An Apt Description for Much Analysis in Circulation These Days

"...the report is about as useful as parsing binary voodoo entrails through the magic punch card-based 8 ball of a Princeton economist..."

That one is a keeper.

Marcellus: Reeling in Expectations??

I'm no geologist, but what's going on here?

The U.S. will slash its Marcellus Shale reserve estimate to 84 trillion cubic feet of gas from the earlier estimates of 410 trillion...

Although the new number is higher than USGS's last estimate in 2002, it represents a 80% decrease from the recent EIA estimate.

Quick story link: Slashing Marcellus Story

Keynesian Economics vs. Regular Economics

Worth the read: WSJ Opinion Piece

Best quote comes at the end.

There are two ways to view Keynesian stimulus through transfer programs. It's either a divine miracle—where one gets back more than one puts in—or else it's the macroeconomic equivalent of bloodletting. Obviously, I lean toward the latter position, but I am still hoping for more empirical evidence.

Another Sign Post on the Way to Financial Reckoning

I realize articles like the one linked below are hearsay and somewhat sensationalistic, but the sheer number of items like this that cross my desk every week is significant... like signposts alerting a driver to danger on the road ahead.

"GAO Fail: Phony Fed Audit..."

Or as the old adage goes: Where there's smoke, there's fire.

Hat tip: Zerohedge

Who is the Life of this Party?

I know this is weird, but I saw it and had a good laugh.

All the chemists and chemical engineers out there... Enjoy!



A little levity and strangeness to take our minds off of the market meltdown...

Some Sunday Morning Thoughts on the Economy and Markets

This is from Sean Corrigan, linked by Zerohedge.  A few choice quotes below.

"Debt cannot be the cure for over indebtedness, nor a more rapidly debased currency the antidote to its ongoing debasement. We must forgo the intellectual conceit that we can impose some higher order on the seeming chaos of the world and instead we must simply smooth the way so that its own emergent properties can seek out a better constellation of interconnections, all by itself.

"We must recognize that there are no workable macroeconomic solutions which can be laid down: that everything is a matter of functioning microeconomics building things up; that the diamond takes on its lustrous geometry, atom by atom; that the masterpiece hanging in the Louvre came into being brushstroke by painstaking brushstroke.

"Only get the microeconomics right and all else will follow.

"As Adam Smith famously remarked, "there's a lot of ruin in a country" - though, contrary to what our present rulers seem to believe, he was not issuing a challenge to them to seek to quantify its limits.

"If we are to avoid that final ruin, if we are to properly rectify much of what is broken and not merely smother it in inflationary balm and patch it over with a plaster of false accounting for a further, brief, electoral, half-life, there are three things which we could and should usefully add to the list of the downcast and destroyed.

"These are, namely: that unsound money which is truly the root of all evil; the unfunded mountains of government debt with which such bad money engages in a poisonous symbiosis of executive tyranny and political corruption; the duty-free but rights-encrusted Provider State which waxes fat on that unholy alliance of illusory finance and which not only robs Peter piecemeal to pay Paul, but empowers Pericles to oversee the theft, and so suffuses the commonwealth with a miasma of perverse incentives, ethical degeneracy, and irreconcilable conflicts of interest.

"What lies broken, we can surely fix, but only if we break in turn the habits of mind and the tyranny of the man-made institutions which we first allowed to break the things we value - our freedom of association, our independence of action, and our individual chance of prosperity.

If you have the time, click over and give a read to the whole thing... http://www.zerohedge.com/news/wasteland-how-central-planning-broke-all-markets-and-what-we-can-do-fix-them.

This is One of the Coolest Things I've Seen on the Web in a Long Time

I hope the youtube imbed works... if not, here's the link (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kotK9FNEYU)



If this doesn't get you over humpday, I don't know what will.

Enjoy!

P.S. I guess the notes just gave up at Coltrane's cadenza... just too fast there at the end...

But We Must Remember S&P's Recent History

Don't forget S&P is the same group that gave the "AAA" rating to all the mortgage-backed garbage that collapsed only a few years ago.

The USA, without a doubt, must get its finances in order; but S&P as the arbiter of creditworthiness... really, REALLY??

A great comment at Innerworkings: http://blog.atimes.net/?p=1891

Ugghhh... Downgrade Deserved...

If a private sector company funded this type of activity, the boss would probably be fired and the credit would be deservedly garbage.  But I fear this is S.O.P. for our government.



Hat tip: Richard Young (http://www.richardcyoung.com/)

Food for thought this weekend....