Archive for March, 2009
Yet another World Baseball Classic has come and passed, and yet no one seemed to care. Japan defeated Korea for a second time… woo?
For scheduling purposes, Major League Baseball decided to stage the WBC during Spring Training, whilst the players are working on improving their conditioning for the upcoming season. During each round of the tournament, pitchers are held to strict pitch counts and positional players rarely get to see a full game of action in order to prevent injury. In a tournament that should represent the best the world has to offer, instead is featuring players who are no where near the peak of their game and will not be for months. (more…)
While Congress grilled Edward Libby, the CEO of AIG, over the distributed bonus money that amounted to less than a tenth of a percent of the $170B of the TARP funds that AIG received from the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve pledged to purchase over one trillion dollars worth of mortgages and long term bonds. In elated exuberance, the Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped two percent in a matter of minutes. Much to the media’s delight, they reported about the strong positive reaction the markets had to the actions by the Fed. However, there was much more to the story that was going unnoticed; the Dollar was crashing.
The Dollar fell four percent against the Euro, four percent against the Sterling Pound, three and a half percent against the Yen, and three percent against the Candian Dollar. If you were a foreign investor and invested in the American markets Wednesday morning, a day in which the markets rose two percent, you would have actually lost money by the end of trading. This example could eventually become the end game for our recent economic woes. While the worry should be on the collapsing of the housing markets and the freezing of the credit markets, the long term health of the Dollar should be of the utmost importance and it is not.
While on a visit to the African continent, Pope Benedict XVI reiterated the Roman Catholic Church’s position on the use of condoms; it is forbidden. However, the AIDS pandemic has been ravaging Africa, where some countries have seen the disease infect upwards of twenty five percent of their population. In hopes of curbing the prevalence of the disease, condom use has been encouraged by a few of the African governments. These countries have seen decreases in the number of new cases of HIV. Unfortunately, the Church has taken the moral high ground and is preaching abstinence only. Maybe the Pope could learn something from the likes of Bristol Palin… Abstinence only education does not work.
Studies have shown that such programs do not work in preventing pre-martial sex and that in many cases, those who were taught abstinence only engage in more reckless behavior than those who were taught about having safe, protected sex. The Pope is naive if he thinks that by telling someone to not have sex will have any effect on curbing the spread of HIV. People will continue to have sex… it is a natural human desire. It is unfortunate that a man who is among those in position to make a difference is instead, condemning the members of his church to further anguish at the hands of this deadly disease. Shouldn’t the lives of those living be more valuable than those yet to be born? The Church needs to change with the times…
Part of my criticism of using the stock market as a tool to gauge not only the strength of the economy, but the success or failure of the current administration was the relationship between correlation and causation. Bob Henderson, the founder of The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, in an open letter to the Kansas School Board, challenged the absurdity of the correlation implies causation concept. His argument was rather simple…
Over the last couple hundred of years, the average global temperature has gone up. Over that same period of time, the number of pirates have declined. (more…)
Yesterday, I discussed how the stock market is a poor tool in evaluating the failure or success of the president. Well, apparently Jon Stewart is a reader of my blog as he decided to bring up this issue on last night’s The Daily Show.
What is the stock market? It’s an instrument of speculation and while it tends to reflect the nature of the economy, it should not be used to judge the strength of the economy. This is a common fallacy of the public. The market tends to reflect the public’ confidence on the economy as a whole. When it becomes common knowledge that the economy is in trouble, the market will feel the impact. If you were to search the web for articles regarding the housing bubble in this country, you will find articles from a few years ago, spelling out the impending economic catastrophe that we are experiencing today. But when one looks at the market in ’06, they would conclude that the economy was thriving. The common person never cares to look at the numbers behind the market and for this reason alone, the success or failure of the stock market should not be used as a model for success or failure of the economy.
