To All, Barron's Reveiw. Fairly good issue today, though overly bullish on tech crapola.
1. Abelson makes fun of Greenspan's comments about margin debt. "How does he know that higher margin requirements would be ineffective? Well, he just does. The Fed may take other measures to curb the surge in market debt. Like prayer." <g> He also seems to think the GDP deflator was awfully high. And, he questions how Amazon could possibly be laying people off when they are growing explosively. (Oh, he of little faith. <g>) But the piece de resistance in the column is his chart showing that the value of the Nasdaq was 5% of GDP in 1990 and 56% today. Whoa, Nellie!
2. Coca Cola is laying off 40 times as many people as Amazon. Of course, KO has the problem of being a real company. But it still makes one question the new pair of dimes and the idea that the labor market is really tight. It is, except for halfway decent paying jobs. <g>
3. Some TA junk about the January Indicator. I don't hold much with such superstitions, but even in superstitions, aren't you supposed to wait until the month is over before declaring how much the markets have lost that month? Odd.
4. An interesting piece about how the utilities plan to go broke, though it doesn't say that in the article.
5. An absoulutely first rate piece from Jaye Scholl about how the auditors missed any problems at alledgedly fake-o Manhattan Investment fund. While claiming $263 million in assets, the fund had only $4 million. I say, close enough. <g> Deloite and Touche was led around by the nose and rubber stamped all the scamolas. That has pretty much been my experience with auditors. Nice people who just don't know enough about the business to catch those who are truly dishonest and skillful.
6. Juxtaposed with the fraud piece was The Roundtable discussion that featured, among others, Abby Jo Cohen. She picked IBM as her favorite stock. The reporter asked her several times about IBM's, as he politely phrased it, "financial engineering," and she dodged the question first by not answering it and then saying that many cos. have done the same thing. Scott Black happened to mention that IBM's revenues have only grown a bit over 6% per year over the last five years, and Abby Jo said that they are going to grow 9% this year and double digits into the future and there is pie in the sky. Sounds like Ms. Cohen would be a great prospect to buy into The Manhattan Investment Fund. <g>
7. Rhonda Brammer debunks the idea that The Russell 2000 had a great year or a great month. More stocks in the index were down than up, which we have known here for quite a while. Meanwhile, on the best performing index, the Nasdaq, the unweighted avg. stock went up 1% last year. Isn't it nice to have those weightings to change the true picture? <g>
8. An absolutely silly "Plugged In" column. Mark Veverka quotes all of the analyst flim flam about why Dell is a buy and then says, if you don't like Dell's ridiculously high price, buy Compaq. The usual suspects were quoted as loving the stocks, the same usual suspects who have missed the entire downturn in the pc industry. And, of course, nary a mention of the fact that Dell and Compaq "getting back on track" may be a bit more difficult this time as growth in the industry no longer exists and is actually negative now. Oh, well, the guy writes the crap he is fed. |
