TODAY'S QUICK READS

Dow Drops 225 Yesterday On Fed Fears
 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324823804579014260595319996.html?mod=ITP_pageone_0

Merkel Win Will Help Europe Recover.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100967134

Apartment Construction Up, Housing Down
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/08/16/july-housing-starts/2660833/

Guru Speaks
http://online.barrons.com/article/SB50001424052748704148304579014383709752524.html?mod=BOL_da_wsbm

Practical Advice
http://www.moneytalksnews.com/2013/08/16/take-5-a-roundup-of-reads-from-around-the-web-107/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=email-2013-08-16&utm_medium=email

PRINTED FORMS

If you hang around medicine awhile you'll get a pretty good idea about printed forms.

But medicine isn't alone in its printed-form misery. Today it's everywhere.

After serving in the military and working for a time at the Veteran's Administration, it became Oh-Holy-Night-Clear that somewhere in the dank, dark entrails of DC there had to be a Department of Memoranda with one and only one purpose: Germinate more memoranda.

A reviling thought indeed but nevertheless, like your wife's mother coming for the holidays, your worst nightmare.

Memoranda and printed forms are the Siamese twins of the written word. Like Watson and Crick, Tinkers to Evers to Chance, Curley, Moe and Larry these two are inseparable.

Here's an excellent description of the printer-form miasma engulfing modern mankind and how those lovable legal legends of progress push their fare.

http://www.dailyspeculations.com/wordpress/?p=8586

NEWS

We touched on this in our Rights Are Rights Until They Aren't article.

Here's one more view about the changing news-journalism landscape. Agreeing or disagreeing isn't the point. It's more about life's only constant--change. Prepare for it.

http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130814183645-143695135-bezos-heraclitus-and-the-hybrid-future-of-journalism?_mSplash=1
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                                             MORE ON TAPERING

So what's the most important indicator that predicts when the Fed will cut back on a QE program that may go down in history as infamous when all is said and finished? Your guess is most likely as good as Bernanke's.

Playing around with knobs can be as dangerous as leaving a three year old unattended out by the family swimming pool. Anything can happen.

http://www.marctomarket.com/2013/08/take-aways-from-us-data-dump.html
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RIGHTS ARE RIGHTS UNTIL THEY AREN'T

  Religion around our house wasn't discussed often.

But whenever it was my father usually prevailed. My mother was born and reared a catholic, though through her middle years she strayed into other non-catholic denominations only to return to her Catholicism a few years before her death.

My dad? Who knew, though he claimed membership in one well-known Protestant sect. His rule centered on letting my older brother and me grow up absent any indoctrination to decide for ourselves. And that's what we did as far as I can tell.

The priests at my mother's local parish didn't like the idea and they didn't give up either, especially after my father died leaving my mother with two young boys to raise alone. If today's young single, divorced or widowed mothers think they have few rights, they haven't studied much history. But we'll leave that for another time.

What's significant here is learning to decide for yourself. It's a right you never want to forfeit. And yet, ironically, it's a right more under siege today than ever.

Fair and balanced and much of that other BS, left or right, like all the news fit to spin, notwithstanding, today much of the real truth lay way outside MSM. It's a miraculously fast, exciting and dangerous era. 

Once upon a time three major networks controlled the bulk of news. Through the lens of hindsight that too was a miraculously fast, exciting and extremely dangerous era
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MORE ON GOLD

 
Conspiracy theorists often run amok. But so too do their antagonists.

Neutralizing your opponents is an age-old ploy. Threatening another person's livelihood brings out either the best or the worst. If the skin of central bankers were any thinner it would be on a roll of that tissue paper we recently wrote about, Desheeting.

For want of a better term-- and we certainly need one--we'll assume our readers are among the most mature and can decide for the themselves. So here is more on gold.

http://www.resourceinvestor.com/2013/08/13/gold-the-hidden-agenda-behind-the-bear-raid?eNL=520a79a2fc746f340c000010&utm_source=DailyENL&utm_medium=eNL&utm_campaign=RI_eNL&_LID=485386&t=precious-metals&page=2
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LOWER PRICES

Look at a gold chart and you'll note the precious metal practically everyone loves to belittle and avoid today made a double bottom around 1,200 an ounce back in June-July.

Since then it's staged a slightly better than 10% rally to close recently around the 1,334 level. Prices in the past week, according to today's WSJ, are up 4%. So what's it all about, Alphie, when you sort it out?  

One word: China.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323446404579008372464837550.html?mod=ITP_moneyandinvesting_2
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WHO'S IN CONTROL?

Let's see a show of hands is a primitive way to take a survey.

But it has its usefulness. Who wants to be or likes being controlled? Let me see a show hands. Recently, there was a big blackout when CBS and their cable company couldn't agree on, what else, money.

CBS wanted more, Time-Warner their customer didn't want to pay it. So as in most such cases the middle man--Joe and Jill Consumer--get screwed. Moral: if you want to avoid the hand raising surveys when it comes television fare, read this.

http://www.moneytalksnews.com/2013/08/13/ask-stacy-whats-the-best-internet-provider/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=email-2013-08-13&utm_medium=email
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NOT BUYING IT

Back to school may not mean back to shopping, according to recent data on retail stores.

Despite this administration's attempts to put a glow on assumed economic recovery numbers, mom and poppers might not be buying it. 

http://www.testosteronepit.com/home/2013/8/12/even-deep-discounts-at-these-stores-couldnt-lure-customers-i.html
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AT SOME POINT

At some point all the tapering fears from all the tapering talk will get priced into the market if it isn't nearly already.

That surely doesn't rule out a nasty correction. Nasty corrections depend more on one's definition of nasty than percentages. In a world of druthers most investors would opt for no corrections. 

But that would be like opting for no Central Banks: unrealistic. Screw-ups happen. They're a part of life.  

So you might want to put on your counter intuitive cap as the tapering fears mount. 

http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2013/08/13/end-of-qe-could-mean-liftoff-for-stocks-wells-capital/
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A LITTLE CULTURE

A little culture is our term. The comments  appear on daily speculations.com, one of the better sites about markets and, in our humble opinion, almost always an excellent read.

Here is Gordan Haave's Story: 

Some time ago my now ex-wife decided that my daughter's sleep away camp should be 11 hours away in Eastern Tennessee. How it got to be that way is a long and convoluted story, sort of like my first marriage. But in any event she has been going there for years now and loves it, and my daughters sheer desire to get me to leave the second I drop her off and her tears upon pickup has me convinced of it's merit as a character building month of her life that is worth the money and hassle. Plus in the many years of drop off and/or return we have developed our own ritual of spending the night at the Hilton in Memphis and walking across the street to Benihana for dinner.

This year was my son's first year for sleep away camp, and of course it was in Eastern Tennessee about 20 miles away from my daughters camp, only they didn't start or end on the same day.

So the end result was my having to drop my daughter off one week and then pick up my son a week later in Tenn. Since it is actually closer to Connecticut than it is to my starting point in Oklahoma I decided to drive on to Connecticut and spend a week with family and friends rather than go back to Oklahoma in between the drop-off and pickup.

One sign that I am getting older is of course that I can't do the drive like I used to. Back in the day I would do the Oklahoma to Connecticut drive with one stop in Indianapolis (half way). Once, when my mother had to go straight into surgery for her cancer I drove it straight through without stopping.

This time on the way out I did Oklahoma City –> Memphis –> Harrisonburg, VA–> to my dad's house in Stamford.

On the way back I did Stamford –> Harrisonburg –> Knoxville –> Memphis –> OKC

The podcast of course is the greatest friend to the long distance driver. This time around I listened to The History of Rome which was once a weekly podcast (but still available) that ran from 2007 to
2012. Here is the wiki page.

I highly recommend it.

It was from this podcast that I fist heard the term Vespasian Sponge.

According to the podcast when Vespasian became emperor he was still dealing with the horrible fiscal mess left by Nero. One of his solutions was to let the tax collectors run rampant. He looked the other way while the tax collectors robbed the citizenry. Then, when they wy, he would become the champion of the people and arrest the tax collectors and seize their ill-gotten gains, which he would of course deposit in the treasury.

As described by Suetonius in "The Twelve Ceasars": "They were, at any rate, nicknamed his sponges — he put them in to soak, only to squeeze them dry later. "

For some time now I (like any regular reader of Washington's blog) have viewed the banks and the government as essentially one and the same, and the two political parties as representing one pro-bank and pro-war party, that then squabbles over meaningless things in order to have us think they are in effect two different parties.

While I still feel the same way about the political parties, the recent fines and criminal inquires against JP Morgan have me wondering if perhaps I was wrong. Instead of the banks owning the government (or being one and the same) that in fact the banks are simply Vespasian Sponge's.

Having bankrupted the country in all manners of spending (particularly raining bombs down on people on the other side of the world) the politicians figured that it was easier to let the banks steal from the population, (and then to squeeze the money out of them) then it was to just take the money directly from taxpayers.

In any event, on a website with a wonderful history of nicknames for certain business figures, I propose that we start referring to certain eminent flexions and bank pres's as "The Sponge".
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