The Long Line Isn't the Correct One

slopeofhope.com

In America, on the right are the mainstream cable channels and on the left are many blogs and some of the financial news channels, such as Bloomberg and some foreign newspapers. What would you label left and right?

It amazes me that someone as abrasive and irritating as Elizabeth Hasselbeck might make $5 million a year on "The View" for sitting there, making off-the-cuff remarks, some casual and some heated. She makes me switch to Bloomberg which is one of the few channels making sense. I've emailed ABC many times to object to her, but I didn't know then how much she might be paid. Ridiculous.

As far as Bloomberg is concerned, evening and weekend commercials could be more family friendly (Cialis and all?). CNBC's commercials and paid announcements and promotions during the weekend could be more carefully vetted, too. CNBC keeps having paid infomercials on the weekend that have wildly insane titles, such as "Houses for $300."

Reminds me that the recently late Robert S. McNamara, who became"the first president of Ford from outside the family of Henry Ford" then took a very powerful post as eighth Secretary of Defense in 1960. Would that happen today? Unlikely a CEO would give up that much money now.

John Malone, the mathematician and investor and so on is today saying on Bloomberg that the internet may have gotten ahead of itself. He claims it's too late for many newspapers to make money from something that is free now. He thinks the only way to do that is to bundle. Bad news for consumers, but could it create a new business paradigm?

A scary article in the Financial Times yesterday was brought to my attention by Mark Haines of CNBC, and it concerns the credit market, which needs to improve:

"Whereas $2,500bn (€1,800bn, £1,500bn) of loans were securitised in 2007, in the US last year almost none were sold to private-sector buyers."
ft.com

While I am not saying I understand all that article, it just goes to reinforce the news that unemployment, foreclosures and the credit markets are all ailing in America today.

With my apologies in this unusually rambling post, I will just finish by remarking that a lot of homeowners in high end real estate in many places, especially in California and Britain, are still on the right hand side of this drawing. Looks to me like all the green shoots are out in my garden, and it's a stock pickers market. See my investment blog for some amazing stock winners.