Data Processing: January 2011

Friday, January 28, 2011

Start Making Money

10 Ways to Market Your Awesome Start-Up

For aspiring entrepreneurs, taking a concept from inception to launch can happen faster an cheaper than ever before. You just launched a shiny new site, and your product has been thoroughly tested and debugged — and now you’re in the hot seat (either from investors, co-workers, or yourself) to ramp up your almost non-existent marketing efforts.

Here are 10 relatively lightweight efforts (in no particular order) that just might get you on the cover of your favorite magazine before you know it:

10. Network / Hustle / Get After It: Sure, social tools have facilitated your digital hustle, but there’s no substitute for making great connections in person. Leverage your network to get bloggers, writers, creatives, and fellow entrepreneurs to write about you, think about your work, or at least like you enough to help you out down the road.

9. Add yourself to CrunchBase, which is an publicly editable Wikipedia of tech companies, people and investors.

8. Add yourself to YouNoodle, which is a place to meet other likeminded individuals.

7. Apply and participate in University or city/org sponsored business plan competitions. Keep in mind what the real value is here, it’s not necessarily the 10 or 20k prize money… but the random collection of angel investors, press, and talented technologists/creatives that hang around these events (even on other teams).

6. Add yourself to StartupWeekend’s Startup Database

5. Get to know your local StartupDigest leaders/editors

4. Get to know any local startup aggregators, like Proudly Made In DC or We Are NY Tech

3. Sponsor and attend events like Tech Cocktail or your local BarCamp

2. Apply for incubator/accelerator programs… see #7 for a similar value proposition.

1. Be excellent and build awesome stuff that people talk about.

Are we missing something? Undoubtedly so… let us know below!

Submitted by Taylor Cottam of Economy Politics

Another Call For The Fed To Raise Rates, So Big Banks Can Start Lending And Hiring Again

As we explained in our previous article Seeking an interest rate solution,
real interest rates are negative and nominal short term interest rates
are near zero. That is not healthy. What is a healthy interest rate? My
view is that short term rates should be above 1% to make them positive
and closer to 2%. It has caused consumer credit to contract.

Of course, banks would argue that a healthy spread is the key to a
healthy banking sector. Raising the rate would likely flatten the yield
curve. What gives?

How banks really make money

Banks are not in the business of making loans per se. They are in the
business of making more off their assets than their liabilities. In
normal times, underwriting consumer and business loans are the best
avenue for them to pursue that goal.

Banks, and many hedge funds, really make money off the yield curve. They
have assets with a higher duration than their liabilities. Although
banks fund their assets with a mix of checking, demand deposits and some
longer dated term deposits (CDs), they have the ability to swap out
longer term deposits (CDs) to make their liabilities duration almost
zero. Their assets, which are typically loans to consumers and
businesses, have a longer duration. Since the yield curve almost always
slopes upward, they make money off the yield curve spread plus the
credit spread.

In 2008, I did some modeling for a large financial institution that had
duration of liabilities of roughly 3.5 years, based upon mostly term
deposits. They were able to bring the duration on their entire
liabilities portfolio down to a duration of less than 0.25 (3 months) by
transacting a simple fixed for floating amortizing swap based upon
their CD maturity schedule. Every quarter, with the 3 month rate sunk
below 25 bps, we would receive a large cash settlement from our
investment bank counterparty. I didn't stick for the full term of the
swap, but on a 1.5 BB principal, our estimate of earnings from the swap
alone stood at $100MM over three years. Based upon where short term
rates have stayed, they could have made 1.5 times that.

With our cost of capital below 25 bps, we did the thing that any
rational person would do. We stopped lending to people and
businesses and lent to the US government instead. We bought Treasuries.
In this case, the 5-year yields were above 2% bringing our expected
risk free spread above 2 points.

In 2008 and 2009, when it became obvious that Bernanke would likely
leave short-term rates low for an extended period of time, yield curve
risk became an afterthought. Those actions have been largely vindicated.
If we held the Treasuries for at least three years, the term of the
swap, we would just sit back and make money off the spread without
having to originate a single loan.

You get to be a bank, without having to do any work to originate loans.
Who needs a large origination group, when you can make a ton of money
and fire half of your employees?

Pushed or Pulled into Treasuries

During the recession there was often talk of a flight to quality.
Investors would flee risky assets and go into something safe. However,
investors are not always being pushed, they are often pulled. During the
recession, we began seeing a very steep yield curve. The spread
investors are as much lured by the allure of easy money with a steep
yield curve as they are by the fear of risky assets.

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Monday, January 24, 2011

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Making Money on Line

Industrial-output growth accelerated to 13.3 percent last month from a year earlier, exceeding economists’ median estimate of 13 percent.

Urban fixed-asset investment also grew at faster pace, climbing 24.9 percent in the first 11 months of 2010 from a year earlier, the report showed. Retail sales gained 18.7 percent in November from a year earlier.

The Shanghai Composite Index of stocks has fallen 10 percent from a Nov. 8 high, extending this year’s loss to 13 percent, on concern tighter monetary policy will cut economic growth and profits.

Food prices rose 11.7 percent in November from a year earlier, the most in more than two years, and residence-related costs such as charges for water, electricity and rent were also a key driver of inflation, the statistics bureau said today.

Broad money supply, or M2, rose last month by 19.5 percent, the fastest gain in six months, the People’s Bank of China reported yesterday. M2 has surged 55 percent over the past two years and outstanding yuan-denominated loans have climbed to 47.4 trillion yuan, 60 percent more than in November 2008.

We recently spoke at length with a young Chinese friend who travels extensively in China in his engineering/design job. He reported that prices for some food items have doubled and tripled practically overnight. That suggests the official estimates of food inflation are lower than the reality facing consumers.

He bought two designer-label business suits here in the U.S. because he said they were half the price he would have paid in China. And yes, the suits were made in either China or another low-cost Eastern Asia nation.

How can workers making $6,000 a year afford food and other consumer prices that are higher than prices paid by Americans making 8 times as much? Even our Chinese friends are mystified how the average (low-wage) household manages.

One answer is that housing is often dirt-cheap in China. As part of the privatization/opening of the economy process in the early 1980s, Chinese families were able to buy a 99-year lease on their residences for very modest sums. There is no property tax in China, though authorities there are trying to impose them for the first time to dampen speculation.

So families who still live in their old 1980s-era housing pay virtually nothing in housing costs.

Everyone who can work does work in Chinese households, and so the household income often includes three or even four incomes (Grandmother or Grandfather might be receiving a government pension, or might generate income in the informal economy).

Most Chinese workers pay no income tax, so whatever they make, they mostly keep.

Despite these pluses, inflation is now so high that it has overtaken these built-in advantages.

The central illusion in the Chinese economy is that the Central State can effectively control it. When China's economy was smaller and simpler, that was possible. Now there are far more nodes of power and control, and the Central Government's control over regional and local government borrowing and spending is more nominal than absolute.

There are powerful, conflicting mixed signals throughout the Chinese economy. The Central government is certainly aware of the economy overheating, and it is making modest efforts to dampen lending and speculation by increasing bank reserves and raising interest rates.

But at the same time, its targets for local government growth--growth at any cost-- remain high, meaning the incentives and directives are still in place to build, build, build as a way of generating all-important growth and revenues.

Local governments remain dependent on land and development fees for fully 40% of their income, so slowing down real estate speculation would spell fiscal doom for local governments.

Add these factors up and it's easy to see why empty malls and towns continue to get built, regardless of final demand. The truth is that the Chinese economy is heavily dependent on massive credit and lending expansion, fixed-investment (in factories, power plants, etc.) and real estate.

In other words, it is the acme of a speculative economy. Though certain aspects of the economy are resilient, others are increasingly fragile and extended.

Rampant growth has led to increasing complexity and obscurity. The policy modifications imposed by the central government authorities have had effectively zero effect on runaway lending and speculation. That is painfully clear evidence that the authorities have lost control of the economy.

Many observers seem to see China and the U.S. as players in a zero-sum game: if one gains, the other loses. I think that is an inaccurate model; the two gain together from each other's stability, and lose together if either one is destabilized.

That's why we should hope that China's leaders manage to eliminate the mixed signals that are exacerbating the credit/inflation/speculation bubble that is threatening to destabilize their nation.

We have our own destabilizing problems, and a loss of U.S. stability is certainly not China's gain, either.

Unfortunately, "one could describe the global economy as a race between the U.S. and China, to see who goes down first."

Special note: Once again I find myself so sorely pressed for time and energy that I am unable to respond to all emails. Please know I read all emails, but I can only devote a very limited number of hours to this blog and all related correspondence. That leaves me with a deeply vexing and unsatisfactory choice: if I devote those few hours a day to responding to email, then I have no time left to write the blog. Without the blog, then there is nothing to write me emails about, so both vanish. My own core energy is heavily depleted by this constant struggle, which leaves me unhappy and feeling that I have failed my readers no matter what I do.

For better or for worse, most of my time is spent pursuing the sort of self-reliance that I promote here. I find it a peculiar conundrum that the only way I can possibly manage my correspondence would be to sacrifice the very practices which form the heart of this site and my purpose in creating it.

Unfortunately, I don't have a fixed income, pension, grant or trust fund, so nobody pays me to answer hundreds of emails. I have to make enough money in the real world to pay our health insurance, property taxes, income taxes, self-employment taxes, dental bills, etc., and have time to nurture my own network of friends, associates and family, cook 95% of our meals at home, take care of the fruit trees, garden, bicycles, etc. and have some time to devote to fitness, music and my other writing/books in progress.

I regret these limits but even workaholics have limits, and they bear down harder with each passing year. I feel old and tired much of the time, and that's not sustainable.

So please do not consider it a slight if you receive no acknowledgement; I read and value each email, as I know it comes from a real individual with pressing demands of their own. This entire enterprise, if it can be called that, is imperfect, and will always be so. I keep it afloat, but barely. That's the best I can do.

I believe as a whole, Americans are a very compassionate and caring group of people. Along with that, I believe that most Americans would not willingly or knowingly allow someone to go hungry or uncared for. The amount of charitable contributions we make each year to organizations whose mission it is to help those in a time of need demonstrates the compassion of Americans.

There is however, a stark difference in freely giving to charity and being forced to serve another. When the government provides a service, no matter what that service is, where does the money come from to fund it?

Taxation.

The only way for government to give one American anything is to first, through the tax code, take money from another American. It must forcibly use one American to serve another American. In most literal terms, forcibly using one person to serve another is the definition of slavery.

So why do we continue to allow our government to enslave us?

Some would argue that our government should be there to provide a safety net, but how big does that net really need to be? Studies have shown that people change their behavior when the government provides welfare. With the “Great Society” programs of the 1960’s, came an increase in the number of unwed mothers and conversely when welfare programs were reformed in the mid 1990’s, the number dropped.

Big cities like San Francisco and New York have some of the most generous homeless programs in the country — they also have some of the largest homeless populations as well.

In Europe, where unemployment compensation benefits are very generous, people spend less time looking for jobs and in some countries, the dole is actually a career opportunity. Up until recently, unemployment benefits in the U.S. were modest and as a result, people took jobs that were available. Now, it seems to most that unemployment benefits will be extended indefinitely — giving little incentive to take a job that’s less than perfect.

Continued on the next page

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Keith Olbermann: Possibly trading news for scripted TV gig with ...

The dust has barely settled on Keith Olbermann's empty chair at MSNBC, but a few serious rumors are already swirling about the anchor's next move.

Arrowheadlines: Chiefs News 1/24 - Arrowhead Pride

Good morning Chiefs fans. Another super thin day for Kansas City Chiefs news. There are quite a few hits on the Hali & Berry to Pro Bowl story, but they are all basically the same info. Here are your two stories... Enjoy.

Results: WMUR, ABC News, NH GOP 2012 Straw Poll » WMUR Political Scoop

Here are the results from the WMUR, ABC News, NH GOP 2012 Straw Poll that was conducted today at the NH GOP annual meeting held at Pinkerton Academy in Derry. Nearly 500 republicans were eligible to vote, and 273 of them cast ballots. ...

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Keith Olbermann: Possibly trading news for scripted TV gig with ...

The dust has barely settled on Keith Olbermann's empty chair at MSNBC, but a few serious rumors are already swirling about the anchor's next move.

Arrowheadlines: Chiefs News 1/24 - Arrowhead Pride

Results: WMUR, ABC News, NH GOP 2012 Straw Poll » WMUR Political Scoop

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Keith Olbermann: Possibly trading news for scripted TV gig with ...

The dust has barely settled on Keith Olbermann's empty chair at MSNBC, but a few serious rumors are already swirling about the anchor's next move.

Arrowheadlines: Chiefs News 1/24 - Arrowhead Pride

Results: WMUR, ABC News, NH GOP 2012 Straw Poll » WMUR Political Scoop

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Keith Olbermann: Possibly trading news for scripted TV gig with ...

The dust has barely settled on Keith Olbermann's empty chair at MSNBC, but a few serious rumors are already swirling about the anchor's next move.

Arrowheadlines: Chiefs News 1/24 - Arrowhead Pride

Results: WMUR, ABC News, NH GOP 2012 Straw Poll » WMUR Political Scoop

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Keith Olbermann: Possibly trading news for scripted TV gig with ...

The dust has barely settled on Keith Olbermann's empty chair at MSNBC, but a few serious rumors are already swirling about the anchor's next move.

Arrowheadlines: Chiefs News 1/24 - Arrowhead Pride

Results: WMUR, ABC News, NH GOP 2012 Straw Poll » WMUR Political Scoop

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Keith Olbermann: Possibly trading news for scripted TV gig with ...

The dust has barely settled on Keith Olbermann's empty chair at MSNBC, but a few serious rumors are already swirling about the anchor's next move.

Arrowheadlines: Chiefs News 1/24 - Arrowhead Pride

Results: WMUR, ABC News, NH GOP 2012 Straw Poll » WMUR Political Scoop

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Keith Olbermann: Possibly trading news for scripted TV gig with ...

The dust has barely settled on Keith Olbermann's empty chair at MSNBC, but a few serious rumors are already swirling about the anchor's next move.

Arrowheadlines: Chiefs News 1/24 - Arrowhead Pride

Results: WMUR, ABC News, NH GOP 2012 Straw Poll » WMUR Political Scoop

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Keith Olbermann: Possibly trading news for scripted TV gig with ...

The dust has barely settled on Keith Olbermann's empty chair at MSNBC, but a few serious rumors are already swirling about the anchor's next move.

Arrowheadlines: Chiefs News 1/24 - Arrowhead Pride

Results: WMUR, ABC News, NH GOP 2012 Straw Poll » WMUR Political Scoop

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Keith Olbermann: Possibly trading news for scripted TV gig with ...

The dust has barely settled on Keith Olbermann's empty chair at MSNBC, but a few serious rumors are already swirling about the anchor's next move.

Arrowheadlines: Chiefs News 1/24 - Arrowhead Pride

Results: WMUR, ABC News, NH GOP 2012 Straw Poll » WMUR Political Scoop

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Keith Olbermann: Possibly trading news for scripted TV gig with ...

The dust has barely settled on Keith Olbermann's empty chair at MSNBC, but a few serious rumors are already swirling about the anchor's next move.

Arrowheadlines: Chiefs News 1/24 - Arrowhead Pride

Results: WMUR, ABC News, NH GOP 2012 Straw Poll » WMUR Political Scoop

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Keith Olbermann: Possibly trading news for scripted TV gig with ...

The dust has barely settled on Keith Olbermann's empty chair at MSNBC, but a few serious rumors are already swirling about the anchor's next move.

Arrowheadlines: Chiefs News 1/24 - Arrowhead Pride

Results: WMUR, ABC News, NH GOP 2012 Straw Poll » WMUR Political Scoop

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Keith Olbermann: Possibly trading news for scripted TV gig with ...

The dust has barely settled on Keith Olbermann's empty chair at MSNBC, but a few serious rumors are already swirling about the anchor's next move.

Arrowheadlines: Chiefs News 1/24 - Arrowhead Pride

Results: WMUR, ABC News, NH GOP 2012 Straw Poll » WMUR Political Scoop

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Keith Olbermann: Possibly trading news for scripted TV gig with ...

The dust has barely settled on Keith Olbermann's empty chair at MSNBC, but a few serious rumors are already swirling about the anchor's next move.

Arrowheadlines: Chiefs News 1/24 - Arrowhead Pride

Results: WMUR, ABC News, NH GOP 2012 Straw Poll » WMUR Political Scoop

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Keith Olbermann: Possibly trading news for scripted TV gig with ...

The dust has barely settled on Keith Olbermann's empty chair at MSNBC, but a few serious rumors are already swirling about the anchor's next move.

Arrowheadlines: Chiefs News 1/24 - Arrowhead Pride

Results: WMUR, ABC News, NH GOP 2012 Straw Poll » WMUR Political Scoop

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Making Money Fast

In Monday’s Washington Post, Education Secretary Arne Duncan was confident that the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, now known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), will be reauthorized this year, arguing that “few areas are more suited for bipartisan action than education reform.”

But Duncan should take a step back and note that there are wildly differing views on exactly how to approach the country’s largest federal education law.

It’s true that voices across the political spectrum and much of the public are dissatisfied with the NCLB status quo. But Duncan shouldn’t count on consensus about the solution just yet, especially not with a new Congress in town. A reauthorization process would provoke a major clash between two very different philosophies about the federal role in education.

As rumors of an NCLB reauthorization float around, the most important question is: What is the proper role of the federal government in education?

One view, held by Duncan and the Obama Administration, is that the federal government can and should play an increasingly large role in American schools. They may have concluded that NCLB is broken, but that doesn’t mean they think the federal role in education is fundamentally flawed.

While the Administration will likely use the language of transparency and flexibility to rally for their reauthorization plan, their current course sets a trajectory for more government involvement in local education.

From Duncan’s point of view, special interest groups such as the education unions should have a place at the bargaining table, despite the fact that they have shown little interest in or willingness to compromise on what’s best for children. Duncan also sees a role for the federal government in what children across the country learn in school and has put federal money behind national standards and tests that would shape curriculum in schools across the land. But such a move would do more to empower bureaucrats in Washington than those closest to children.

The Administration’s philosophical approach to education reform also includes more spending from Washington. This was evidenced by the nearly $100 billion the Department of Education received through the stimulus and the $10 billion public education “edujobs” bailout last year.

The second philosophy believes that in order to help American students realize their education potential, Washington needs to get out of the way and stop trying to act as the nation’s school board. And because educational authority is constitutionally reserved to the states, there is very little the federal government can do to improve local education. The federal government not only lacks the authority to manage local schools but also provides less than 10 percent of school funding, meaning Washington is ill-equipped to serve the diverse needs of 50 million school children across the country.

Restoring federalism in education means moving dollars and decision making out of Washington and putting it back in the hands of state and local leaders. Conservative leaders in Congress have suggested that this will be their approach.

In any debate over NCLB, policymakers should keep two guiding principles in mind:

Washington-centric education reform has been tried for more than four decades and has failed. More money and more federal programs are not the answer to improving education. The United States spends more than $10,000 per pupil per year, and per-pupil expenditures have nearly tripled since 1970. Yet reading ability has stagnated, achievement gaps persist, and graduation rates have idled. Federal intervention has not improved America’s schools.

It’s time for a fundamentally different approach to education reform, one that empowers those closest to students. Distant, unelected bureaucrats in Washington are the farthest from students, yet they create much of the red tape local schools have to deal with. Education reform should begin to restore federalism in education by allowing states to bypass federal bureaucracy and use their share of federal education funding to meet their students’ needs and to act as laboratories of reform and innovation.

There is an alternative to NCLB that would go a long way in achieving these conservative principles: the Academic Partnerships Lead Us to Success (A-PLUS) plan, introduced in various iterations in recent years. Such a proposal would promote greater state and local control in education by allowing states to consolidate funding from dozens of federal education programs, bypass all the red tape, and direct resources to the most pressing education needs among their students. The A-PLUS plan also requires accountability through state-level testing and transparency about results for parents and taxpayers.

If this Administration is truly interested in using the reauthorization of NCLB to improve American education, it should back up its talk about flexibility and transparency by allowing states to opt out of burdensome federal mandates and direct money to the education priorities that make the most sense for their students. Coupled with requirements for transparency about results, such flexibility would ensure that the needs of students—not the demands of education unions, special interest groups, Washington bean-counters, and bureaucrats—will be met. Such an agenda is likely to garner broad support.

One of the most discouraging things about the last two years was seeing swing voters in focus groups, when asked what President Obama's economic strategy was, repeat different versions of "Well, I know he said we needed to save the banks. Beyond that, I'm not sure." When Obama in his first State of the Union gave a vigorous defense of bailing out the banks, saying he knew it about as popular as a root canal, and saying "I get it", it was very memorable to voters. But when his predictions about what would happen when the banks were stabilized -- they would start making loans to businesses, and businesses would start hiring -- didn't happen, and instead the banks gave themselves record breaking bonuses, voters turned on Obama fast. In exit polls on Nov. 2nd, when asked who was most to blame for the bad economy, voters by a wide margin said Wall St. was most to blame, and the voters who said that went Republican by a 14-point margin.

Obviously, saving the banks hasn't been the President's only economic strategy. The stimulus bill, while too small, was an important job creator/saver. Saving the American auto industry was an incredibly important thing to do. Health care reform was in part a long term economic strategy. The infrastructure bank idea is a great potential job creator. Extending unemployment insurance helps keep money in the economy. And all the tax cutting going on is clearly meant to have some stimulative effect, although how much is highly debatable.

However, there have certainly been times where Secretary Geithner, who has been the main driver of the economic strategy, seems to think and act as if helping the big banks and helping the economy amount to the same thing. The tepid reaction to the foreclosure crisis has sure felt that way -- apparently we can't freeze foreclosures or do much to help homeowners because it might "endanger" the banks. In fact, I would argue the exact opposite: that our number one economic strategy right now should be to shift money from the big banks to the real economy, to Main Street businesses and workers and consumers. The big banks are hoarding extraordinary amounts of money, and they are clearly not investing it in job creating businesses. They are speculating with it, they are trading with it, they are investing in complicated financial instruments that do nothing to create jobs- in fact, they are sucking capital out of the real economy that might actually create jobs. These massive financial conglomerates have way too much concentrated wealth and market power, and that is weakening the rest of the economy.

This is one reason why, as I wrote a couple of times last week, it is so important to write down the mortgages of homeowners who are underwater. Taking that money out of the bankers' hands and putting it in the hands of the hard pressed middle class would do more to stimulate the economy than any other thing the President could do right now. This is also why the Federal Reserve's new proposed rule, out last week, on swipe fees is so good. It would generally limit swipe fees to 12 cents per transaction. Right now the average is 44 cents, and with most small businesses it's quite a bit higher. If this rule is upheld, this is money that will go straight from the big banks' profit margins into the main street economy -- all told, probably a $15 billion boost going back to retailers, restaurant owners, taxi cab drivers, and hopefully consumers. $15 billion going from Wall Street, speculative economy into the real economy is a nice lift right now. This is why I have been working with retail business leaders and consumer groups to support this new regulation.

Unfortunately, not all Democrats see it this way. Tom Carper and Mark Warner tried to head off the amendment that made this regulation happen in the Senate, and have been lobbying the Federal Reserve against a strong regulation on the subject ever since they lost the legislative fight. And Barney Frank, who is a great liberal on social issues but spends way too much time with bank lobbyists, was whining on Friday how unfair the proposed rule was to the poor bankers.

Barney, you got this one wrong. Democrats should not be looking out for the bankers, we should be looking for every single opportunity we can to drain the Wall St. swamp. The big banks are hoarding money. They have way too much market power, and when their profits expand, they put that money into the speculative economy rather than the real economy that manufactures goods, sells products and services, and creates jobs. When we take a dollar away from them, and put it into the real economy, there is actually a multiplier effect as people on Main Street spend or invest the money in real products. When mortgages get written down, it helps the real economy. When swipe fees on credit or debit card transactions get lessened, it helps the real economy. If we instituted a transactions tax on every trade made on Wall St, and put that money into a jobs program, that would help the real economy.

The big banks are hoarding our money. Our best economic program right now is to shift money from the banks, and put it into the hands of consumers who might actually buy products and businesses who might actually hire more workers.

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Movie News Quick Hits: First 'Spider-Man' Action Shots and More ...

Darth Vader's other son from another mother [via GeekTyrant]-- A simple post on the official Tumblr for Rian Johnson's time travel movie 'Looper'

Knight Science Journalism Tracker » Blog Archive » Mammoths news ...

“Japanese scientists attempt to resurrect Mammoth” shouted the news agency AFP (source: The online version of the Japanese newspaper “Yomiuri Shimbun”: Daily Yomiuri Online). The article lacks any hints about the major hurdles of such ...

Arnold Schwarzenegger set to make Hollywood comeback as a nice ...

Look out, Hollywood. Former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has a warning for.

Friday, January 14, 2011

Making Money Cash

The Florida Gators (7-5 overall and 4-4 in SEC play) actually were awarded a bowl bid with a hefty financial payout ($3,100,000) based on past performance.

No other explanation of why Florida is in the Outback Bowl really makes any sense.

Florida will be playing in Tampa against Penn State while South Carolina will face Florida State in the Chick-fil-A Bowl (awarded to the SEC’s No. 5 finisher) and Mississippi State (who beat Florida straight up and finished a game ahead overall) will play Michigan in the Gator Bowl (meant for the SEC’s No. 6 team).

Who cares that Florida was “less than Florida” this year. We all know they’ll rebound, and it just seems more like a big game with them than without them.

Pitt in the BBVA Compass Bowl

Who Should be Playing: Kentucky vs. Syracuse (SEC No. 8 vs. Big East No. 5)

Syracuse finished 2010 with at a better than expected 7-5 mark overall and went 4-3 in Big East play. Regardless of how good this was it still puts the Orange a step below Pitt who finished (disappointingly) 7-5 overall and 5-2 in conference.

Regardless, Pitt has been shuffled southwards to the BBVA Compass Bowl (meant for the No. 5 Big East team) while the Orange will participate in the first-ever Pinstripe Bowl (hey, that’s played in New York isn’t it?) that is supposed to be awarded to the Big East’s No. 4 finisher.

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News Corp's The Daily iPad Newspaper Delayed By “Weeks, Not Months”

While we may all have our own opinions on whether News Corp's iPad-bound newspaper, The Daily, is a boondoggle or simply before its time, I think we were all at least looking forward to seeing what it was like. People were curious about ...

News Story Details

... McMurry, Schreiner, Sul Ross , Texas Lutheran, and HSU. The winner of the East Division is LeTourneau University of Longview, Texas. For more information, go to: http://www.ascsports.org/news/2010/12/16/GEN_1216105636.aspx ...

Great news: Elected officials know less about the Constitution ...

Great news: Elected officials know less about the Constitution than the public.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

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NFL Lockout News Roundup: January 13, 2011

The quick summary: nothing has changed and the NFL and NFLPA are as far apart as ever. Here's the latest news: Kevin Mawae and the NFLPA appear to think that the owners are keen on reducing the amount of money ...

News Corp considers MySpace sale, what happened? - Lost Remote

After slashing 47% of its staff earlier this week, News Corp is considering selling the struggling MySpace, among other strategic options, Bloomberg reports. MySpace relaunched as an entertainment hub in October, ...

Bad News, About Virgin Mi-Fi and Verizon Upgrades - NYTimes.com

Two announcements this week. Two big bummers. Two good things gone.

Monday, January 10, 2011

Making Money From the Internet

Business cycles and the essence of long-run economic growth are distinct issues. Preventing recessions is not the key to growth, as these are regrettable but unavoidable companions to an economy directed by a capital allocation process that is susceptible to systematic failure. Preventing the last failure is pretty irrelevant, because the next systematic failure will be different. Last I checked, only the US government is offering low-down payment loans, and no one offers no-documentation loans, so our government is not really helping here. As for creating growth via something new, if centralized governments could do that, the Soviet Union would still be around.

That decentralized, self-interested, people can collectively make such large errors seems irrational or corrupt to many, but they should remember that growing economies require people to be making things better, which means, new ways of doing things. New ideas are often wrong. Economics has gone onto intellectual cul-de-sacs many times (socialism, Keynesian macro models, input-output models, Hilbert spaces in finance, Arbitrage Pricing Theory, Kalman-filter macroeconomic models, etc.). Other scientific disciplines have their own mistakes, and political mistakes--stupid wars--are also common. These are rarely conspiracies, but rather, smart people making mistakes because the ideas that are true, important, and new, are really hard to discern, and tempting ones are alluring when lots of other seemingly successful people are doing it.

My Batesian Mimicry Theory posits that recessions happen because certain activities become full of mimics, entrepreneurs without any real alpha who got money from investors looking in their rear-view window of what worked and focusing on correlated but insufficient statistics. For example, people assumed a nationally diversified housing prices would not fall significantly in nominal terms, because they had not for generations; people assumed anything related to the internet would make them rich in the internet bubble, conglomerates would be robust to recession in 1970, that the 'nifty fifty' top US companies had Galbraithian power to withstand recessions in 1973, that cotton prices would not fall in 1837, etc.

As in ecological niches, there is no stable equilibrium with when mimics arise to gain the advantages of those with a real, unique and costly, comparative advantage. Every so often there are too many mimic Viceroy butterflies, not enough real poisonous Monarch ones, and a massive cataclysm occurs as predators ignore the unpleasant after-effects and start chomping on all of them. The Viceroy population grows until this devastating event occurs, a species recession. Next time, it won't happen in butterflies, but rather, among frogs or snakes. They key is, some ecological niche is always heading towards its own Mayan collapse (distinct from the 2012 Mayan apocolypse).

The key to wealth creation is doing less with more--destroying jobs at the micro level and creating jobs at the macro level by reallocating capital and labor to more valuable pursuits. The computer got rid of things from typesetters, secretaries, to engineers working with slide-rules, but these people didn't stay unemployed, they did something else, making the economic pie bigger. This is antithetical to government and unions who think creating a permanent 'job' creates productivity--stability at the micro level and stagnation at the macro level. Wealth is created by having decentralized decision-makers focused on simple goal of making money, which means, they oversee transactions where revenues collected are greater than expenses paid. If externalities are properly priced (I know, most liberal think this never happens), this implies value is created. The continual improvements in method (ie, productivity, wealth creation) merely maintain profits in a competitive environment; to do nothing would see their profits eaten away by competitors would could easily copy what they did and just undercut their prices.

The key to this is having managers who keep their workers focused. A good example is a story I heard second-hand about a football player for Minnesota Vikings in the 1970s. Coach Bud Grant called this marginal player into a meeting, and said, 'Here's what I need you to do...'. The player, an articulate fellow quite confident in himself, interrupted with an explanation of why he wasn't doing better and suggestions about how to correct it, mainly focused what others were doing wrong. Grant cut him off: 'You don't understand. This isn't a negotiation. Do what I'm telling you, and you have a role here. Otherwise, you don't.' Hierarchies only work well when people have clearly defined goals, and managers who manage their direct reports singlemindedly.

Private firms can do this much more quickly and often than government, and are rewarded with investment and retained earnings to the degree they do it well. When the government wants to do something, like build a light-rail system, it instead satisfies all its stakeholders who have no financial downside, only veto power, and so the cost/benefit calculus is almost irrelevant. The probability that benefits will outweigh costs when not prioritized is negligible, as highlighted by the fact that companies have to work very hard to make this positive when all those other considerations are ignored.

Thus, Minneapolis's light rail, at the cost of $1.1B for 12 miles of track, takes me longer to go downtown than a car because it stops 19 times at places no one wants to go because these 'hubs' were then sold as development opportunities, and an unusual number of ex-city councilmen are part owners of coffee shops and stores near these stops. Ridership does not even cover their marginal costs. It could have worked if they had an express train that went non-stop from end to end, but doesn't because it was not designed with the goal of making money, only the hope.

Good companies like Facebook, Apple and Google, have this sense of really understanding their users. Lots of simple things that making going to their sites and getting what you want. Their inferior competitors are relatively ugly, cluttered, and clunky. These generally weren't genius ideas like the ideas needed to create the first transistor, or Cantor's diagonal argument, in that there competitors had similar raw competence in these field, but it did take people looking to do things better than others, and decisive people who could empathize with their customers created really great things.

Robin Hanson had a neat article about the Myth of Creativity, where he criticizes Richard Florida's vision of bohemian lead productivity:

This is a Star Wars vision of innovation: "Feel the force, Luke; let go of your conscious self and act on instinct." And it is just as much a fantasy as that celluloid serial. Innovation is no more about releasing your inner bohemian than it is about holding hands, singing Kumbaya, and believing in innovation.

In truth, we don't need more suggestion boxes or more street mimes to fill people with a spirit of creativity. We instead need to better manage the flood of ideas we already have and to reward managers for actually executing them.

Sure, it's good to punish fraudsters, and be wary of the stupid ideas that were passed off as brilliant in the prior cycle (eg, Angelo Mozilo winning the American Banker's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006, celebrated by politicians on the right and left, prized by Fannie Mae, and Harvard, is now an example of the 'unregulated predatory private sector'). But this is like learning not to put one's hand on a hot stove--good to know, but old news to most. Our priority at the top level should be to get out of the way, and so government should focus on its essential but limited perennial tasks as opposed to creating some new engine of growth. Leave that for the millions of people making sure millions of small changes are constantly made to daily procedures. Such changes do not require vision from politicians, subsidies, or tax breaks, but are rather the natural by product of people trying to make a buck. It's the standard Hayek/Friedman view of macroeconomics, and it's still the best description of how the complex adaptive system of our economy works.

You're probably reading this on junk. And I'm not talking about newsprint - industry woes aside, that's high-quality stuff. But if you're on a computer or an iPad, and you're not plugged into an Internet jack in the wall? Junk, then.

But it's not your MacBook or your tablet that's so crummy. It's the spectrum it's using.

Spectrum, in the words of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, is the economy's "invisible infrastructure." It's the interstate system for information that travels wirelessly. It's how you get radio in your car, service on your cellphone and satellite to your television. It's also how you get WiFi.

But not all spectrum is created equal. "Beachfront spectrum" is like a well-paved road. Lots of information can travel long distances on it without losing much data. But not all spectrum is so valuable.

In 1985, there was a slice of spectrum that was too crummy for anyone to want. It was so weak that the radiation that microwaves emit could mess with it. So the government released it to the public. As long as whatever you were doing didn't interfere with what anyone else was doing, you could build on that spectrum. That's how we got garage-door openers and cordless phones. Because the information didn't have to travel far, the junk spectrum was good enough. Later on, that same section of junk spectrum became the home for WiFi - a crucial, multibillion-dollar industry. A platform for massive technological innovation. A huge increase in quality of life.

There's a lesson in that: Spectrum is really, really important. And not always in ways that we can predict in advance. Making sure that spectrum is used well is no less important than making sure our highways are used well: If the Beltway were reserved for horses, Washington would not be a very good place to do business.

But our spectrum is not being used well. It's the classic innovator's quandary: We made good decisions many years ago, but those good decisions created powerful incumbents, and in order to make good decisions now, we must somehow unseat the incumbents.

Today, much of the best spectrum is allocated to broadcast television. Decades ago, when 90 percent of Americans received their programming this way, that made sense. Today, when fewer than 10 percent of Americans do, it doesn't.

Meanwhile, mobile broadband is quite clearly the platform of the future - or at least the near future. But we don't have nearly enough spectrum allocated for its use. Unless that changes, the technology will be unable to progress, as more advanced uses will require more bandwidth, or it will have to be rationed, perhaps through extremely high prices that make sure most people can't use it.

The FCC could just yank the spectrum from the channels and hand it to the mobile industry. But it won't. It fears lawsuits and angry calls from lawmakers. And temperamentally, Genachowski himself is a consensus-builder rather than a steamroller.

Instead, the hope is that current owners of spectrum will give it up voluntarily. In exchange, they'd get big sacks of money. If a slice of spectrum is worth billions of dollars to Verizon but only a couple of million to a few aging TV stations - TV stations that have other ways to reach most of those customers - then there should be enough money in this transaction to leave everyone happy.

At least, that's some people's hope. Some advocates want that spectrum - or at least a substantial portion of it - left unlicensed. Rather than using telecom corporations such as Verizon to buy off the current owners of the spectrum, they'd like to see the federal government take some of that spectrum back and preserve it as a public resource for the sort of innovation we can't yet imagine and that the big corporations aren't likely to pioneer - the same as happened with WiFi. But as of yet, that's not the FCC's vision for this. Officials are more worried about the mobile broadband market. They argue (accurately) that they've already made more beachfront spectrum available for unlicensed uses. And although they don't say this clearly, auctioning spectrum to large corporations gives them the money to pay off the current owners. But even so, they can't do that.

"Imagine someone was given property on Fifth Avenue 50 years ago, but they don't use it and can't sell it," says Tim Wu, a law professor at Harvard and author of "The Master Switch." That's the situation that's arisen in the spectrum universe. It's not legal for the FCC to run auctions and hand over some of the proceeds to the old owners. That means the people sitting on the spectrum have little incentive to give it up. For that to change, the FCC needs Congress to pass a law empowering it to compensate current holders of spectrum with proceeds from the sale.

One way - the slightly demagogic way - to underscore the urgency here is to invoke China: Do you think it's letting its information infrastructure stagnate because it's a bureaucratic hassle to get the permits shifted? I rather doubt it.

Of course, we don't want the Chinese system. Democracy is worth some red tape. But if we're going to keep a good political system from becoming an economic handicap, there are going to be a lot of decisions like this one that need to be made. Decisions where we know what we need to do to move the economy forward, but where it's easier to do nothing because there are powerful interests attached to old habits. The problem with having a really good 20th century, as America did, is that you've built up a lot of infrastructure and made a lot of decisions that benefit the industries and innovators of the 20th century. But now we're in the 21st century, and junk won't cut it anymore.

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TaxProf Blog: 2011 Tax News

TaxProf Blog provides resources, news, and information for law school tax professors. It is not affiliated with Auto Didactix LLC's TaxProf, a software-based tutorial for law students in the federal income tax course. ...

Arizona Shooting News (LIVE UPDATES)

PHOENIX -- A 22-year-old man described as a social outcast with wild beliefs steeped in mistrust faces a federal court hearing on charges he tried to assassinate Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in a Tucson shooting rampage that left six people ...