In Search of the Perfect Investment

Is investing “right” for you? Lately it’s been awful. My picks have largely been working. My portfolio of long and short equities is making a few bucks.Nice bucks.

Yet I’m not happy. I worry will it suddenly turn on me?  And I’ll lose all my gains, especially in those mortgage REITs, which half my readers are convinced of are a POS (piece of sh*t.)

Life is weird.

This market is holding in. Friends are makig shekels with BuyWrites — buy the stock, write calls on it. and SellWrites, selling puts. Need to investigate the many and various strategies in options. The returns seem to be much more quantifiable than simply owning long or short.

This week a big block of Facebook comes due for selling. I think it will put more pressure on the stock. I don’t see the BestBuy founder securing enough finance to buy back the company. That will put pressure on the stock also. Two nice shorts.

Michael R. Bloomberg in Bloomberg View on immigration as an economic issue. The New York City mayor writes that immigration reform is an issue for Democrats and Republicans to convene around, not a partisan talking point. Immigration reform is “the single most important step the federal government could take to bolster the economy,” he writes. Citing various studies, Bloomberg says immigrants create businesses, jobs, and revitalize cities as a result. One solution: Demand that the election frames immigration’s role in the economy. “To remain great, we must remain a nation of immigrants,” he writes. “To do otherwise would betray not only our heritage, but also our future.”

I’m a happy immigrant that apparently did some good.  One year I paid the U.S. Government $40 million in taxes. (And I never got a thank-you.)

For Bloomberg’s entire article, click here.

Before you embrace cloud computing, recognize my warning: It often sucks. You can work “in the cloud, have your Internet connection die, or your cloud provider glitch and unhappily lose everything . It happened to me again this morning. I write this column using WordPress in the cloud on a far distant provider. It glitched this morning and I lost 15 minutes of brilliance. Worse, many cloud providers don’t even back their own servers up. While you might think the cloud provider you’re using is ultra-safe, he’s actually less safe than you working on your local laptop and backing your brilliance up onto a local external USB hard drive.

I don’t make this stuff up. I read a lot of computer and networking magazines and web sites. And the latest furor has been over flimsy cloud server sites that bill themselves as ultra-safe, but aren’t.

Favorite pictures.

Harry Newton who warns you to get a colonscopy and have your skin checked by a dermatologist. I have recently lost friends to skin and bowel cancer — both of which were preventable — had they bothered being checked. But they didn’t because they were stubborn and stupid. But they didn’t deserve to die. Neither do you.

I put politics on the bottom of this column because my views on politics irritate too many readers. My Republican readers think I’m a left-wing pinko New York liberal who wants to take all their money and fund do-gooder pograms that will benefit lazy, dishonest people. My Democratic readers haven’t figured me out since I keep talking about new business startups efficiency, and making programs accountable and measurable. For fear of offending everyone, here’s a few simple takes:

+ Paul Ryan is good for the stockmarket. He and Romney talk about not raising taxes, cutting onerous regulations, reducing government’s size and getting things moving. Good positive words.

+ The election is scheduled to be about jobs. But it’s likely to be about war with Iran. Israel’s leaders are frightened and obsessed with Iran’s nuclear bomb. They believe Iran will use it on them. The world has lived with multiple countries with nuclear bombs for over 70 years. So far, no one (except us) has used the bomb. The threat of retaliation and the leaders’ belief in their own survival has kept things quiet. Even during the depths of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis, Russia kept its nukes at bay. Israel believes that Iranian leaders are looking for a quick trip to martyrdom.  Iran denies it has the bomb or is seeking it, but won’t let the outside world in to check. Israel persists with its obsession and preparation. Romney said he’ll support Israel. Obama will have no choice. Bloomberg has a story this morning “Israel Plans Iran Strike; Citizens Say Government Serious.” Click here.

Meantime, the only thing we as rational voters can do is to focus on the plans they’re presenting us. Ryan’s are the most detailed. David Stockman was the director of the Office of Management and Budget from 1981 to 1985, Ronald Reagan was president. Two days Stockman published this article:

Paul Ryan’s Fairy-Tale Budget Plan
PAUL D. RYAN is the most articulate and intellectually imposing Republican of the moment, but that doesn’t alter the fact that this earnest congressman from Wisconsin is preaching the same empty conservative sermon.

Thirty years of Republican apostasy – a once grand party’s embrace of the welfare state, the warfare state and the Wall Street-coddling bailout state – have crippled the engines of capitalism and buried us in debt. Mr. Ryan’s sonorous campaign rhetoric about shrinking Big Government and giving tax cuts to “job creators” (read: the top 2 percent) will do nothing to reverse the nation’s economic decline and arrest its fiscal collapse.

Mr. Ryan professes to be a defense hawk, though the true conservatives of modern times – Calvin Coolidge, Herbert C. Hoover, Robert A. Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, even Gerald R. Ford – would have had no use for the neoconconservative imperialism that the G.O.P. cobbled from policy salons run by Irving Kristol’s ex-Trotskyites three decades ago. These doctrines now saddle our bankrupt nation with a roughly $775 billion “defense” budget in a world where we have no advanced industrial state enemies and have been fired (appropriately) as the global policeman.

Indeed, adjusted for inflation, today’s national security budget is nearly double Eisenhower’s when he left office in 1961 (about $400 billion in today’s dollars) – a level Ike deemed sufficient to contain the very real Soviet nuclear threat in the era just after Sputnik. By contrast, the Romney-Ryan version of shrinking Big Government is to increase our already outlandish warfare-state budget and risk even more spending by saber-rattling at a benighted but irrelevant Iran.

Similarly, there can be no hope of a return to vibrant capitalism unless there is a sweeping housecleaning at the Federal Reserve and a thorough renunciation of its interest-rate fixing, bond buying and recurring bailouts of Wall Street speculators. The Greenspan-Bernanke campaigns to repress interest rates have crushed savers, mocked thrift and fueled enormous overconsumption and trade deficits.

The greatest regulatory problem – far more urgent that the environmental marginalia Mitt Romney has fumed about – is that the giant Wall Street banks remain dangerous quasi-wards of the state and are inexorably prone to speculative abuse of taxpayer-insured deposits and the Fed’s cheap money. Forget about “too big to fail.” These banks are too big to exist – too big to manage internally and to regulate externally. They need to be broken up by regulatory decree. Instead, the Romney-Ryan ticket attacks the pointless Dodd-Frank regulatory overhaul, when what’s needed is a restoration of Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era legislation that separated commercial and investment banking.

Mr. Ryan showed his conservative mettle in 2008 when he folded like a lawn chair on the auto bailout and the Wall Street bailout. But the greater hypocrisy is his phony “plan” to solve the entitlements mess by deferring changes to social insurance by at least a decade.

A true agenda to reform the welfare state would require a sweeping, income-based eligibility test, which would reduce or eliminate social insurance benefits for millions of affluent retirees. Without it, there is no math that can avoid giant tax increases or vast new borrowing. Yet the supposedly courageous Ryan plan would not cut one dime over the next decade from the $1.3 trillion-per-year cost of Social Security and Medicare.

Instead, it shreds the measly means-tested safety net for the vulnerable: the roughly $100 billion per year for food stamps and cash assistance for needy families and the $300 billion budget for Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor and disabled. Shifting more Medicaid costs to the states will be mere make-believe if federal financing is drastically cut.

Likewise, hacking away at the roughly $400 billion domestic discretionary budget (what’s left of the federal budget after defense, Social Security, health and safety-net spending and interest on the national debt) will yield only a rounding error’s worth of savings after popular programs (which Republicans heartily favor) like cancer research, national parks, veterans’ benefits, farm aid, highway subsidies, education grants and small-business loans are accommodated.

Like his new boss, Mr. Ryan has no serious plan to create jobs. America has some of the highest labor costs in the world, and saddles workers and businesses with $1 trillion per year in job-destroying payroll taxes. We need a national sales tax – a consumption tax, like the dreaded but efficient value-added tax – but Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan don’t have the gumption to support it.

The Ryan Plan boils down to a fetish for cutting the top marginal income-tax rate for “job creators” – i.e. the superwealthy – to 25 percent and paying for it with an as-yet-undisclosed plan to broaden the tax base. Of the $1 trillion in so-called tax expenditures that the plan would attack, the vast majority would come from slashing popular tax breaks for employer-provided health insurance, mortgage interest, 401(k) accounts, state and local taxes, charitable giving and the like, not to mention low rates on capital gains and dividends. The crony capitalists of K Street already own more than enough Republican votes to stop that train before it leaves the station.

In short, Mr. Ryan’s plan is devoid of credible math or hard policy choices. And it couldn’t pass even if Republicans were to take the presidency and both houses of Congress. Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan have no plan to take on Wall Street, the Fed, the military-industrial complex, social insurance or the nation’s fiscal calamity and no plan to revive capitalist prosperity – just empty sermons.

A reader sent me the article. I wrote him back:

The article is good. And it addresses the key issues. But some of the words are little too “political” for my taste. What I mean is that I prefer writing which is plain, simple and addresses the issues cleanly. Short, easy words, spelling out the numbers, the facts, etc.Show me the additions, subtractions and bottom line.

Too much of what both the Obama team and now the Romney/Ryan team is aimed at populist rhetoric designed to win votes – but not to clarify the issues with assumptions, facts and figures.

Am I wrong?

Am I?