Chinese Effrontery

Monday’s WSJ brought a front page article that made me LOL at the hypocrisy. The sub-headline was all it took. The article in question is “China’s Blunt Talk for Obama” and the humorous sub-headline “Regulator Says U.S. Policy Puts Global Recovery At Risk as President Arrives in Beijing”. What specifically is so funny? Let me quote:

Data Security at Financial Institutions

Would someone please explain the security procedures that banks and other financial institutions implement? I happen to run into a “verification process” quite frequently. This normally entails answering a series of questions. You know, questions like “what city did you get married in?” or “what is the first name of your paternal grandfather?” There seems to be about 15 standard questions used by financial institutions, not all of which are used by each. My problem with these has to do with a lack of understanding exactly how they are supposed to protect me.

How is Vegas treating jugglers?

A few months back The Long Run blog’s founder Brett Spurr was in Vegas and observed an interesting economic phenomenon: while hotel room prices were at all-time lows, food was now pricier. So a hotel room at a major hotel might run you $50 a night but the Coke machine on your floor is now charging double. The old “if you can’t make it in popcorn, make it in peanuts” strategy.

Brett cautioned his observations were purely anecdotal. I thought I’d follow up on Brett’s intriguing observation by wrangling my connection¹ with Vegas local Michael Goudeau (former co-host of the Penn Jillette Radio Show and an occasional panelist for the yearly The Amazing Meeting) and get his observations about how the down economy is affecting what is surely one of the most interesting local economies on earth.

GDP, Truth Twisters and, well, Duh

A couple of noteworthy items made their way to my attention this week and unfortunately both are sad. Let’s start with our official paper of record, The Wall Street Journal. Yesterday, the WSJ featured a 6-column article on the top of page 2 about the Fed’s “Path to Higher Interest Rates”. The article goes to great lengths speculating about how the Fed will raise rates when it ultimately decides to do so. Not only did I waste a few moments of my life reading this useless piece, but my only response was, well, “duh!” More precisely, many many “duhs”.