Bits & Pieces (Thursday Night Open Mic)

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Kevin S. Willis

It’s a new video. This time, it’s Rick Santorum!

 

A new study links low I.Q. to prejudice, racism, and conservatism. To paraphrase my intellectual better, Forrest Gump: “I may not be a smart man, but I know what bullshit smells like.” A liberal quasi-dissents, but sort of agrees. The conflation of conservatism and racism is everywhere. Can you tell it’s an election year?

NASA films the dark side of the moon. No evidence of giant Transformers or secret moon bases.

What happened before The Big Bang? Johnny Galecki was unemployed! Bad-dum-dum! I’ll be here all week, folks.

Finally, they’re planning a broadway musical based on Back to the Future. About damn time.

You know what’s unbelievably cool? $1 billion dollars in profits. Emphasis on the unbelievable.

— KW

by Ashot
Somehow I feel like this video is perfect for the ATiM crowd.

And I thought this was funny, too.

Filed under: Bits and Pieces, conservatism | Tagged: , , , , , | 61 Comments »

Word of the day: Pettifog

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Fairlington Blade 
George Will cracked open his thesaurus again. Seems 
like a good word for the occasional comment thread.

pet·ti·fog/ˈpetēˌfôg/

1. Quibble about petty points
2. Practice legal deception or trickery.

That is all.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 14 Comments »

Morning Report

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Brent Nyitray

Vital Statistics:

Last Change Percent
S&P Futures 1321.7 1.9 0.14%
Eurostoxx Index 2474.0 3.2 0.13%
Oil (WTI) 96.59 -1.0 -1.04%
LIBOR 0.5306 -0.007 -1.21%
US Dollar Index (DXY) 79.078 0.216 0.27%
10 Year Govt Bond Yield 1.83% 0.00%

Stocks are flat this morning, with a lot of data.  Productivity was up .7% and unit labor costs were up 1.2% for the 4th quarter.  Productivity was below expectations and costs were above.  Initial jobless claims were 367K vs 371K expected.  Continuing claims were slower than expected as well.  Stocks rebounded modestly on the numbers.

Corelogic reported its December Home Price Index and full year 2011. Home prices fell 4.7% nationally during 2011.  The worst states were Illinois, Nevada, Georgia, Ohio, and Minnesota.  Montana, Vermont, South Dakota, Nebraska, and NY reported the highest increases.

Today is the first Thursday of the month, which means retailers are reporting same-store sales. The winners so far appear to be Gap and Kohls.  Ann Taylor and Abercrombie and Fitch (Abercrumble) are bringing up the rear.

Facebook filed its registration statement last night. I have only skimmed the document, but a few things stand out.  First, there are two classes of stock – the B shares which have 10 votes per share and the A shares which have 1. Facebook is selling 5 billion of the A shares.  They did 3.7 billion in revenue in 2011 and have roughly 62% EBITDA margins.  Given the $100 billion price tag, this works out to 27x sales and 45x EBITDA.  Revenues are roughly doubling per year. It will no doubt make zero sense on any sort of reasonable valuation metric, but iconic companies like Apple and Google always trade rich.

Pulte Homes reported earnings this moring.  They are echoing the sentiment of the other homebuilders – noting reasons for optimism regarding profits, and a “growing sense of optimism” about the housing market in general. 4Q earnings were light, though.

Filed under: Earnings Announcements, Economic data | Tagged: | 29 Comments »