In Search of the Perfect Investment

Predictable and wonderfully sweet. Susan walks into my home office early yesterday morning and gives me the family birthday present — a handsome 32 GB WiFi iPad. It says it needs charging. I charge all day. I feel virtuous.

By yesterday evening after the ballet, I do step 2 — plug into iTunes. I register with Apple.  Step 3. I agree to receive promo material till the day I die. Then it tried to transfer my good stuff — music, movies, podcasts and photos — from my Windows PC  to my old iPad. That was when I got this friendly popup:

The iPad ‘Harry Newton’s iPad” cannot be synced. An internal device error has occurred.

That’s it. The message gives vagueness a whole new meaning.

Apple.com has “support.” But no mention of this message. I Google the message. Nothing useful. Apparently no one in the entire world has seen this error message.

Of the two million iPads sold worldwide, I got the only busted one!

And, to think, that yesterday I was ragging on Microsoft and its Windows 7. To Microsoft’s credit, I can type a note on Windows 7. I can’t type diddly on my new iPad.

Ultra-high yielders revisited and expanded. Readers are enthusiastic about high-yielders. There are four categories:

1. Bonds.

2. Bond funds. See categories two and three below.

3. Preferred stocks. (Basically bonds.) No listed below.

4. Stocks. Not all high yielders are in danger of cutting their dividends — e.g BP. Most are in good shape. And many don’t fluctuate widely in price. Which makes them ideal for writing covered calls on — and juicing up your return even more. Remember when you write a covered call, you keep the dividends.  More on this later.

Meantime, one reader extols this site Dividend.com. He says the annual subscription is a bargain.

Here’ my list from yesterday of high yielders expanded by reader input. This list deserves your serious attention.

Why I won’t invest in banks. Figure there’s $1.4 trillion of loans to commercial real estate coming due between now and 2013. Most of the loans were made at 75% to 80% of the “value”of the property  at that time. That value has now fallen 40% to 50%. This means all the equity in the loans is gone and a good piece of the value of the loan.  If the banks foreclosed and sold the properties today, they’d lose as much as 40% of the money they’re owed.

But the banks aren’t foreclosing today because the loans are “performing”  — the banks  are receiving their monthly payments from the borrower. The banks don’t have to report problems on their balance sheets because the loans are performing.

The original business model for all this real estate insanity was called refinancing. Buy something today with a short-term loan. When the loan comes due in the next few years — commercial loans are typically short-term — the borrower expected he could refinance the expiring loan with a new loan.

That won’t now be possible, since the property’s value has declined. And the money the property owner  could then borrow will be much less than the amount of the loan coming due. Perhaps half.

This is a ticking time bomb for the banks. Most are choosing to ignore the problem since the loans are presently “performing.” They are great believers in The Pregnant Woman Hope Theory, as in the story of the pregnant girl who rubs vanishing cream on her stomach cream in the hope the problem will go away. The banks hope rents will rise to their old 2007 levels, and people will flock to hotels and vacation resorts.

Hope is a wonderful investment strategy.

Technically, most of our banks are bankrupt. Fortunately, we have the largest believer in The Hope Theory, namely our Federal government.

Nassim Taleb on Risk and Robustness. For the inaugural video in the New Yorker Currents series, Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks with James Surowiecki (a favorite author) about the causes of the 2008 financial crisis and the future of the economy. Click here. More on Taleb here.

Australian Comics Clarke and Dawe Explain the European Economic Crisis. Now all is explained.

For the hilarious video (send it to all your friends), click here.

After the tornado in Boston.

Yesterday: My daughter, Claire,  gets crazy on husband Ted (my son-in-law).

“You have to fix the door. It’s leaking rainwater into the house.”

Ted: “But we were going to talk about this. Why the sudden urgency this morning?”

Claire: “Because it’s been a week since the tornado and the door still isn’t fixed.”

Offending door taken with Ted’s BlackBerry

Ted is on his way home to fix door when he calls me on his cell phone and explains  his plight. It was all my fault, since I  had taught her the ways of urgency.

I suggested to Ted that  he not become unhinged over the door. (Bad pun.)

Ted replied he thought they might be the problem.

To further calm him, I reminded him that When God closes a door, He opens a window.

Ted replied, “I think we got to fix them too.”

Harry Newton,who marvels on the monster he’s created in daughter Claire.

Accompanying Ted’s emailed door picture were these plaintive words, “Sorry. This camera is sh!t, but here you go. Please send me intended copy because I enjoy being married to your daughter and I don’t want to jeopardize that.”

Everyone should be so lucky to have such a son-in-law.

Son-in-law Ted. Handsome and caring, too. Good package.