I wanted to comment briefly on the whole Goldman Sachs thing. The accusation, if you aren’t familiar, is that Goldman, with the help of or on behalf of John Paulson, created these mortgage CDOs that were basically setup to fail. That would allow John Paulson and Goldman to short the CDOs while at the same time Goldman sold them to their clients.
It’s all a lot more complicated than that of course. Goldman Sachs is a big company that does a lot of stuff. They have clients on different sides of …

Got an email from the friendly folks at ycharts.com. I’m sure you all have your favorite chart sites and tools. Most of these sites don’t offer much more than the basics or hide some stuff behind fees. So I almost didn’t look at YCharts. However, their charts are really nice, and they can chart some data not available on other sites like EPS/Revenue/ROE growth. Take a look if you haven’t already.

So I was reading this New York Times article, and it said the following:
But even if nobody achieves album sales on a Jacksonian scale, couldn’t he or she be an artist every bit as popular, every bit as loved, every bit as listened to?
Probably not. The pop-idol field — like every field that can lead to super-fame — is more crowded than it has ever been, and the variety of routes to stardom keep growing.

Oh give me a break! Want to know what lesson I learned in life? EVERYBODY, and …

Disclosure: I had a Microsoft position which I unloaded at a slight profit due to the fact that I have lost complete faith in the current management of Microsoft.
I was surfing the web and every now and then I like to check the website MSDN.Microsoft.com. I check it out because I write .NET code, and I use Office in my solutions. So that I don’t confuse people to like .NET and C# quite a bit, and I like Office 2007, but my love of Microsoft ends there.
I use to be …

Chris wrote to me the following comment:
Debt is the biggest issue facing us all. I found this video on YouTube which really opened my eyes to the importance of getting out of debt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50bWUrKAbwU I am sure you will be as amazed as I was.

Chris, sorry to disappoint you, but I was not amazed. Not because what he was saying was not true. In fact he is saying the truth, but the fact that he is misleading the truth. What he …

It is interesting to see, but I think the Republicans might actually self-destruct. Remember that the Republican party was the result of the whig party self-destructing. Though the question is can the Republican party self-destruct? Sure it can, after all the Progressive Conservatives of Canada are no more, Conservatives of the UK are a shadow of a party, and the SPD (one of Germany’s oldest party) is self destructing.
So what could be that watershed moment for the Republicans? The Fiat Chrysler deal.
Indiana’s state treasurer, Richard Mourdock, has objected to the …

The folks behind the new documentary Stock Shock: The Short Selling of the American Dream asked me to share the trailer with our readers. This would be an interesting movie for any of you who at some point owned shares in Sirius (SIRI) or XM (XMSR) Satalite Radio.

(trailer and more after the fold)

I am going to play the contrarian, getting rid of Smith-Barney is REALLY good for Citi. Many like on Fast Money say, "hey why on earth are you getting rid of the cash cow?" And with Citigroup getting a potential 10 billion, I am thinking WAY TO GO CITI!
Why do I think what I do? Because obviously I am the only one in the market thinking this.
“You’re selling out the future to get through the crisis of the present, and unfortunately they don’t have a lot of other choice,” David …

In the US Christmas retail sales plummeted.
The holiday shopping season was one of the most dismal in years and even the after-Christmas period, when consumers normally rush to stores to use gift cards and seize on big sales, isn’t expected to be enough to save retailers from a terrible year.

No so in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

I wrote a blog entry on how my 2008 predictions fared, and what I think will happen in 2009. Well, wow, I did not expect one of them to happen that quick.
My prediction was that in 2009 Japan was going down. It seems Japan is already going down. The headlines read "Japan November industrial output falls ‘off the cliff’".
Before people panic and say, "OMG this will happen to us", you need to go back into my predictions on why this is a Japanese problem.