Grey Matter

The Liesmans Secret
There is a growing phenomena which is blatant and yet totally ignored by CNBC, except for Rick Santelli. Steve Liesman has the uncanny knack of taking any piece of soberingly brutal data, and finding a positive nugget in it to highlight. Leisman obviously subscribes to The Secret...



The Secret, for those of you who don’t know, is a philosophical way of life which pushes its subscribers to find only the positive in every instance. As far as living your life goes, it’s a good idea. The basic idea is, if you look at any life situation and it appears all black, but there’s a speck of white, focus on the white, the good, the positive, as focusing on the black will do you no good. The idea is that you cannot increase the white by wallowing the misery of the black, but you can actually start to diminish the black (the negative) by focusing on the positives in even the slightest sliver of the positive. Liesman takes this to the extreme. He can take the most negative of market data metrics, ignore all the negatives, and only speak of the positives. Good life philosophy, not exactly objective journalism. Take today for example: A nauseatingly bad jobs report comes out, totally contradicting the Bullshit ADP report we got earlier this week, and SL is still seeing the silver lining. Liesman obviously put a little too much stock in Obama’s statement from earlier this week, “We expect to see an extremely positive jobs report on Friday.” Seems the Great Changer is going to have to change again, this time its his stance on Unemployment that needs a tweak. What he should say is, “Holy Shit, we were dead wrong.” The job situation is dangerously problematic, and we have no friggin idea what to do. We have thrown a Trillion bucks at this thing; We’ve printed money like the drunken sailors stumbling around NYC for Fleet Week. This would at least make people feel better that the guy recognizes the shit that’s piling up. Instead he says, “Great news…430,000 new jobs in May, YIPEEEE!” Another great metric, we have created jobs for 5 months in a row now. YAHOOOOOO. And with the shockingly gruesome news that the entire country produced only 41,000 jobs in May, Liesman jumps right on the bus, and points out that theres a silver lining. Yea, Steve, there’s a silver lining in the fillings in my teeth, too, but it was an excruciating experience which got those silver linings for me. 46% of those who are unemployed have been out of work for over 6 months. GROSSSSSSSS. But Liesman says, “Good news folks average weekly hours worked is up.”_________________________________ The empty line represents the empty stare I demonstrated when I heard him say this. The only positive metric was average weekly hours was up….

Guess why, Stevie? There are less workers in the work place, so they have to work an extra hour or two. That’s not good, that’s bad! That means small businesses aren’t hiring, instead they are working their dwindling workforce to the bone. To me, that’s a negative indicator. With the Homebuyer tax credit gone, Construction jobs are DOWN by 35000, Retail DOWN 6000, Financial DOWN 12000…But hey Joe Main Street, guess what? Average weekly earnings were up! Ummm, of course they were, the few people still employed worked more hours ,because most of them are doing their job, and some portion of the job their friend (who just got laid off) was doing, so they get paid an extra hour or two a day for picking up the slack.

The geniuses on major media networks expected a rosy 200K new jobs today, and they all look like they just ate a shit sandwich now that the cats outta the bag. Friends, I hate to keep saying it, but its like any major problem you have ever faced; The thing cannot improve until the whole truth comes out. The administration needs to say, “Okay, we screwed the pooch, we are going to stop printing money, we are going to raise interest rates, we’ll stop bailing out the banks, and we’ll stop artificially stimulating the markets, and let the chips fall where they may. Then, and only then, can we start to see the light. I hope it’s soon.


Science and Math CLASS
A couple days back I wrote about the unbelievable academic acumen my daughters demonstrate in their school work, and attributed the lion’s share of the credit for it to my wife. She deserves it. But the one place that I do chip in is in the Math department. In the previous post, I talked about black and white. When you get to the brains of men and women, we move into a grey area. You see women have more white matter in their brains, and men have more grey matter. Grey areas process info, and white matter is the network between the gray areas. So men’s brains have more areas to process data, and women’s brains have more networks between processing centers.


I’m being nice, but to put it simply, Men’s brains are set up to process concrete data, and women are wired to make connections. So we (men) make the key decisions, and the ladies go to the coffee clutch to discuss how shitty the decisions we make are. This has been going on for years. Based on our uncanny ability to process concrete data, us guys are better at things like Math and Science. Both are rooted in empirical concrete type info. No matter how many times you add it up 2+2 will always equal 4. And as women are networkers, they are better at communicating and language arts. It’s not by choice, it’s in the DNA.. Think about this: Whats the age old battle between man and woman? You didn’t fix the broken screen, you didn’t take out the garbage pails on pickup day, you didn’t clean the garage, bla bla bla ..bla bla.
If they just understood the science they’d leave us a note, on Monday, that reads some like this…..

Honey,
I understand that you are busy as I am, there are a number of things that I am hopeful you will help me with around the house. If you would kindly do the following to assist me by Friday it would be a great help.
1) Take out all garbage (Thursday night) for Friday morning pickup
2) Change the light bulb in the bathroom
3) Repair the broken screen in the kid’s room
4) Pick up your Dry Cleaning
5) Replace the battery in the smoke detector in the basement.
I will not bust your balls in the least bit until Saturday morning. Even if you do the usual, and put all this off until the last minute, I will not even get aggravated. As long as all of this is done by the aforementioned time, it would be greatly appreciated.


If they just realized that a concrete list with a set time frame is what we process, things would be so much easier! But I digress.

Some simple Math, which we men seem to excell at, tells me that the paltry 41,000 private sector jobs created in May is a horrific number. To put it into perspective, 41,000 new jobs, divided by the 50 states that make up the US of A, tells us that in the whole month of May, each state created 820 new jobs. YES, the math is simple, 820 jobs per state! There’s no silver lining or sugar coating that can make that a nice looking number. PERIOD. And, just in case you feel like throwing up in your mouth a little, this lovely Friday, if you drill a little further down on the math, you will see that in each state there were a measly 27 new jobs created every day in each state. 820/30 days = 27.333. Now that’s some concrete data that can’t be ignored.
So, if you’re out there looking for work, every day there’s 27 brand spanking new jobs out there for you. Go get em.

On the Right ---
I happen to be a righty, in just about every way shape or form. Even my politics seems to veer to the right more often than not, so why do I sleep on the left side of the bed? HA. I don’t, chicks sleep on the left! There was a serious debate on this at a Sangria fueled barbeque this past weekend, and the men and women unscientifically polled seemed to verify the law of averages. Apparently numerous studies have shown that when men sleep in bed with their partner, the predominant side for the man to sleep on is the right. Yes, that’s correct. Stand at the foot of the bed, and face the pillows. If you sleep on the right, you are typically the male. If you get up from the right side of the bed for a whizzer in the middle of the night and pop a squat, you probably aren’t the man, but you are the dominant person in the relationship. There are discussions about.... closer to the door, and near the kids, and bla bla bla. But the truth is, if you really think about it, men are always right, aren’t they? It would only make sense we'd be on the right, as we are usually in the right. HAHAHAHAHA. Figured I haven’t gotten enough hate mail lately, so throwing in a little jab suggesting men are always right should be a good shit stirrer. But it’s true! The right is the dominant side. 76% of men sleep on the right, and only 4% of humans are lefties, so right dominance is clear. Lets take a few examples: One friend who was at the Sangria Fiesta, to the naked eye is a manly man…Great Athlete, College football National Champion, and good fighter, but totally overshadowed constantly by his overly energetic wife. She must out talk, out play, and out compete the poor guy at everything, and recently spanked her hubby in both Golf and Tennis. Where does he sleep you ask?? On the left. This explained a lot to us.

On the Left: When Socialism Fails...
Many here in the US feared Barack Obama as at best a Raging Liberal, and at worst a Flaming Socialist. The course taken so far has demonstrated a possible worst case scenario. Many have said that Barack Obama’s real plan is a Western European Social-Democracy. It’s the really nice kind, with most of the jobs coming either from the unions who are in bed with the government, or the actual government. The health care and social services are one size fits all, and those citizens daring enough to achieve more than the standard of living stipend, well, they should pay more taxes, so the wealth they have created can be evenly distributed to those fine folks who have chosen to demonstrate absolutely zero will to do anything more than show up. The European Union is rife with these quaint little quasi democracies, yea yea, they are democratic, as they elect their leaders, but most of them elect leaders who identify best with Socialistic tendencies. Not exactly the land of the free and the home of the brave.

NO TIME FOR HORSEPLAY
The point of today’s blog is you as an investor need to process this concrete data, see the facts and run from this market. This isn’t child’s play, you can’t be horsing around with your kid’s future.
Unemployement, Credit, Housing, Banking and Small Business Growth are all in a terribly grim place, and there is no reason whatsoever to be buying stocks. I am not even going to start patting myself on the back about my downside calls, and blah blah. Today is not the day for that. IF you want a good bet, play the ponies for a few weeks. The races may be fixed, but at least you know that going in! These markets are being shown to Joe Main Street, and more importantly, to Joe Main Street’s pension or retirement plan, as a good place to invest for your future. It’s not, and when the markets come clean, and trade down to last Marchs lows then, and only then, will all the Stimulus be cleansed out of this market. What the market needs is a good colonic. Until the Colon is cleansed, you’re better off throwing a few bucks on a couple of longshots this weekend at the Belmont, and hope for the best. To give you a head start on the pony plays for this week, check out my man Anthony Robb’s Big Tip Blog. He likes Make Music for Me, and Stately Victor as an outside shot. Get all the details on A-Robbs picks at http://thebigtip.com.au/racing/73-opinion/536-tony-gold-is-bit-for-the-belmont-stakes

Happy Horseplay this weekend. Forget the markets and play the ponies.