Thursday, August 26, 2010
Goldman: Bullish on fertilizer, and GOOG's Gmail phone service
On MOS, they talk about the Central FL plant--the South Fort Meade mine issue/injunction should come to a head by mid September.
GS main uno 0826 -
GS main uno 0826 -
The liberation of Pilsen
Every five years Plzen conducts the Liberation Celebration of the City of Pilsen in the Czech Republic. May 6th, 2010 marked the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Pilsen by General George Patton's 3rd Army. Hundreds of America veterans attend this celebration and are treated like rockstars!
Barron's: Takeover candidates in storage
Barron's
What is left to possibly buy?
Compellent Technologies (CML): Compellent offers automated tiered-storage solutions that dynamically migrates data to the optimal storage tier based on frequency of access. This helps in that there are expensive, fast Hard Disk Drives (HDD), and cheaper, slow ones. Compellent's software helps with this issue; however, many other vendors are coming out with their own tiering software, making Compellent less relevant and differentiated. We don't follow the company, and don't believe that their technology is truly needed by any of our major vendors. With that being said, many of those that have followed 3PAR thought the same thing about that company's offerings.
Isilon Systems (ISLN): Isilon's Scale-out Storage systems provide a high performance, high scalability system for managing file-based data and applications in a clustered storage solution. Mainly their software is helpful for a few industries like motion pictures in that Isilon's system can handle very large files that are not typical Word, Excel, e-mail kinds of items. Audio and digital images are also logical to be used with an Isilon solution. Isilon focuses on industry verticals of the government, geospatial, higher education, energy and others.
CommVault Systems (CVLT): CommVault offers modular data-management software solutions to support backup and recovery management; data deduplication; virtual infrastructure, storage optimization and eDiscovery/compliance. It's not immediately clear for whom in our coverage universe CommVault's solutions would be complementary. Backup is a much needed capability, but we don't believe its growing as fast as the need for
What is left to possibly buy?
CommVault Systems (CVLT): CommVault offers modular data-management software solutions to support backup and recovery management; data deduplication; virtual infrastructure, storage optimization and eDiscovery/compliance. It's not immediately clear for whom in our coverage universe CommVault's solutions would be complementary. Backup is a much needed capability, but we don't believe its growing as fast as the need for
Big Government can track you
Time.com
Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway — and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements.
That is the bizarre — and scary — rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants — with no need for a search warrant..
This case began in 2007, when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents decided to monitor Juan Pineda-Moreno, an Oregon resident who they suspected was growing marijuana. They snuck onto his property in the middle of the night and found his Jeep in his driveway, a few feet from his trailer home. Then they attached a GPS tracking device to the vehicle's underside.
After Pineda-Moreno challenged the DEA's actions, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled in January that it was all perfectly legal. More disturbingly, a larger group of judges on the circuit, who were subsequently asked to reconsider the ruling, decided this month to let it stand. (Pineda-Moreno has pleaded guilty conditionally to conspiracy to manufacture marijuana and manufacturing marijuana while appealing the denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained with the help of GPS.)
In fact, the government violated Pineda-Moreno's privacy rights in two different ways. For starters, the invasion of his driveway was wrong. The courts have long held that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes and in the "curtilage," a fancy legal term for the area around the home. The government's intrusion on property just a few feet away was clearly in this zone of privacy.
The judges veered into offensiveness when they explained why Pineda-Moreno's driveway was not private. It was open to strangers, they said, such as delivery people and neighborhood children, who could wander across it uninvited.
Judge Kozinski is a leading conservative, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, but in his dissent he came across as a raging liberal. "There's been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there's one kind of diversity that doesn't exist," he wrote. "No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter." The judges in the majority, he charged, were guilty of "cultural elitism."
Bernanke's speech in Jackson Hole
- With the natural splendor of the Grand Tetons as a backdrop, Fed Chairman Bernanke will deliver opening remarks on 27th August at the Kansas City Federal Reserve's Economic Symposium in Jackson Hole. His speech is entitled, "The Economic Outlook and the Federal Reserve's Policy Response."
- This conference presents Bernanke with an opportunity to clarify the Fed's monetary policy strategy in the face of a significant slowdown in the US recovery. The most recent economic data have been coming in below already modest expectations. This is of particular concern considering that the BEA estimate for Q2 GDP growth, originally reported at an annualized 2.4%, is likely to be cut in half upon revision on 27th August.
- While we don't expect the Chairman to brace the nation for a "double dip," he may warn that near-term growth could be insufficient to promote a sustained reduction in the country's 9.5% unemployment rate.
- Turning to the Fed's policy response, perhaps Bernanke will attempt to explain on 27th August what the Fed hopes to achieve, in real economic terms, by targeting a stable level of asset holdings.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Now we know why Obama needed a vacation
It was all the weighty issues at the White House!!
Even Obama's vacation is fair game for Letterman!
IRS files a $172 million lien on broke daytrader
And they'll book this as a receivable using the tricks that the broke banks use!
NY Daily News
He failed as a day-trader and barely survived in New York on a beer budget, but Marcos Esparza Bofill has been hit with a $172 million tax bill by the IRS.
"Who's the IRS?" Esparza Bofill, a twentysomething Spanish émigré, asked a friend who alerted him to his astronomical back taxes.
Esparza Bofill moved to New York from his native Spain in 2006 to try his hand at day-trading. When he nearly went bust after a year, he moved back home.
"He lost money while he was here. He couldn't afford rent," said friend Adam Baruchowitz of Brooklyn.
Esparza Bofill didn't file an income tax return for the year he was here swapping stocks - and that's leading to big problems with Uncle Sam.
The feds tracked his every trade. But because Esparza Bofill never accounted for his losses or expenses in tax filings, the IRS presumed he made a pure profit - a staggering $500 million in income.
NY Daily News
He failed as a day-trader and barely survived in New York on a beer budget, but Marcos Esparza Bofill has been hit with a $172 million tax bill by the IRS.
Esparza Bofill moved to New York from his native Spain in 2006 to try his hand at day-trading. When he nearly went bust after a year, he moved back home.
"He lost money while he was here. He couldn't afford rent," said friend Adam Baruchowitz of Brooklyn.
Esparza Bofill didn't file an income tax return for the year he was here swapping stocks - and that's leading to big problems with Uncle Sam.
The feds tracked his every trade. But because Esparza Bofill never accounted for his losses or expenses in tax filings, the IRS presumed he made a pure profit - a staggering $500 million in income.
Gartman--check out the quote from 1992!!
Gartman_082510
The quote in the box that starts with..."The US economy almost remains comatose...."
Booyah Baby!!
"Jingle Mail" hits commercial property
Like homeowners walking away from mortgaged houses that plummeted in value, some of the largest commercial-property owners are defaulting on debts and surrendering buildings worth less than their loans.
Companies such as Macerich Co., Vornado Realty Trust and Simon Property Group Inc. have recently stopped making mortgage payments to put pressure on lenders to restructure debts. In many cases they have walked away, sending keys to properties whose values had fallen far below the mortgage amounts, a process known as "jingle mail." These companies all have piles of cash to make the payments. They are simply opting to default because they believe it makes good business sense.
"We don't do this lightly," said Robert Taubman, chief executive of Taubman Centers Inc. The luxury-mall owner, with upscale properties such as the Beverly Center in Los Angeles, decided earlier this year to stop covering interest payments on its $135 million mortgage on the Pier Shops at Caesars in Atlantic City, N.J.
Taubman, which estimates the mall is now worth only $52 million, gave it back to its mortgage holder.
"Where it's fairly obvious that the gap is large, as it was with the Pier Shops, individual owners are making very tough decisions," he said....
More landlords are expected to follow suit. Of the $1.4 trillion of commercial-real-estate debt coming due by the end of 2014, roughly 52% is attached to properties that are underwater, according to debt-analysis company Trepp LLC. And as the economic recovery sputters, owners of struggling properties are realizing a big property-value rebound isn't imminent...
If borrowers do walk from bond-financed properties, the real estate is often foreclosed and sold for less than the loan balance. Investors holding those loans take another hit by paying fees to loan servicers that handle the liquidations.
Also, public and private real-estate companies don't often default on mortgages provided by banks because the same banks are likely to be providers of credit lines or other loans. Playing hardball with a bank on one loan could adversely affect the relationship and other loans.
In one recent CMBS default, Vornado, one of the country's largest owners of offices and malls, stopped payments on an $18 million mortgage on the Cannery at Del Monte Square mixed-use development in San Francisco. Simon Property Group last year also walked away from the struggling Palm Beach Mall in West Palm Beach, Fla. And Macerich in July forfeited Dallas's Valley View Center mall, which was saddled with a $135 million mortgage.
Owners of commercial property have an easier time walking away than homeowners because commercial mortgages are typically nonrecourse. That means the biggest penalty for walking away is the forfeiture of assets and cash flow they may generate.
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