The Battle of GameStop

If you ever want it explained to you about Wall Street or unregulated capitalism, I find it helpful to refer to gangster movies.

Want to understand how insurance works? Watch Goodfellas.

Want to understand hostile takeovers? Watch The Godfather.

Want to understand corporate espionage and insider trading? Watch The Departed (or an actual movie about Wall Street crimes, Wolf of Wall Street).

Want to understand shorting stocks? Here's the opening bit to Miller's Crossing:

It's gettin' so a businessman can't expect no return from a fixed fight. Now if you can't trust a fix, what can you trust? - Johnny Caspar

What's happening in the real world is that the stock markets are reeling from a running gambit that hedge funds (Think billionaire vultures) had been using of "Shorting" the stock value of a retail company GameStop (Remember Blockbuster Video? GameStop is kind of like them but selling video games instead of movie rentals) for quick profits, only to get exposed by Reddit (social media) investors realizing those hedge funds overextended themselves (took on massive debts to pull off the Short) to where they were vulnerable to "Squeezing" (artificially raising the value of the Shorted stock so that the hedge funds can't turn a profit).

In short: The hedge funds are Johnny Caspar trying to make money off a fixed fight, only for Bernie (the horde of small investors) to flip the fix to make money while Caspar eats the losses.

For more details, let's go to Derek Thompson at The Atlantic for his take:

...To see how the whole thing went down, imagine a kind of misshapen nesting-doll set with four characters: GameStop, hedge funders, Reddit traders, and zillions of retail investors.

At the center is GameStop, which is not a great company. In 2019, the strip-mall fixture lost almost $500 million. In 2020, a pandemic forcibly shut down many of its stores and gutted its revenue...

I don't blame GameStop: they didn't ask to get Shorted by the big hedge funds like Melvin Capital (wait, seriously, they named themselves Melvin??? What the hell, was "Eagle Fang" already taken or something?).

One layer up, you have institutional investors, such as hedge funds, which “shorted” GameStop, or bet that the value of the stock would decline. Depending on how you look at it, short sellers are heroes of capitalism identifying rotten companies and industries on the verge of collapse, or they’re corrupt worrywarts picking on lovable, vulnerable firms. Either way, GameStop was one of the more popular targets of these hero-villains. By one metric, the company was the second-most-shorted firm out of more than 6,000 companies listed in the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. If GameStop’s stock continued to fall, as it had consistently since 2013, hedge funds that had bet against the company would have gotten even richer than they already are...

Thompson doesn't seem to recognize the pattern of rich-brat bullying underlying the way the hedge funds were picking on GameStop. I highlighted the part he's ignoring as a sign that Melvin and the other investment groups weren't using Shorting tactics to weed out bad companies: The hedge funds enjoyed having an easy target like GameStop around to Short in order to generate billions in profits with little risk (because Shorting is a fixed fight). But risk did show up:

But they didn’t. That’s because, as short sellers were targeting GameStop, online investors were cooking up ways to target the short sellers. A band of Reddit users, led by a trader who goes by the YouTube name “Roaring Kitty,” had for months been eyeing GameStop as a tasty investment. Over the course of several months, they spelled out a detailed plan to buy up GameStop’s stock and push up the price, punishing the hedge funds and forcing them to cover their position by rushing to buy back shares, which would push up the stock’s value even more. This is called a “short squeeze,” and it seems to have served at least two purposes for the Reddit investors: sticking it to hedge funds and getting a little rich. Both happened. One hedge fund, Melvin Capital Management, has lost at least $2 billion, while Roaring Kitty is now estimated to have made more than $13 million on his GameStop investment...

What happened at the social media level was akin to a revolution, a sort of Occupy Wall Street where instead of protesting in the streets the lower rungs of society entered the trading floor to beat the rich kids at their own game. It not only brought about financial ruin for Melvin (with rumors of filing for bankruptcy because its debts on those Shorting deals are due soon) but sent much of Wall Street into a collective panic. If the day traders and middle-class self-taught investors can spot a Short taking place, any quick-rich plan to Short a company for billions is now at risk of getting Squeezed. Back to Thompson:

Maybe the only long-term outcome of the GameStop fiasco is that hedge funds will be more cautious about establishing enormous short positions in cheap brand-name companies, and investors will learn that stock manias, like memes, disappear as quickly as they go viral. Perhaps all we’ll remember from the past week is that a few hedge funds’ greedy doltishness accidentally helped mint some Robinhood millionaires, while a bunch of latecomers set their money on fire for lolz.

But something tells me that we’re at the dawn of something stranger. For a week, takes have flown wildly around the internet that tried to capture this saga in a tweet. The investor and former Trump White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci compared what we’re seeing now to the “French Revolution of finance,” with an army of scrappy traders engaged in a moral uprising. Others worried that the GameStop bubble was turning into a collectivized Ponzi scheme, in which innocents were being lured into a ruse that would take all their money after the market corrected. Given that online trading has been restricted and the company’s stock is now in a free fall, both the Mooch and the Debbie Downers might be right...

What Thompson refers to is how Robinhood, the brokerage site that started this Squeeze play, stopped all trading on GameStop and other Shorted stocks like AMC Theaters, preventing the investors from doing what they wanted (to either sell themselves before the artificial high prices dropped, or to buy even more to squeeze the hedge funds into full bankruptcy). That freeze turned a revolution into a meltdown, leading to one class action lawsuit already. There's a likelihood the Squeeze was as rigged as the Short.

We're witnessing in real-time the public exposure of one of Wall Street's greediest tricks (market manipulations) at the expense of the common ground-floor investor getting screwed either way.

In some respects, it's a damn good thing there are reform-minded Democrats now in charge of Congress to investigate this whole shell game. Have at 'em, Liz Warren and Maxine Waters. I hope you root out the whole rotten gang of greedheads.

Why America Is Reopening Its Doors for Hell

Update: Thanks again to Batocchio at Crooks & Liars for adding this blog to Mike's Blog Round-Up! I hope everyone's safe and doing their bit to reduce the risks of coronavirus, and for the LOVE OF GOD STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN...

There is a push right now across a lot of states - after six weeks of Stay-At-Home practices attempting to reduce the spread of COVID-19 - to reopen certain public places (like beaches) and certain businesses (like restaurants) even though the evidence is there that the United States is not in a safe place itself in terms of managing the health care response to the coronavirus.

Why are we even considering putting more customer service and other at-risk workers in harm's way?

1) States cannot cope with their overwhelmed unemployment benefits programs.

Much like Florida, collapsing under the weight of having more than 20 percent of the workforce dropping onto a benefits program that was underfunded and mismanaged to begin with, other states cannot cope with the overwhelming reality of that many people requiring aid all at once, and most of them needing that aid for more months than the state politicians do not want to contemplate. Iowa is doing it, Texas is doing it, Georgia is doing it... To quote the Reuters article by Andy Sullivan:

State unemployment laws generally do not allow workers to collect jobless benefits if they refuse work available to them, said Thomas Smith, an associate professor at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. That could force workers in Georgia back to their jobs at a time when it is not clear whether the risk of infection has abated, he said.

“You’re asking people to put their life on the line,” he said. “These people aren’t Army Rangers - those people signed up for combat. A barber did not...”

Some critics say the state’s early reopening is an attempt to push people out of a safety-net system that is straining state finances.

“I think that one of the big drivers of this decision by Kemp is to get people off unemployment rolls and having the private sector keeping these people afloat,” said Georgia employment lawyer James Radford...

Some Georgia businesses are opting not to open at all at this point due to employees’ safety concerns.

At Manuel’s Tavern in Atlanta, general manager Steve Pitts said he and many of staffers are reluctant to come back to work while the pandemic is still not contained. The restaurant remains closed for now.

“I have a daughter and I want to be around for her,” said Pitts, 53. “It’s still too dangerous...”

2) States are terrified of the loss of their tax revenues, due to the drop of sales taxes that would be coming from many of those closed businesses.

Unlike the federal government - which can operate with large deficits no matter how much the Far Right scream about it - state governments ARE required in one form or another to stay within means (some have balanced budget amendments written into their constitutions). As a result, they rely a lot on local revenue either in the form of income (and corporate income) tax and sales tax... both of which are getting hit hard during Stay-At-Home policies. While incomes can remain relatively stable  (most people still self-employed or working at-home can generate that) it's the sales tax part - from restaurants, clothing stores/gift shops, the drop in gas purchases, even a drop in grocery buying, movies and theater entertainment, theme parks, hotels (a lot of tourist-heavy states like Florida have been upping hospitality taxes for a long time), everything else - that's being lost every day that every store front, park gate, and eatery dining room is closed.

This one is a genuine (read: non-partisan) problem. And without more aid from a federal government - Hi Mitch, you obstructionist bastard! - the states have no choice but to force businesses to re-open to try and regain some driblets of tax revenue.

3) And most annoying of all: Minor faction of wingnuts - pushing for "Freedom" when in fact they're marching and shouting in order to make Democrats look bad - hate the inconveniences they are suffering and cannot imagine the health risks that will get dumped onto most low-wage (and usually minority) workers. And so they're making enough noise about it to give their political leaders the excuse to re-open anyway.

Some of those wingnuts don't even believe this coronavirus is that bad compared to other diseases and causes of death floating out there. So what if COVID-19 is an extra 2-to-5 percent risk to your grandparents? Never mind the evidence by the by that this virus is lethal to ALL ages...

There are, however, solid and reasonable arguments for why we NEED to remain shut down and Stay-At-Home for at least the next few months:

A) We do not have enough test kits in place to effectively identify and quarantine affected people. Without that, the asymptomatic carriers of the virus can keep walking around for weeks before showing actual signs of COVID... and be contagious enough to spread the virus without warning to others. Every other country that's been containing the pandemic successfully have an aggressive testing system in place. WE DO NOT. Okay? trump is lying about the number of tests we have available. trump's entire administration is lying. trump is motherfucking lying.

We are going to spread this bug like a zombie plague: Fast, terrifying, and with a pile of bodies in its wake.

B) We do not have enough protective gear and cleaning supplies available. Between the lack of filtering masks, gloves, hand sanitizer and soap, and other required (PPE) items, a lot of employees at public places are going to get exposed. Our own hospitals are short on these supplies, often because trump's own FEMA people keep raiding our states for that equipment which then disappears into someone else's warehouses.

This is not even going into greater detail about the horrors of the food processing - especially the meat - industry with low-wage workers in close-contact, easily-contagious work areas. We're running both the risks of contaminated foods reaching us, but also losing enough workers both short and long-term to create shortages and a food crisis. The food companies are under pressure to stay operating but they don't have the protective gear and testing of staff to keep doing so. We won't see it now but it's coming in another month or two, when the grocery stores still open run out of steak and pork and fresh fruits.

C) We do not have a coordinated and effective health care system to handle a wide-spread pandemic. There are not enough hospital beds and rooms, there are not enough hospitals period in rural areas (and despite all the talk from Republicans and the Far Right about this, COVID is already in these rural Red states and spreading faster...). The lack of adequate funding - many rural states refused the Medicaid expansion of Obamacare, which meant those rural (and poor) hospitals had to close - over the last thirty years has finally caught up to us.

And yet here we are. Even Democratic-controlled states are looking into "soft openings" of certain industries. We're upping the risks and doing little in other ways to bring those risks back down.

The whole point - and effectiveness - of Stay-At-Home is to reduce the risks and "flatten the curve" of the way pandemics come and go. As long as we can keep the bell curve of infection rates/deaths relatively shallow, we're good. But if that bell-curve of infection is steeper than the tall side of a mountain, we are screwed.

And we are at the front-end of that curve. The infection numbers are still going up. We're behaving like we're at the tail-end of the curve when we're nowhere near it!

We are royally sickeningly fucked.

Some Thoughts This Monday Night March 2020

Images, by Tyrone Green Witty Librarian:

Look, I have a lot of schadenfreude watching the Dow Jones drop like a stone over the last month, but we're at the point - probably way past it - where a lot of middle-class 401k and mutual fund portfolios are getting nuked. Isn't there a way to close down the markets for two weeks, let things cool off, like the banking holiday FDR ordered back when he took office at the height of the Great Depression? Those trading floors will be one less place for people to pick up the COVID19.

My library closed to the public back on March 17, we spent the remainder of the week getting our holds into Books-by-Mail for those we could contact, the rest are stuck here until late April when we *hope* to re-open. We're still coming to work until further notice, depending on what the state does, and in the meantime we're using the closed time to re-arrange office space and catch up on paperwork. We DO have ebooks available through Overdrive...

Most libraries - public and college - have closed, almost all the schools have closed here in Florida... and yet our governor DeSantis, obsessing over the economic hit that would happen, isn't doing anything to get the state to block off the beaches and reduce public gatherings there. He's resisting calls for stronger "Shelter In Place" emergency orders to get more residents to stay at home and not spread contact by infectees. Even as we're getting a shitton of New Yorkers fleeing a locked-down New York City and bringing more infectees with them.

For all my science fiction/fantasy and horror readings, for growing up on Stephen King's The Stand, for all the zombie apocalypse movies I've seen, I still can't believe that when a global pandemic finally hit the first thing to go was all the toilet paper. (I kid. Hand sanitizer and eggs disappeared just as quick)

I just found out today that the TV show Supernatural predicted it back in 2009!

We're looking at a possibility of the number of people filing for unemployment - due to layoffs at a lot of tourism, travel, retail, education, restaurant/bar, luxury service jobs because we HAVE to avoid these places of business now - jumping into the 30 percent range during this month. We need to remember a few things: 1) unemployment figures relied a lot on people claiming that, which was lower than actual numbers that can no longer live off-the-books as it were 2) we're looking at a collapse of several industries that will take YEARS to recover meaning those numbers are going to stay up well into 2021 (and 2022 for that matter).
We are looking at both funding unemployment and other social aid services way more than we already are (which wasn't all that great to begin with), AND we are looking at the reality of a Universal Basic Income - a monthly payout by the federal government to help cover the basics like rent/mortgage and food - getting implemented for a long period of time (if not set up permanently). THIS means one thing: The Federal government has to pay for this, and our nation is going to HAVE to raise taxes on upper incomes to balance this out.

None of this would be happening if trump took his job seriously, recognized the warning signs from JANUARY, and prompted both Congress and the Executive branch into funding and manufacturing the medical supplies - not just masks and gloves but also ventilators and respirators - so that when we got to here in March we'd have the bare minimum of those supplies to keep our hospitals functioning. Instead for reasons of his own - either sheer laziness, ignorance of the severity, some twisted idea this crisis would work to his advantage this year of election - trump fiddled while Rome got burned.

Gods help us, this is where we're at tonight.

The Thing About Wall Street

It is in the nature of the stock markets to go up.

I'm not a full-on economic expert, I barely got out of college Econ 1101 with a C plus, but ny dad worked awhile as a broker and still invests to this day, so I have a small inkling of how it all works.

For starters, "Buy low and sell high."

/rimshot

Seriously, my observation about stock markets comes from even a cursory glance of any market chart. The Dow Jones, the one on Wall Street, the one most news services keeps an eye on, shows a near constant, relatively slow uphill climb going from left (past years) to right (current year).

From the Business Insider Markets site, tracking from 2010 to 2020

For what I know, it's a combination of factors.

The constant addition of startup companies and IPOs (Initial Public Offerings) as companies add themselves to the list, that a certain amount of investment gets pumping into the markets right there. The market goes up because the market is adding more publicly traded companies, that simple.

The ever-changing and growing industries, such as the entire Information Technology industry that overwhelmed the markets in the 1990s, expands the number of companies out there, creating a diverse investment field to build a portfolio that won't fall apart if just one industry has a bad year or overall downturn. A smart investor can use the minuses to balance out the pluses and keep boosting the values of the pluses.

Upon all that, a major shift of upper incomes directly using the capital gains on investments as their own income, increasingly separate from the original purpose - well, one of them - of the markets as a means to invest in capital and business growth. All a rich person has to do is put enough money into stocks, let the corporations boost their values through buybacks, and let those markets keep generating more money that quite honestly never existed before and isn't based on anything other than the hopes and predictions of the markets themselves.

It's all a wonderful illusion, when you look at it that way.

And it's an illusion that despite all the wealth and power that's tied into it, the stock markets are vulnerable to outside forces that can turn a steady uphill chart into a cliff of eternal peril.

That chart above is from the past ten years of the market from 2010 to 2020. Here's a chart from the past month:

Also from Business Insider Markets site, tracking from February to March

We've been witness to one of the greatest collapses in stock market history, not so much from trump's meddling with tariffs since 2018 that began the wobbly status the Dow is in now. Despite all of trump's worst efforts, the markets kept rebounding once they figured how to adjust to the Orange One's conniptions against China, Europe, and other trading markets.

No, this collapse is from the now-unavoidable Coronavirus pandemic, something that's been out there since December 2019 and something that trump's administration has been mishandling - through avoidance, lying, blame-shifting, and nonexistent planning - the government's response to a flu outbreak that is already disrupting every aspect of human life. Above all, trump's failure to prepare for trade to break down, medical supplies to dry up or run out, businesses to close due to declining patronage, people losing jobs as workplaces close, all of that.

The markets have been in shock since February, when it was clear the federal government wasn't prepared to handle the long-term implications of the pandemic. We've borne witness to some of the worst drops in the Dow Jones since 1987 (Black Monday) and 1929 (the first Big One)... almost all of them in the past ten days.

When trump took an Oath of Office he wasn't prepared to run back in January 2017, the Dow Jones was around 19,488 points, give or take an 8. As of tonight, it's at 20,188, to where we're one more bad trading away of watching every stock market gain made between 2017 to 2019 - where it reached the highs of 29,000 points - completely wiped out. For a man who brags about how the stock markets were doing thanks to the Republicans Tax Cut of 2017 - which turned into a sugar/cocaine/meth/steroid boost of greedy proportions - finding himself back to Obama levels (or falling even further) has to be a blow to that narcissistic Id of his.

And while the Futures are pointing to an up day tomorrow - because investors will try to buy stocks in companies while their values are lower, and they are desperate to make the markets go back up again - there's every sign the markets will keep dropping another day later because nearly every action trump's White House has done up to now hasn't helped. Every spike on that last month's chart was followed by more drops.

And things are poised to get worse.

What's happening to Wall Street right now hurts a bit, especially for people who ARE investing towards things like retirement and a modicum of personal fiscal stability. But this is just a sideshow to the rest of the world coping with a global pandemic.

The worst things are going to be happening to our families and those most vulnerable to the COVID19 virus (our kids and our grandparents), the worst things are going to be happening to our hospitals and medical workers and our emergency responders. The worst things are going to be happening to those forced to keep working in public, exposed to vectors, trying to keep the power on and the water running and the toilet paper shelves at the stores restocked.

This stuff with Wall Street is just one sign of how bad it's been and how bad it's going.

I don't want to show the charts of the infected and the dying. THAT'S too horrible to review...

Just Say "Inverted Yield Curve" To a Financier And Watch Them Scream

There's been growing reports over the past three months of red flags regarding the U.S. economy. 

The ongoing damage of trump's tariff wars starting to rattle the major banks.

The Gross Domestic Product has been underperforming, mostly due to trump's tariff demands.

And then, just yesterday we get the news that the short-term (two year) bonds are getting higher interest rates than the long-term (ten year) bonds. It's something called an "Inverted Yield Curve," meaning bond investors believe in getting their money now instead of later, suggesting a recession is unavoidable. 

The last time there was an Inverted Yield Curve? 2007, and all the fun THAT led to.

The stock markets pretty much tanked today in one of their worst performances in modern memory. Funny enough, today only ranked 4th worst. The other top five? All happened under trump as well.

The investors get it. They have to, it's how they keep their wallets full. There's a recession coming and it's no longer a question When it's a question of How Soon and How Painful.

A replay of the 2007 global economic collapse - only this time thanks to tariffs and Brexit - is quite likely.

Brief Thought on How to Label Rich Jerks

Idiot Billionaire Hoping To Save His Tax Cuts From Impending Progressive Passage of High Marginal Rates Doesn't Like Being Called a Billionaire (via Arwa Mahdawi of the Guardian).

When asked by New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin whether he thought billionaires had become too powerful in American life, the coffee magnate complained that “the moniker billionaire now has become the catchphrase”. Rather than using a word like billionaire to describe a person with billions of dollars, Schultz suggested it may be better to use expressions like “people of means” or “people of wealth”.

Poor Schultz. He was just trying to help us all out; generously digging into his rich vocabulary and spreading the semantic wealth. However, after footage of the interview went viral this week, the businessman has been mercilessly mocked. People of mean spirit have been suggesting their own alternatives to billionaire such as “robber barons”, “cash vampires”, and various other phrases that are probably too rude to repeat...

Yeah, I've probably repeated about twenty rude ones on Twitter just this weekend alone.

But let's play nice, shall we? Let's not go after the super-rich who are failing at noblesse oblige with the vindictive venom of French Revolutionaries.

If we're gonna label Billionaires for what they are, let's keep this professional yet accurate.

Let's call them:

Avarice Americans.

What, Schultz. You don't like that? You don't like getting called out for your greedy tax-dodging stealing-from-the-public ways?

Whadda ya gonna do, pay us to NOT insult you? You should. All of you Billionaires should tread lightly. There's 300 million of us and only 585 of you. I think we can take 'em in a fair fight.

On This Christmas Eve 2018

As I head out to a family gathering:

The stock markets are having their steepest decline in a single month in almost 15 years, with this December poised to wipe out nearly every stock gain since the GOP passed their tax-cut bill in mid-2017. This is what you get, Wall Street, for blindly accepting a bad businessman you KNEW was a bankrupt con artist all because he promised you massive tax cuts... that are now turning useless even for yourselves.

The federal government is in partial shutdown, still forcing thousands of federal employees to work without pay and even taking some away from planned vacations to cover for employees barred by rules to work during such things. Merry Christmas, Republican assholes!

trump himself is sitting alone in the White House, trapped by his shutdown stunt (and oddly enough not celebrating with any of his five kids: his wife Melania is traveling back from Mar-A-Lago to give him some company on Christmas Day itself but then will depart the next day) and whining like the spoiled brat he is. Every sign of his instability and willingness to bash at anything and everyone is getting more obvious... and of course nothing will be done about it by Republicans until it gets too worse even for them.

Other than that, America, all I got for you is this one True Meaning of Christmas:

DIE HARD IS A CHRISTMAS MOVIE AND DON'T YOU FORGET IT.

Welcome to the party, Hans!

This Day I Can't Even: December 20 2018 A Day Which Will Live in OMFG

I was going to write about things but other things kept popping up.

I was going to write about trump's ongoing tariff wars combined with market anxiety over oil, interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve, and growing concerns over a dysfunctional federal government had dropped the New York Stock Market deep into the red over the last two-three months and seriously deep over the past week.

I was going to write about the ongoing revelations in Mueller's Russia-trump Investigations, including how the judge overseeing Michael Flynn's plea agreement openly flipped out in court over Flynn's transgressions and accusing Flynn of treason, "You sold this country out!". Judge Sullivan walked it back later by noting treason only applies in times of war against a declared hostile foreign power, but still whatever the judge saw in the un-redacted portions of the plea deal made the judge recoil in horror.

I was going to write about the REAL power in the Republican Party wasn't trump or the deep pocket SuperPACs, but the Far Right Noise Machine of Limbaugh, Fox Not-News and assorted partners in crime. It's an open secret trump doesn't listen to advisors or experts, he listens to the ill-informed pundits on TV. Considering how the wingnut media has been berating trump for his failures to get his coveted trump Wall funded by Mexico Canada tariff hikes China the U.S. Defense budget American taxpayers...

I was going to write about how trump's sudden temper tantrum - spurred on by that Far Right Noise Machine on Fox & Friends - over getting HIS Wall built created a last-minute scramble by the outgoing Republican House to pass a new Continuing Resolution / Budget... with the glaring problems of A) the Republicans don't have the votes to support including $5 BILLION for the Wall, B) the Senate already passed a CR without it and will NOT be able to vote for a changed bill including it, C) half of the Republicans in Congress have ALREADY GONE HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS. We're essentially going to get a trump Shutdown after all...

But no, I get home today after a crazy day at work and get my dinner done and then I check Twitter and I see stuff about Secretary of Defense Mattis (the last Sane Man in trump's chaotic White House) RESIGNING FROM THE POST AND STEPPING DOWN SOME TIME IN FEBRUARY OMFG OMFG WE ARE SO DEAD THIS IS HORRIFYING WE ARE FORSAKEN BY THE OLD GODS AND NEW THIS NIGHT...

Oy. Seriously, this is a bad thing. Mattis is leaving under duress, no longer willing to abide by trump's unwillingness to listen to reason and trump's impulsive foreign policy moves such as the recent decision to withdraw (ABANDON) from Syria regarding the ongoing civil war/fight against ISIL. To refer to Adam L. Silverman at Balloon Juice about the Syrian withdrawal, this is how bad it's going to get:

The immediate, within 24 hour removal of State Department personnel, while not logistically difficult, is a huge issue. The personnel being withdrawn were working on the civilian side of the Stability Operations we are conducting. This includes the USAID personnel who are working with internally displaced Syrians, as well as refugees in the region and coordinating humanitarian relief and assistance with local NGOs and other local groups. The military withdrawal will, of course, take longer because it isn’t just removing personnel, but equipment, which will obviously take longer than 24 hours...

If we pull out there will be four immediate effects.

1. The collapse of the local stabilization we’re contributing to. This will result in increased internally displaced Syrians and Syrian refugees who will flee ahead of both Syrian and ISIS efforts to fill the vacuum the withdrawal will create.
2. As a result of the first effect, we will see an increased humanitarian crisis in the areas we withdraw from.
3. We will once again have abandoned the Kurds despite the promises we’ve made to them, which further diminishes the United States ability to exercise any form of national power (Diplomatic, Information, Military, Economic), because it further demonstrates that we can’t be trusted, won’t keep our word, and can’t be counted on.
4. The vacuum and destabilization created by the withdrawal will be filled by both Syrian forces and ISIS. They will move to occupy and control the areas we’ve left, will fight each other in them, and this will lead to further destabilization in Syria and, potentially, throughout the Levant. It creates new stresses, challenges, and threats for Iraq and Lebanon, as well as for Israel and Turkey even though both of those states have been pursuing their own interests in Syria. And because of increased refugee outflows, it will increase pressures and problems for our allies in the EU...

The upshot of all this: Russia profits because they keep their allies in Syria in power, Iran profits because they gain from the chaos of the civil war to retain control over Lebanon and keep Iraq destabilized, Turkey profits because the Kurds will become vulnerable again and lose any hope of establishing their own nation. The world has to cope with an escalation in refugees fleeing the war zones, which adds to the Far Right/Nationalist uprisings happening in Europe against that refugee crisis (again, benefiting Russia). All the U.S. will get out of it are the personnel coming back home, but with no guarantees we are leaving a stabilized, functioning Syria and nowhere near a stabilized Middle East. Essentially, we're giving up on trying to help the Syrian people, and that abandonment is going to make the U.S. more despised and disrespected on the global stage than ever before.

Mattis leaving now points to the recent Syria move as a major factor, although working for trump has clear soul-scarring issues that would drive any sane man to have left months ago (Mattis likely only took the job out of a sense of patriotic duty).

Silverman added a copy of Mattis' resignation letter at Balloon Juice - follow the link please - so you can read it and draw your own conclusions.

I've already drawn one conclusion from all this week (and it's not even Friday News Dump Day yet!):

The chaos of the trump Administration is going to destroy this nation. It's no longer a matter of IF it's a matter of WHEN, and that WHEN is now counted by days instead of weeks or months.

WE ARE SO VERY ROYALLY MUTHAFUCKING FUCKED.

It's days like this I *wish* I could drink Saturnalia wine...

Update: It's not so much that I believed Mattis was great as a Secretary of Defense, it's just that he did what he could to keep trump's partisan, unpredictable, and noticeably corrupted ideas away from influencing the military in ways that would have proven disastrous for the nation's well-being. In an administration full of corrupting individuals - some of whom are just now facing criminal investigations for the crimes they're committing in office - Mattis was one of the few who could have been trusted to serve the nation's interests and not trump's. We have no guarantee the next Defense Secretary is going to do that: For what we know, it's going to be a trump-suckup who'll willingly abuse the authority and power of our armed forces to serve trump's whims (and GOD KNOWS what they'll hand over to Putin)...

Things That Should Worry You: April 2018 Edition

Lessee:

The trump trade war against China is escalating, and while Wall Street is doing what it can to send up the red flags - by sliding into the red ink for most of last week - it looks like trump is going to keep pushing this agenda as far as he can take because he genuinely believes "trade wars are good and easy to win".

Try telling that to the farmers who export billions to China (via CNBC):

If China follows through on its plan to impose a 25 percent tariff on soybeans, it would make global suppliers like Brazil even more attractive to Chinese buyers. It also would encourage those suppliers to add more acres of soybeans, and then negatively impact the price American farmers can get for their crop...

The lion's share of the U.S. agribusiness trade to China involves soybeans, which are grown in many farm states where Trump received strong support during the 2016 presidential election. Top soybean growing states include Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Nebraska, Indiana, Missouri, Ohio and the Dakotas...

Experts say that if China cuts agricultural exports, it could impact a wide swath of the farm economy — from small to large farmers. It could reduce profits for farmers and make them more willing to delay large purchases, such as new machinery, and encourage them to cut back in other places...

This isn't three-dimensional chess, people: it's TEN-dimensional chess, and trump can't even figure out how the horsey pieces move.

Let's look at the other foreign policy nightmare that trump can't handle: Syria.

President Donald Trump is sounding off about an immediate withdrawal of US troops from Syria, according to multiple news reports published on Thursday (via Business Insider).

But the president reportedly faced some strong opposition from top military officials, including Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Joint Chiefs of Staff Joe Dunford, who warned Trump of the consequences of a rapid withdrawal, during a meeting on Tuesday...

During the meeting, Dunford reportedly said Trump's plan was not productive and asked the president for clear instructions on what to do, The Associated Press reported.

Mattis chimed in and argued that a quick pull-out would not only be detrimental to the US, but doing so in a responsible manner would be logistically impossible. Mattis reportedly suggested a one-year withdrawal timeframe instead.

Trump then countered and gave officials five to six months to destroy the Islamic State and then withdraw, officials told The Associated Press.

Trump also indicated that he expects the military to succeed in destroying ISIS by October...

Cadet Bone Spurs seems to think this is a World War II video game where the targets are easy to spot, the bad guys are all in one contained area, and all we have to do is use the God cheat code to reach the final cutscene.

trump shows no sign of understanding logistics - even our military with all its experience has to pace itself - and post-war rebuilding. One of the reasons why our military stayed so long in Iraq - and why we're still in Afghanistan - is because we had to commit to nation-building efforts to give the country an infrastructure to live off of. Without those reconstruction efforts, you leave the region to stew in its own rage and allow the bad guys like the Taliban and ISIL to seep back into the mess and start over.

Meanwhile, abandoning Syria like this reconfirms the hold Assad (and Russia) will keep on whatever is left standing of Syria while the terrorist factions claim all the broken parts. America (and the Middle East) loses in the short term and we will pay the price again in the long term.

This is what you voted for, 62 million Americans. You voted for the guy with NO foreign policy experience and TERRIBLE business history to manage this nation.

We are so very fucking screwed.

Trade War 2018 All In Red Ink

Lemme see if I can show you how today's stock markets are looking right about now (1 PM EDT):

Granted, the markets can still rebound towards the end of the day, but we're already 500 points in the hole on the Dow Jones, the S&P is in the red, Nasdaq is in the red, and I have no idea what that fourth one is but it's in the red too.

This is what it looks like, donald trump, when you start a trade war with China (via Business Insider):

US stocks tumbled Monday as President Donald Trump doubled down on his criticism of Amazon, sending technology and consumer discretionary stocks lower.

The selling also comes ahead of the Trump administration's plan to unveil this week the list of Chinese imports targeted for US tariffs. The list of $50-60 billion worth of annual imports is expected to target "largely high-technology" products.

The more tech-heavy Nasdaq 100— which has been a lightning rod for market volatility in recent weeks — plummeted as much as 3.3% to lead all major US indexes. Meanwhile, the benchmark S&P 500 dropped as much as 2%, and the 30-company Dow Jones industrial average slid more than 2.1% at one point.

Among the technology firms worst hit were chipmakers, including Lam Research, Micron Technology, Nvidia, Intel, and Cisco, which all dropped at least 3.7%. Note that due to their position in supply chain, these firms are more vulnerable to geopolitical turmoil, particularly as it pertains to China...

If you remember the last time the stock market nose-dived like this about a month ago, that related to trump's announcement to place tariffs on steel and aluminum. This is merely Phase Two, where the other nations start responding to trump's stupidity on trade, meaning we're about to see a lot more red on the stock tickers. To CNN for this part:

The Chinese government said that tariffs on about $3 billion worth of US imports are going into effect Monday, hitting 128 products ranging from pork, meat and fruit to steel pipes...

...China's commerce and finance ministries said in statements late Sunday that authorities are imposing tariffs of 15% on 120 American products — such as fruits, nuts, wine and steel pipes — and 25% on eight other products, including pork and recycled aluminum.

Those products make up just a tiny portion of the hundreds of billions of dollars of goods shipped between the two countries each year. But the tariffs are alarming news for the affected industries.

The US National Pork Producers Council warned last month that the measures would "have a significant negative impact on rural America." It said the US pork industry sold $1.1 billion worth of products to China last year, making it the third largest export market...

I think a lot of pork-related farming communities are about to regret voting for trump in the next thirty days...

Also, trump's war against Amazon - because CEO Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post - isn't doing the stock market any favors, adding onto the growing economic imbalance that is going to affect the national (and global) economy for the worse.

Don't forget how much of a "genius" this trump guy is: "Trade wars are good, and easy to win."

All that red on the spreadsheets. Even a C-student in Econ 1101 from UF can tell you that's not winning.

Right about now, I would encourage the Wharton School of Business to revoke trump's degree in Economics, because he has clearly not earned it.

Welcome to the Trade Wars.

One Two trump Four Let's Have Ourselves a Trade War

I wrote what felt like ages ago a What If scenario of what trump's first year of a presidency would look like. Actually it was in February 2016. What happened was two months later the Boston Globe went and did their own predictions, and I kinda felt like bragging that I had gotten there first.

But the Globe beat me at considering one disaster that I had overlooked: the likelihood that trump would start some kind of trade war - especially with China - as part of trump's nationalist-populist agenda to take America back to an age of protectionism and high tariffs.

Well, it didn't happen in trump's first year - although there were moments he threatened to roll something out - but hey, now that trump is at a stage where his entire administration is falling apart, why not go the extra mile and wreck the economy by boosting tariffs on steel and aluminum?

Via CNBC:

President Donald Trump's plan to slap tariffs on foreign aluminum and steel could help U.S. producers, but it could also fuel inflation, slow the economy and trigger other retaliatory actions against U.S. industries, analysts said.

These fears weighed on stocks, and the market sold off sharply after initially flip-flopping amid confusion over whether there would be an announcement or not. But stocks sold off sharply when Trump surprised the markets and announced a 25 percent tariff on steel and a 10 percent tariff on aluminum.

"One of the largest fears we have is we've got tariffs. We could have trade wars, and it could blow up NAFTA negotiations, and nobody wins a trade war," said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley FBR.

The Dow closed down 420 points to 24,608, and the S&P 500 slid 1.3 percent to 2,677. The move was viewed as one of the most protectionist actions from the Trump administration, and it is one of his policies that has most worried markets, even as stocks have rallied on tax reform and his other pro-growth policies.

"Tariffs would probably have the unfortunate effect of both slowing growth and accelerating inflation, and that's not a good thing," said Ward McCarthy, chief financial economist at Jefferies. "For this economy, this is the worst possible time to be doing that."

The effects of what trump proposes won't just have a negative effect on the stock market.

I could link you to other economic pundits - say Anne Lowry at the Atlantic or David Lynch at the Washington Post - but let me have a go at it. Me, a barely-competent person at finances who got a C in Economics 1101 back at Gainesville (GO GATORS) in 1990 or so.

How trump's tariffs proposal are gonna suck:

• The tariffs are like a tax on the items in question, meaning the costs on these items will go up. While the steel mills may see more profits out of it, all of the other industries that build using steel will have to pay more and will pass those costs onto the consumers, namely us. I'm seeing reports of how this will affect the automakers, especially the ones here in the U.S. I just spotted a report from Coors about how this will affect their beer canning. These tariffs do not happen in a vacuum: Every other industry that relies on cheap materials for cheap products will have to make those products more expensive to us consumers. And those industries will see their profits decline, leading to lost jobs and a downward cycle.
• The tariffs will spark a trade war, and not just against countries who compete against us but also our allies. Other countries will not like having access to a solid market like ours curtailed with a tax on steel as steep as a 25 percent increase. The early observations was that trump wants this trade war as a way of attacking China, but on steel I'm finding out the nation getting hit hardest is going to be CANADA: Canada ships us about 11 percent of imported steel while China ships less than Germany (3 percent). Canada just happens to be one of our biggest trading partners, and also our sole neighboring nation to the North. PISSING THEM OFF IS NOT A GOOD IDEA, EH?
• Tariffs make economies worse, not better. And this one I learned from watching Ben Stein in that Ferris Bueller movie:

While Smoot-Hawley wasn't the prime cause of the Great Depression, it did make things worse.

Just on those three points alone that I can think up off the top of my head - coming from a C-grade economics student - I've made salient arguments why tariffs need to be treated with more subtlety and finesse (say, very minimal increases on a tariff while pursuing connected policies that would alleviate any negative responses). Instead, here comes the ole Shitgibbon with a sledgehammer looking to start a fight with some of the largest economic powerhouses on the planet.

This is a fight that by all accounts a lot of trump's own people were counseling against. I can't link to anything yet, but I thought I saw something online from experts noting that these particular tariffs will wreck whatever economic gains were to be coming out of Congress' massive tax-cut boondoggle.

Here it comes, America, the train wreck Boston Globe and a lot of other experts warned you was coming if trump got into the White House on his protectionist, isolationist platform.

62 million of you voted for this. And now you're going to find out that economics is a lot harder than simple "buy low sell high." And that the guy you backed isn't a financial genius, just the grandest biggest con artist of all time.

Gods help us.

Hope You Invested In Manure Futures...

This may not be the kickoff of the recession that Pinku-Sensei warned was coming, but am willing to bet this is the tsunami alarm going off: The Stock Market has dropped sharply both on Friday and today (via CNN):

Stocks went into free fall on Monday, and the Dow plunged almost 1,600 points -- easily the biggest point decline in history during a trading day.

Buyers charged back in and limited the damage, but at the closing bell the Dow was still down 1,175 points, by far its worst closing point decline on record.

Percentage-wise, it was about a 4 percent loss - not as bad as the 1987 crash or the 2008 crash - but the optics of seeing a huge wave of red (losses) dominate the screens has to hurt.

I'm seeing other people online say this is merely a "course correction," that the markets can't ALWAYS go up like they've been doing the last 18 months. But you rarely see a course correction this steep.

I'm also seeing the argument about the crash happening because of inflationary fears and/or concerns about interest rates going up, in responses to the "strength" of the American economy when it comes to employment numbers (which isn't as sound as it looks either).

When you consider a lot of pension plans - city, county, state, private - tie their revenues to stock portfolios and mutual funds, there's a lot of money getting lost for people right now. So this is not good news.

The long-term implications for this are beyond my meager understanding (I got a C in economics: the best I can tell you is "buy low, sell high."), but when I consider Pinku's early warning about the recession, and the fact we've got a federal government led by morons who create economic chaos wherever they go, I am not looking forward to the coming fiscal year.

If This Doesn't Make You Angry Enough, You're Willfully Allowing The Death of the Middle Class To Continue...

There's another chart or three detailing just how f-cked a majority of Americans are right now in this ongoing - yes, this ain't over kids - recession.

Here, take a look at this (via the Washington Post):

The dark blue line represents what we'd consider the Middle AND Lower Class here in the U.S.  Essentially the botton 90 percentile of families based on real average wealth (with wealth defined by income, equity, et al).  Starting off at the post-WWII spot of 1945, you'll see the three tiers of income - Bottom 90, Top 10, Top 1 Percent - all going upward during the 1950s and even improving for the Bottom 90 in the late 1980s and 1990s (when Reagan's income tax reforms kicked in, property values went up, new technology jobs started).

Up until about 2005-06, near about the start of the Great Recession that we're still in.

Everybody dropped.  Every market got hit - stock market, commodities, property market - and there was a massive downturn.  It looks like the downturn took a two-year, three-year dive before flattening out for the three years following... except for the 1 Percenter track.  Where the Bottom 90 AND the Top 10 Percenters flattened, the 1 Percenters went up, and went up sharp.

What the hell happened there?  Referring to that Washington Post article:

...The problem was that middle class doesn't own that much in stocks, but went into debt to buy lots of housing. So the housing crash turned their biggest financial asset into an albatross, wiping out their equity but not their debt. And the housing recovery hasn't done much to fix this, since it's struggled to move beyond the "nascent" stage.

Stocks, meanwhile, collapsed during the crisis, but came back soon thereafter. The middle class, in other words, missed out on the big bull market in stocks, but not on the even bigger bear one in housing. That's why the recovery has restored so little of the wealth that the recession destroyed. In fact, the bottom 90 percent have actually kept losing net worth the past few years, in large part, due to rising student loan debt...

Not all recoveries were made equal: the stock market flourished, the investment population flourished, the rest of us got screwed with debt up to our ears.

One thing I keep seeing from the hate-the-poor tweeters and Facebook posters on the Intertubes is how it's the poor people's fault they don't invest in the obviously-successful, will-always-go-up stock markets.  I keep replying when I can to let them know that not everyone can play the market: even a MENSA member like me can't make heads or tails of stock profiles and investment surveys.  Every poor person simply can't afford to pay into stock ownership, no matter how smart they are, because stocks themselves get expensive.  And most middle-class Americans didn't have much free money on hand to dabble either.  If the middle class invested in anything, it was in something tangible and focused: their homes, and they left the stock market stuff to their pension plans and 401(k)s.  For the 1980s and 1990s, the system worked after all: property values increased, and most Americans thought themselves well-off regardless of how much wealth they really controlled.

Which leads to the second chart from that Post article:

The Bottom 90 Percenters - 90 percent of ALL Americans - saw their percentage of the nation's overall wealth drop from over a 1/3 (37 percent) of everything down to less than a 1/4 (23 percent) of everything.  We never really had all that much, but we had enough to spread around and feel secure.  Now 90 percent of us aren't getting as much of the pie as we used to get.

Meanwhile, look at the Top 10 Percenters.  Sure, the 10-to-1 Percenters dropped as well, but not as sharp as the Bottom 90.  And the Top 10-to-1 holds 35 percent of the share.  Add that to the Top 1-to-.1 Percenters who hold 20 percent, and add again to the .1-to-.01 Percent (the REALLY rich) also 11-12 percent and then add the .01 Percenters themselves (the UBER rich) at 11 percent share and you've got 77 PERCENT of total wealth held by the Top 10 Percenters.  The Top .1 Percenters at roughly 42 percent - nearly double of 90 PERCENT OF ALL AMERICANS - of all total wealth.

We haven't seen income disparity like this since the days of the Great Depression, when the poor were REALLY poor and the rich were REALLY rich.

And this recession - where wages for the middle classes and the poor have stagnated for years, even more than a decade by now - isn't over yet.  Debt for lower-income families- for even what we'd still consider the middle class - remains crushing and getting worse.  We've taken some of the debt woes from healthcare finances out of the equation but not by much, and we're looking at increased debt woes from higher education costs.  Piling on-top of that is the fact our housing industry hasn't improved and the foreclosure problems - with banks still bad-faith actors - remain a threat.

So what if anything are we doing as a nation about the massive personal debts - mortgages, college costs, other costs - we have threatening what's left of our middle class?

Nothing.  Not a goddamn thing.

Angry yet?

Income Inequality

This is something that has been posted a few months back but only now is circulating the blogosphere:

The problem of income inequality in the United States has been with us for a long time: for at least the last ten years (if not the last thirty or more) wages have been frozen for most American workers, while the top one percent of the employment bracket (the CEO level) continued getting raises and bonuses and comp packages and Golden Parachutes (even when those CEOs were screwing up their companies: SEE the Twinkies company going down in flames while the executives paid themselves off).

Just to note: it used to be as recent as 1978 that executive (CEO) pay was only 35 times that of the average employee.  Today it's roughly 380 times, partly because average employee wages haven't grown but mostly because executives have been paying themselves (via friendly boards or manipulated systems) more and more without consequence (politicians are bought, media are bought, unions are crushed).

The argument for high wages for high-level jobs (like CEO, or high-priced attorney, or esteemed doctor) is that it motivates people to work and empower themselves to achieve great things: the carrot rather than the stick as it were.  While that is a valid argument, there's a question of "how much is really enough?"  At what point does GREED become too much of a motivating factor rather than equitable compensation for good effort?  Where's the sense of proportion when it comes to taking a $5 million bonus while 2,000 other employees of your company gets a wooden nickel each for working as hard or even harder than that CEO?

There ought to be a way to fix this in a fair and equitable manner.  I'd argue for a wage cap on CEOs tied to their employees: that CEOs of large companies be paid no more than 35 times (like in 1978) than their average non-administrative employees.  Said cap to be phased into action over a five-year period, dropping from 380 times to 150 times in Year One, to 98 times in Year Two, all the way down to that 35 times by Year Five.  In the meantime, require that the average wage of those non-admin employees to go up, as a way of making that "35 times more" deal for the upper management less painful (so that it would make the CEOs more like 50 times paid more if those employees hadn't gotten raises).

The math might not be there, I know.  But somehow we've got to raise the wages for a majority of working Americans out there.  And we've got to make CEOs less greedy (based on that video's report, that One Percent of the populus has got 40 PERCENT of the nation's money.  THE F-CK?!)

This isn't communism (something for nothing).  It might be socialism: forcing the richest to take less so that the poor can get more.  Except for the fact we're talking about improving the wages of poor WORKING Americans, not some "handouts" to a nebulous "moochers and takers" society.  But what's the alternative?  Doing nothing, sitting back and basking in the "It's all Capitalism baby learn to love it" belief system is not the solution... The current system is broken: there's no judge, no force of accountability against the GREED that's corrupted our financial institutions.

Seriously, what is the alternative to capping CEO wages?

From Balloon Juice, All You Need To Know About Our Corporate Overlords

This is from a comment posted on a thread at Balloon Juice.  The bold text was my addition:

The last election cycle demonstrated that even if you allow Wall Street and the corporations dictate a large portion of the policy, they will still fund campaigns to destroy you because they don’t want their share or ten times their share, they want it all, all the time.They are never going to stop going after social security. They want every single dollar of the education budgets. They do not want to pay any taxes for anything. They do not want any regulation that ties their hands with respect to their workers, the environment, or any other external costs imposed upon the public by their business activities. Oh yeah, and if they screw up and take the economy down, they want the government to bail them out.

I concur.

Until the Greedheads responsible for all the disasters we've suffered over the last three eight thirty years are held accountable and shipped to jail... until all the goddamn Supply-siders get sued for Fraud and selling snake oil to the nation... we are well and truly fucked as a country.

Just To Note, This Happened Too

While the media and the political Beltway bubble obsess over the final stages of the Health Care Reform effort, this happened:

President Obama signed a jobs bill into law on Thursday, but declared that the measure, which is intended to spur employment by providing businesses incentives to hire new workers, “is by no means enough.”

Of course it's not enough.  I'm still without a full-time job over here.

The bill itself is pretty meager:

The bill gives employers an exemption from payroll taxes through the end of 2010 on workers they hire who have been unemployed for at least 60 days. It also extends the federal highway construction program, shifts $20 billion to road and bridge building and allows small businesses to accelerate the depreciation on investments they make in equipment, by allowing them to write off purchases of up to $250,000 right away.
But while Mr. Obama began the year vowing to focus on “jobs, jobs, jobs,” he and the Congressional Democratic leadership have taken a largely incremental approach. Some economists have said the measure Mr. Obama signed will have only a modest impact on unemployment, and Democrats are already planning to follow it up with legislation that would extend more than $30 billion in corporate tax breaks and aid to small businesses.

As you can see, the bill focuses more on construction jobs - which I will admit had been hit hard by the Recession and which does fit into Obama's Stimulus programs - and on providing businesses tax credits to hire people currently unemployed.  But I really don't see anything here that helps where I work.  There's nothing here for library growth or retention - in fact states are still looking at cutting funding for libraries.  There's nothing here directly in technology and computer jobs for my computer skills.

The other problem is that the $15-20 billion in the bill isn't all that much.  Seriously, at the federal level that's kinda cheap.  Considering that having 9.7 percent of the employable population is officially out of work - equal to about what, 27 million Americans? - I would think that any... Actually I don't consider anything much past my own nose right about now when it comes to getting employed.  It's been more than 14 months now that I've been unable to find anything full-time that would hire me, that I could justify as a good hire...  I know I'm being selfish, but there's gotta be a lot of guys and gals just like me - college-educated, struggling, white-collar or office-trained - in the same boat and in no position to go for these 'shovel ready' jobs.  Where's the 'clipboard ready' jobs, eh?

The only two options I'm facing right now are 1) running a write-in campaign for the US Senate or 2) Sending my resume to every CEO job on Wall Street so I can get some of that awesome BONUS moneys.  So what if I lack an MBA?  Those company boards are more clueless than I am when it comes to Economics 101 (hint: Buy Low.  Sell High.  I could write a book on that!...).