Anti Trust is the answer for Too Big To Fail

We passed the Sherman Anti Trust Act back in the 1890's. It was used to break up Standard Oil in the early 20th century, and last used to break up the telephone company in the 1960's. The Sherman act gives the US government the right to break up big companies that are deemed monoplistic, or just too damn big. It's still on the books and the US Justice Dept has a whole division of lawyers to enforce it. Too bad they haven't been earning their pay.
At the beginning of Great Depression 2.0 it was decided to drop Lehman Brothers on the floor as a warning to others. Not a bad idea, but the breakage scared everybody. Soon after, Sec of Treasury Paulson and Chairman of the Fed Bernanke, both thoroughly frightened, went to Congress and got the $800 billion TARP bill passed to shore up the rest of the Wall St to avoid more breakage. Then the perpetrators of Great Depression 2.0, Congress critters Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, got the 2000 page Dodd Frank bill passed to guarantee US taxpayer bailout of "too big to fail" financial institutions.
Where are the anti trust lawyers? Any firm "Too Big To Fail" is clearly big enough to break up under the Sherman Anti Trust act.
Plus, big firms lack competition to keep their pricing honest. We consumers get robbed anytime a company is so big it is the only game in town.

Indian Giver

Among the various European countries lining up to bail out Greece, we have Finland. The Finns promises to "loan" 700 and some change million Euros to Greece. But to make sure they get paid back, the Finns demanded "collateral". The Greeks agreed to deposit 500 million Euros in an escrow account in Finland. The the Greeks default, the Finns keep the 500 million Euros.
Big deal, to get a 700 million loan they put up 500 million, so that in effect the Finns are only loaning 200 million Euros. The rest of the Europeans are waits to see how this plays out.
I saw a European TV pundit on the internet explaining how a movement to "tighten European economic integration" was running into trouble. Under "tight" integration, the Germans would pick up the losses in Greece. The Greeks like the idea, and the Eurocrats love it. The German taxpayers are against it.

Hewlett Packard Stock drops 23%

Yesterday Hewlett Packard announce plans to get out of the computer business by spinning off or selling off the computer division. The suits complained that manufacturing computers was a low margin business and they wanted to move into software and services. No matter that they are the #1 computer maker since they bought up Compaq some years ago. Then they announced plans to buy a British software company for $10 billion.

Today HP stock dropped 23% as investors decided that the HP suits were out of their minds.
HP did something like this ten years ago. The company got started and had been a powerhouse in the electronic test equipment business. In 2000, HP spun off the test equipment group and "Agilent Technology" a new firm that has down fairly well.

Supercookies

Yesterday's Wall St Journal reported the existence of "super cookies", bits of malware planted on your computer and used to track your web surfing. This sounded pretty bad. I googled "supercookie" and lo and behold, an avalanche of information.
Apparently one type of cookie hides out in your "flash" plugin. Another type had something to do with Windows Media Player.
I found a website that claimed to switch off the Flash cookies and another that explained the Windows media player cookies were fixed in version 10 of Windows Media Player.
The other thing I did was weed out my ordinary browser cookies. Upon looking, I found that years of use had accumulated a vast number of cookies, kinda like barnacles. Cleaning them out sped up my web surfing noticeably.
You can wipe ALL cookies, the only penalty is you may have to log in to some of your favorite websites again. The websites that keep you logged in permanently do it with cookies, they make note of your log in inside the cookie.

Samuelson and stimulus

Back when I went to college, we all took one course in economics and the textbook was a thick brown volume by Samuelson. That text covered a lot of stuff, starting with the law of supply and demand and then the famous "multiplier effect". Samuelson stated that money spent in an economy doesn't stop with the first payment, he claimed that the recipient of the money went on to spend it, and those recipients would spend it yet another time. He claimed that a single dollar spent, would be multiplied as it rippled across the economy.
Of course Samuelson never wrote about the numerical value of the "multiplier". Was it 1.1? 2.3? or larger? We never learned that.
Now, all those college students exposed to Samuelson and his multiplier effect are grown up and running the government, and they all believe that spending is good for the economy, and the way to spend is to borrow, spend, and pay it back later.
Now I can see the multiplier effect for something like the purchase of airplanes for the Air Force. Boeing gets the contract and then turns around and orders parts. Probably 90% of the cost of a new Boeing goes into parts that Boeing buys from suppliers. This is how we got out of the Great Depression. World War II started and massive orders for everything from B17's to army bunk beds made the US economy perk right up. Paul Krugman said as much when he suggested in the NYT that an invasion of space aliens would be good for the economy. I think Krugman was speaking in jest, but you never know.
So, money given to corporations to make things probably does multiple some. But money given to individuals is different. People use money to pay down their credit cards and pay their mortgages and pay their taxes, none of which multiples at all. Sure people buy groceries and clothing, but that's a much smaller percent than Boeing shells out for parts.
Now take Obama's Porkulus, $ 1 trillion in "stimulus" money. Did it go for buying things? No, it went to state governments who used it to meet payroll and make unemployment payments as their taxes dried up and their unemployment rolls grew.
Very little multiplier effect. It did consume the credit of the United States, so we cannot borrow that much again. The Porkulus didn't work and we are still stuck in Great Depression 2.0. Obama and his friends are now reduced to saying that the Porkulus would have worked if it hard been bigger. Right. We drop $ 1 trillion into the economy and nothing happens. Do you really think $2 trillion would be much different, if we could lay out hands on $2 trillion?

Romney Campaigning in New Hampshire

The event was at the Littleton Diner, as nostalgic a piece of up country color as you can ask for. It's been there for 60 years that I know of, and looks like it will be in business for another 60. It's was raining. This picture was taken a hour before anyone arrived. By the end of the event the rain had dried up and there was a crowd filling the sidewalk.


Romney left the suit coat behind and dressed for the occasion. We don't wear suits to the Littleton diner much. Romney merely called for each voter present to tell a little bit about himself, state concerns and ask questions. It was a Republican crowd and they had a lot of concerns about jobs and the economy, very few about wedge issues. Romney spoke well and connected with the voters. Everyone agreed that Romney would make a fine president, a real improvement over the incumbent.


Parents brought children. All the local Republicans showed up, including yours truly.




Romney drew a decent crowd. There were as many voters present as press and the place was packed. It 's not a very big place, but it is the traditional place to campaign in Littleton.

My stove is web surfing when it ought to be cooking

Hewlett Packard is peddling operating system software for kitchen appliances to makers thereof. Not sure just why I as a customer would want my kitchen range to be internet enabled, but HP marketeers are hard at work, developing the concept.