I Take A Nearly Lethal Dose Of Ritalin Every Day And I Have To Admit This Guy Is King Of All ADD Patients!!!

If ever there was a case of it taking one to know one this is it. So there's this guy who's nearly 60 and he's a junk collector in North Carolina. Dude has a simple dream, one he's been pursuing for a while now. He's got these Christmas trees that he's been growing. He wants to string lights on them. Six hundred and fifty thousand lights to be exact. So far the story seems kind of ordinary. Lots of people dream of having the biggest something or other. Especially around the holidays. Many fine individuals go over the deep end decorating without accusations of being hyperactive. Stu Ellis is no mere decorator. He wants to finance this operation by short selling the stock market which by his estimate should see the DJIA listing around 500 by next year. A year ago you would have thought he was crazy to say that out loud. Today it seems perfectly plausible. Still no ADHD there. This is the kind of thing that you can't make up. He's going to finance his private equity fund by selling one of the 7 wonders of the modern science fiction world. It turns out that he's got a very significant movie prop hanging on a string in his garage. He's going to sell the model space ship from Forbidden Planet which was just about the greatest Science Fiction movie of all time. OK still no Attention Deficit Disorder here. He's cashing in on some luck in the collectables market. What makes this the perfect storm of ADD is that his mother had to remind him to take a look around his house for something valuable that he could sell. It's like me with the closet doors. Some of you may remember I have to take them off the hinges or else I forget I have clothes.

As for Forbidden Planet, it is probably the most optimistic expression of art ever created. It's loosely based on Shakespeare's The Tempest and blessed with all the cheerful sensibility that 1950's America could handle. The plot is borrowed from Elizabethan theater and the underlying theme remains that of the horrors that mankind may bring upon our self if suddenly our dreams become real. It explores the moral that perhaps some dreams should not come true.

Perhaps like dreaming that you'll bring down all of Wall Street so that you can generate enough light pollution in your backyard that space aliens will want to land at your house and then getting your mom to help you bring that dream to reality.

That man's a fucking genius. All I have to show for my ADD is this blog and some late homework.

Buy A Decent Suit, You Can't Come In Here Like This. Go To Morty Sills, Tell Him I Sent You

Yesterday I posted about my new hero in life, Andrew "Fucking!" Lahde.

Meritocracy. Say it out loud with me. MERITOCRACY. I remember when America was one. I was once part of one. Fuck. It's been 13 years. I think GE will let me talk about it now and if they don't want me talking then show me the paperwork and I'll give back the $2000.

Here's something that most people don't know about me. Even people who I grew up with don't really know this about me. For those of my 2 readers who remember me when I was "missing" this is where I was.

Once upon a time I was a young man who barely made it through high school. When kids grow up they dream of running away and joining the circus. I dreamed of running away and joining Hollywood. I ended up missing Hollywood by 3000 miles. Unfortunately for me my family wasted all of it's political potential long before I was born. After knocking around for a couple months after high school I lucked my way into the mail room at the Boston office for a stock brokerage. The company was Kidder, Peabody and Co. Inc. In the interest of brevity I'll simply say it was the last of the old money firms. They let me in the back door through the mail room in 1988. I weathered the Ivan Boesky/Michael Milken insider trading scandal. I was on the floor watching the GNP tick off the charts when the Barbarians pounded down the gates at RJ Reynolds.

I worked hard. I started at $12,000 a year. I doubled it quickly. I got promoted to the sales floor as an assistant broker. I was the last person Kidder, Peabody ever promoted from the mail room to the floor. The sales manager started training me to take the Series 7 exam.

Then this asshole fucked it all up. GE pulled the plug on Kidder and sold out to PaineWebber. PW immediately showed up and generally announced that if you didn't have an MBA you should hit the bricks. I didn't have a college degree. I still don't have an MBA after 26 years of schooling. I'm not stupid. I knew any asshole with a computer and 5 minutes free time could do what I did. I hate being right all the time.

A bunch of dicks with old boy network connections started making wrong decisions. Eventually PW got bought out by UBS. UBS is currently under FBI investigation for tax evasion.

Kidder, Peabody was a meritocracy when I started. Then the Baby Boomers took over when the OLD money retired. But that's a story for another day.

EPILOGUE: I made the front page of The Wall Street Journal October 20, 1995. I'm not the only person I know personally who made the front page but I am the only one who didn't get there as the result of a scandal.

I Hate Being Right All The Time

Back in the day when I used to talk to people face to face, you know before the blog, I said to a friend who was pissing all his money away on Internet Stocks that turned out to be nothing more than wishful thinking that I thought the DOW should be 3000. This was back when the DOW was giddy over hitting 11,000 for the first time. Now it's not fair to try to compare the DOW today with the DOW of yesteryear. Afterall, if the stocks don't perform the newspaper that counts the DJIA just drops them and replaces them with stocks that do perform.

You can't run a proper experiment if you keep changing variables whenever you feel like.

My Brush With Celebrity Greatness

Last night Lisa and I went to a party at the BC Club in the pregnant building. It was hosted by some lawyers and bankers. I'm not really sure why.
What made it a tax deduction for Bank of America was a speech given by an executive who was probably wicked smaat but had no presentation style. Then they brought out Jimmy Tingle who was pretty funny. As he slipped out the back I shamelessly begged for a picture. He was pretty nice about it.

The rest of the night I spent talking with a minor player in the mortgage business. His take home message was that he had no idea a couple years ago that the real estate market would be this fucked. Oh and the big speech was the reason why I got to talking to the bankers in the first place. They wanted to tout their new initiative to pitch their special mortgage program for Police, Firemen and Teachers. You know, the only ones left with steady jobs.

Junk

Yes, I know the spanky new website is down. New firmware on router refuses to port forward now. Can't get old firmware to fix.

I have nothing to say about The Bin Laden Trades.

Or this.

My leg feels better. Barney seems to have forgiven me.

Pop Goes The American Dream

2 weeks ago I applied for a home mortgage with LendingTree. I did it mostly because I'm curious what a teacher is worth. I know roughly $46K is a dollar value but it's just a number this year, it goes up every year thanks to the union and DOE regulations. Now a teacher is considered one of the big three professions. You always hear Doctor Lawyer Teacher as the gold standard of professional status. Throw in the fact that this is going to be my first home, my FICA is over 700 and I have 10% down. I also own my car and have no student loans (I am carrying a large balance on my credit card but it is coming down now that I'm working.) One would think that I could get a loan for whatever I asked for. Not so. I asked for $300,000 which is the low end of the price for a single family detached within 10 miles of the school I teach at. There were fewer then 20 houses on MLS to choose from. I got two calls, not the 3 advertised. One offered me $94,000 and the other never called me back.

Now I know there are lots of complaints about LendingTree but I thought they'd be a good ballpark estimate. Perhaps if I went to the bank I'd have a better idea of my financial prospects. I'm going to leap to conclusions anyway.

A teacher, considered one of the pillar of the community jobs* can't get a loan on their salary to purchase a home in the community they work in. That's fucked up. It's not like there's no money in the system to loan, $400 billion dollars is a lot to inflate the currency supply with. That's pretty damn close to half a trillion. So I should be getting that loan right?

Who's going to give a loan now? It seems that there are no mortgage houses left standing. All that money with no one willing to hand it out.

A couple years ago Lisa tried to get in with some bankers to handle their forclosure listings. Nothing came of it. Now you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a house in preforclosure and Lisa is still only representing buyers. Looks like the banks have to come to her now. There are some folks who will survive the market and end up with a lovely home. They'll never get back what they paid for it but people pay 3 times in mortgage interest anyway. What they sell it for will just be a number to boast about. Only Baby Boomers who bought a house for $15,000 in 1970 will actually make money on top of what they paid in mortgage interest. It's too bad the dollar they sell their house for isn't worth what it was in 1970. The rest of us are screwed. In the mean time, there is no middle class left when a married, college educated, pillar of the community professional can't get a loan to purchase a 2 bedroom house on 10,000 square feet of land.

American dream? I'm dreaming about moving to Croatia. By the way, that house would have cost $60,000 a year ago, it works out to $120K today.

What kind of job prospects can I expect in Eastern Europe? It turns out that Croatia is desperate for teachers that speak english. I'll bet the banks there would be happy to give me a loan especially since I'll have a 35% down payment. And for those Americans who don't know where Croatia is it's two countries north of Greece on the coast of that splash of water just behind Italy's knee. And for those Americans who think it's dangerous there. The civil war is over. Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia are all joining the EU. They've got no place to go but up.



*(not my words, one of the mortgage brokers called it that.)

For Whom The Bell Tolls

It tolls for thee.