godfather of all the Celtics," former player and coach Chris Ford said.
But he was more than that.
"Nobody has had as much impact on a sport as Red Auerbach had on the game of basketball. He was a pioneer of the NBA," said Tommy Heinsohn, a Hall of Fame player in Boston before becoming a Celtics coach and broadcaster. "He left his philosophy of winning championships, playing hard and playing as a team with several generations of players. ... The game of basketball will never see anyone else like him."
Arnold Auerbach was born in Brooklyn in 1917, and had already coached two professional teams when he took over the Celtics in 1950. He won an unprecedented nine titles -- Phil Jackson has since tied him -- including eight in a row before he stepped down in 1966.
Auerbach pulled the strings that brought seven more championships to Boston, and maintained a presence as the Celtics president and patriarch over the last 20 years. "Our ownership group feels the highlight of becoming owners is clearly the chance to have known and worked with Red," owner Wyc Grousbeck said Saturday.
Auerbach received the U.S. Navy's Lone Sailor Award on Wednesday at a ceremony in Washington, where he lived. Hall of Famer Bob Cousy, who knew Auerbach since 1950, was with him.
"I think Arnold was an absolute giant in the field," the former Celtics point guard said Saturday. "I have been around a lot of competitive people but his commitment to winning was absolute nothing was more important. He was relentless and produced the greatest basketball dynasty so far that this country has ever seen and certainly that the NBA has ever seen."
With Cousy passing the ball around, Auerbach introduced a fast-paced game that made the young league more exciting -- and popular. In racially combustible Boston, he hired the NBA's first black coach and fielded its first all-black starting five.
"He did so many things to help improve the game," said Bill Sharman, who played for Auerbach in Boston and went on to become coach and general manager of the Los Angeles Lakers. "He was a coach who went out of his way to help his players. ... Besides being such a great coach, he was also a great friend and he will be truly missed."
U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy said Auerbach's "legacy transcends the Celtics and basketball," whether it was helping out on a political cause or visiting the senator's son in the hospital.
"He was the gold standard in coaching and in civic leadership, and he set an example that continues today," Kennedy said. "More than being a legendary coach and Boston institution, Red was a person of the highest caliber with a heart and generosity that knew no bounds. ... With every whistle that blows for the Boston Celtics, Red's spirit is celebrated and his memory cherished. He was loved and never will be forgotten."
Auerbach's failing health put a scare into the Celtics and their fans last year, when he spent much of August visiting hospitals for tests and an undisclosed surgical procedure. But he made it to Boston for opening night and held court with the media before the game.
"I'm here. That's what counts," he said at the 2005 opener. "I've been to, oh, about 50 of them. It's always a great thrill, it really is."
Grousbeck said that Auerbach was preparing to attend the team's Nov. 1 opener. Instead, the Celtics will dedicate the season to him.
The city of Boston erected a statue of Auerbach on his 68th birthday in 1985, placing him on a park bench, holding a cigar, near historic Faneuil Hall. Kris Liakos, 24, stopped by to take a picture with the statue after seeing the news of Auerbach's death on television.
"The statue's been here since I was a kid," the 24-year-old Celtics fan said. "That's the kind of thing that happens to somebody when they die, but he's been sitting on this bench for 20 years. That's what he meant to this town."
Down the street at the TD Banknorth Garden, fans watching the Bruins play the Ottawa Senators could spy the 16 NBA banners hanging from the rafters, along with the No. 2 the Celtics retired in Auerbach's honor.
"When you think of the Celtics, you think of Red Auerbach," 46-year-old Dana Letiecq said after the hockey game. "That's the bottom line."
Joe O'Leary brought his 13-year-old son, Mark, to the game and to the Auerbach display at the new Garden's sports museum.
"I don't smoke many cigars, but whenever I do I think of Red," the elder O'Leary said.
"Light one more up for Red," said his brother-in-law, Mike Bohan.
Those titles came in the Boston Garden, a beloved building that was shuttered with much sentimentality in 1995 to make way for what is now called the TD Banknorth Garden. But Auerbach was stung by a different emotion after watching the Celtics' final game in the old building, a playoff loss to the Orlando Magic.
"(Expletive) the building," Auerbach said. "We lost a ballgame."
AP sports writers Howard Ulman in Boston, Joseph White in Washington and Dan Gelston in Philadelphia contributed to this story.
AP GAO Chief Warns Economic Disaster Looms Saturday October 28, 9:32 pm ET By Matt Crenson, AP National Writer GAO Chief Takes to Road, Warns Economic Disaster Looms Even As Many Candidates Avoid Issue
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- David M. Walker sure talks like he's running for office. "This is about the future of our country, our kids and grandkids," the comptroller general of the United States warns a packed hall at Austin's historic Driskill Hotel. "We the people have to rise up to make sure things get changed."
ADVERTISEMENT click here But Walker doesn't want, or need, your vote this November. He already has a job as head of the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that audits and evaluates the performance of the federal government.
Basically, that makes Walker the nation's accountant-in-chief. And the accountant-in-chief's professional opinion is that the American public needs to tell Washington it's time to steer the nation off the path to financial ruin.
From the hustings and the airwaves this campaign season, America's political class can be heard debating Capitol Hill sex scandals, the wisdom of the war in Iraq and which party is tougher on terror. Democrats and Republicans talk of cutting taxes to make life easier for the American people.
What they don't talk about is a dirty little secret everyone in Washington knows, or at least should. The vast majority of economists and budget analysts agree: The ship of state is on a disastrous course, and will founder on the reefs of economic disaster if nothing is done to correct it.
There's a good reason politicians don't like to talk about the nation's long-term fiscal prospects. The subject is short on political theatrics and long on complicated economics, scary graphs and very big numbers. It reveals serious problems and offers no easy solutions. Anybody who wanted to deal with it seriously would have to talk about raising taxes and cutting benefits, nasty nostrums that might doom any candidate who prescribed them.
"There's no sexiness to it," laments Leita Hart-Fanta, an accountant who has just heard Walker's pitch. She suggests recruiting a trusted celebrity -- maybe Oprah -- to sell fiscal responsibility to the American people.
Walker doesn't want to make balancing the federal government's books sexy -- he just wants to make it politically palatable. He has committed to touring the nation through the 2008 elections, talking to anybody who will listen about the fiscal black hole Washington has dug itself, the "demographic tsunami" that will come when the baby boom generation begins retiring and the recklessness of borrowing money from foreign lenders to pay for the operation of the U.S. government.
"He can speak forthrightly and independently because his job is not in jeopardy if he tells the truth," said Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution.
Walker can talk in public about the nation's impending fiscal crisis because he has one of the most secure jobs in Washington. As comptroller general of the United States -- basically, the government's chief accountant -- he is serving a 15-year term that runs through 2013.
This year Walker has spoken to the Union League Club of Chicago and the Rotary Club of Atlanta, the Sons of the American Revolution and the World Future Society. But the backbone of his campaign has been the Fiscal Wake-up Tour, a traveling roadshow of economists and budget analysts who share Walker's concern for the nation's budgetary future.
"You can't solve a problem until the majority of the people believe you have a problem that needs to be solved," Walker says.
Polls suggest that Americans have only a vague sense of their government's long-term fiscal prospects. When pollsters ask Americans to name the most important problem facing America today -- as a CBS News/New York Times poll of 1,131 Americans did in September -- issues such as the war in Iraq, terrorism, jobs and the economy are most frequently mentioned. The deficit doesn't even crack the top 10.
Yet on the rare occasions that pollsters ask directly about the deficit, at least some people appear to recognize it as a problem. In a survey of 807 Americans last year by the Pew Center for the People and the Press, 42 percent of respondents said reducing the deficit should be a top priority; another 38 percent said it was important but a lower priority.
So the majority of the public appears to agree with Walker that the deficit is a serious problem, but only when they're made to think about it. Walker's challenge is to get people not just to think about it, but to pressure politicians to make the hard choices that are needed to keep the situation from spiraling out of control.
To show that the looming fiscal crisis is not a partisan issue, he brings along economists and budget analysts from across the political spectrum. In Austin, he's accompanied by Diane Lim Rogers, a liberal economist from the Brookings Institution, and Alison Acosta Fraser, director of the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
"We all agree on what the choices are and what the numbers are," Fraser says.
Their basic message is this: If the United States government conducts business as usual over the next few decades, a national debt that is already $8.5 trillion could reach $46 trillion or more, adjusted for inflation. That's almost as much as the total net worth of every person in America -- Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and those Google guys included.
A hole that big could paralyze the U.S. economy; according to some projections, just the interest payments on a debt that big would be as much as all the taxes the government collects today.
And every year that nothing is done about it, Walker says, the problem grows by $2 trillion to $3 trillion.
People who remember Ross Perot's rants in the 1992 presidential election may think of the federal debt as a problem of the past. But it never really went away after Perot made it an issue, it only took a breather. The federal government actually produced a surplus for a few years during the 1990s, thanks to a booming economy and fiscal restraint imposed by laws that were passed early in the decade. And though the federal debt has grown in dollar terms since 2001, it hasn't grown dramatically relative to the size of the economy.
But that's about to change, thanks to the country's three big entitlement programs -- Social Security, Medicaid and especially Medicare. Medicaid and Medicare have grown progressively more expensive as the cost of health care has dramatically outpaced inflation over the past 30 years, a trend that is expected to continue for at least another decade or two.
And with the first baby boomers becoming eligible for Social Security in 2008 and for Medicare in 2011, the expenses of those two programs are about to increase dramatically due to demographic pressures. People are also living longer, which makes any program that provides benefits to retirees more expensive.
Medicare already costs four times as much as it did in 1970, measured as a percentage of the nation's gross domestic product. It currently comprises 13 percent of federal spending; by 2030, the Congressional Budget Office projects it will consume nearly a quarter of the budget.
Economists Jagadeesh Gokhale of the American Enterprise Institute and Kent Smetters of the University of Pennsylvania have an even scarier way of looking at Medicare. Their method calculates the program's long-term fiscal shortfall -- the annual difference between its dedicated revenues and costs -- over time.
By 2030 they calculate Medicare will be about $5 trillion in the hole, measured in 2004 dollars. By 2080, the fiscal imbalance will have risen to $25 trillion. And when you project the gap out to an infinite time horizon, it reaches $60 trillion.
Medicare so dominates the nation's fiscal future that some economists believe health care reform, rather than budget measures, is the best way to attack the problem.
"Obviously health care is a mess," says Dean Baker, a liberal economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think tank. "No one's been willing to touch it, but that's what I see as front and center."
Social Security is a much less serious problem. The program currently pays for itself with a 12.4 percent payroll tax, and even produces a surplus that the government raids every year to pay other bills. But Social Security will begin to run deficits during the next century, and ultimately would need an infusion of $8 trillion if the government planned to keep its promises to every beneficiary.
Calculations by Boston University economist Lawrence Kotlikoff indicate that closing those gaps -- $8 trillion for Social Security, many times that for Medicare -- and paying off the existing deficit would require either an immediate doubling of personal and corporate income taxes, a two-thirds cut in Social Security and Medicare benefits, or some combination of the two.
Why is America so fiscally unprepared for the next century? Like many of its citizens, the United States has spent the last few years racking up debt instead of saving for the future. Foreign lenders -- primarily the central banks of China, Japan and other big U.S. trading partners -- have been eager to lend the government money at low interest rates, making the current $8.5-trillion deficit about as painful as a big balance on a zero-percent credit card.
In her part of the fiscal wake-up tour presentation, Rogers tries to explain why that's a bad thing. For one thing, even when rates are low a bigger deficit means a greater portion of each tax dollar goes to interest payments rather than useful programs. And because foreigners now hold so much of the federal government's debt, those interest payments increasingly go overseas rather than to U.S. investors.
More serious is the possibility that foreign lenders might lose their enthusiasm for lending money to the United States. Because treasury bills are sold at auction, that would mean paying higher interest rates in the future. And it wouldn't just be the government's problem. All interest rates would rise, making mortgages, car payments and student loans costlier, too.
A modest rise in interest rates wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, Rogers said. America's consumers have as much of a borrowing problem as their government does, so higher rates could moderate overconsumption and encourage consumer saving. But a big jump in interest rates could cause economic catastrophe. Some economists even predict the government would resort to printing money to pay off its debt, a risky strategy that could lead to runaway inflation.
Macroeconomic meltdown is probably preventable, says Anjan Thakor, a professor of finance at Washington University in St. Louis. But to keep it at bay, he said, the government is essentially going to have to renegotiate some of the promises it has made to its citizens, probably by some combination of tax increases and benefit cuts.
But there's no way to avoid what Rogers considers the worst result of racking up a big deficit -- the outrage of making our children and grandchildren repay the debts of their elders.
"It's an unfair burden for future generations," she says.
You'd think young people would be riled up over this issue, since they're the ones who will foot the bill when they're out in the working world. But students take more interest in issues like the Iraq war and gay marriage than the federal government's finances, says Emma Vernon, a member of the University of Texas Young Democrats.
"It's not something that can fire people up," she says.
The current political climate doesn't help. Washington tends to keep its fiscal house in better order when one party controls Congress and the other is in the White House, says Sawhill.
"It's kind of a paradoxical result. Your commonsense logic would tell you if one party is in control of everything they should be able to take action," Sawhill says.
But the last six years of Republican rule have produced tax cuts, record spending increases and a Medicare prescription drug plan that has been widely criticized as fiscally unsound. When President Clinton faced a Republican Congress during the 1990s, spending limits and other legislative tools helped produce a surplus.
So maybe a solution is at hand.
"We're likely to have at least partially divided government again," Sawhill said, referring to predictions that the Democrats will capture the House, and possibly the Senate, in next month's elections.
But Walker isn't optimistic that the government will be able to tackle its fiscal challenges so soon.
"Realistically what we hope to accomplish through the fiscal wake-up tour is ensure that any serious candidate for the presidency in 2008 will be forced to deal with the issue," he says. "The best we're going to get in the next couple of years is to slow the bleeding."
Maui, after watching or listening to the world series for about 60 years I believe that the Detroit Tigers are the best team the world has ever seen in imitating the Keystone Kops.
Jonathan Lebed: Stock Manipulator, S.E.C. Nemesis -- and 15, he's 21 now'days. but this is from 2000. He must of been a genius to do this or maybe I'm unaware how big and popular the stock market was in 2000?
He wrote this in reply to the SEC: "I was going over some old press releases about different companies. The best performing stock in 1999 on the Nasdaq was Qualcomm (QCOM). QCOM was up around 2000% for the year. On December 29th of last year, even after QCOM's run from 25 to 500, Paine Webber analyst Walter Piecky came out and issued a buy rating on QCOM with a target price of 1,000. QCOM finished the day up 156 to 662. There was nothing fundamentally that would make QCOM worth 1,000. There is no way that a company with sales under $4 billion, should be worth hundreds of billions. . . . QCOM has now fallen from 800 to under 300. It is no longer the hot play with all of the attention. Many people were able to successfully time QCOM and make a lot of money. The ones who had bad timing on QCOM, lost a lot of money.
"People who trade stocks, trade based on what they feel will move and they can trade for profit. Nobody makes investment decisions based on reading financial filings. Whether a company is making millions or losing millions, it has no impact on the price of the stock. Whether it is analysts, brokers, advisors, Internet traders, or the companies, everybody is manipulating the market. If it wasn't for everybody manipulating the market, there wouldn't be a stock market at all. . . ."
'Queen of the Internet' bares all POSTED: 9:50 a.m. EST, October 31, 2006
LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- She's been heralded for years as the most downloaded person on the Internet, which means... aw, heck, you know what it means. People love looking at Cindy Margolis.
What it hasn't meant, all these years, though, as all those millions of lookers know, is seeing even one picture of this 21st-century pinup queen without at least a little something covering her.
No longer.
At 40, Margolis, who has been titillating fans since she was an undergrad at Cal State Northridge with her own line of greeting cards, has posed very au natural for Playboy. The December issue, with her on the cover, hits newsstands Friday. The pages of pictures on the inside leave nothing to the imagination.
It was for a good cause, Margolis explained when The Associated Press caught up with her, fully clothed, at her home in Tarzana.\
i thought some of you might find this a very good article for those who also have retirement accounts, some excellent new ETF products and i like the author (Jonathan Hoenig from fox bulls and bears - i love this guy, smart mofo). personally i have been looking thru the various commodity etf's(hence how i found this article) and this DJP commodity etf is the best for commodity diversification(all the others are too energy weighted)
ps - for those who remember their Economics classes, the currency carry trade is a strategy used by every int'l country and major bank and some of the smartest hedge funds and is one of the best ways i have seen to have a portion of your retirement income uncorrelated to equity for diversification and as u can see by the historical returns its very strong (this isnt some new whizbang sector fund or something, this strategy has been around forever just couldnt implement it w/o lots of money and a currency trading account until now)..im going to do some more research on it : http://dbcfund.db.com/Pdfs/DBV_Fact_Sheet.pdf
hopefully everyone has a portion of their assets for retirement that they dont trade with and are focused on long-term.....and i am not advocating throwing 80% of portfolio in commodities,etc...but i like diversification
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