Presidential Edition

Before I get to the Presidential stuff, I wanted to post this from Stansberry Research.  This is so true.  It's the reason I can no longer stand to have CNBC on in the office.

  I hope I've heard the last of "four days in a row where the S&P 500 moved more than 4%." The statistic has been repeated perhaps 100 times since last Thursday's closing bell.

But I haven't heard one person give the correct analysis. The correct analysis of last week's four-day 4% "streak" is this: It means nothing. You could take any four days in a row, measure the S&P 500's movement over that time, and come up with a new statistic that says, "Four days like this have happened X times in the past 50 years." That, too, would be meaningless. (Maybe I shouldn't have said that. I probably just gave some airhead at CNBC an idea…)

But that's the financial media's purpose, isn't it? They're there to look good and assign phony meaning to random events. It's a brilliant strategy. It guarantees they'll never, ever run out of things to talk about.

 The financial news sources everyone loves – from the Fox-ified Wall Street Journal to CBNC to Bloomberg Radio – all have a common theme… one that will help you become the worst possible investor.

The theme is simple: "Whatever just happened is important." Whatever stock just went up or down… whatever commodity everyone wants to buy today… whatever big political development the government wants you to focus on… whatever is being squawked about elsewhere is super-duper important. (There's even a financial TV show called "Squawk Box." They know exactly what they're doing, and they're doing a lousy job on purpose.)

Let's face it. If there were a financial news network – or even a single financial TV news program – devoted to learning about businesses, their competitive advantages, and (most important to investors) what businesses are worth… nobody would watch. It would put so-called investors (who are really just casino customers) to sleep.

So… we get "four days in a row of 4% movement on the S&P 500" repeated to death for a week.

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I usually try to steer clear of politics, but I'm changing that.  I'm not sure, yet, if I want Ron Paul to be our next President.  However, he seems to be the most consistent with his message.  I agree with his message, as well.  The fact that the media has completely refused to even mention his name, despite almost winning the Iowa poll, tells me the Democrats are scared of him.  That brings me to Jon Stewart's show the other day.  It made me laugh...

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More from Ron on CNBC.  We need a strong currency and that isn't going to happen under the current system.

Ron Paul with Larry Kudlow

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Rick Perry seems like W on steroids.  I do love his attacks on The Bernank, but he better watch out.  He'll end up on a terrorist watch list quicker than you can "Transitory".

'Threatening the Fed Chairman Is Not a Good Idea': White House

The White House Tuesday denounced Texas Governor and 2012 presidential hopeful Rick Perry, saying it was not a good idea to threaten Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.


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Texas Governor Rick Perry

Responding to sharp words from Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry about Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, White House spokesman Jay Carney said: "I certainly think threatening the Fed chairman is not a good idea."

"When you are president or running for president, you have to think about your words," Carney said during an Iowa stop of President Barack Obama's three-day jobs bus tour. "The Fed's independence is important."

Perry, the governor of Texas, said Monday that more fiscal stimulus by the U.S. central bank would be "treasonous" and said if Bernanke "prints more money between now and the election, I don't know what y'all will do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas."

Bernanke, appointed to the Fed leadership in 2006 by former President George W. Bush, has faced criticism for his loose monetary policy including quantitative easing and a pledge to keep interest rates low for another two years.

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This is just funny...

Man Pretends To Be Hank Paulson To Make Fake $353,000 Mortgage Payment To Citi, Succeeds

Perhaps the most surreal fact about the case of 35 year old Bryan Gardner who back in 2009 sent CitiMortgage a $353,000 money order "drawn on the account of the 'Secretary of the Treasury Hank M. Paulson, Jr." in order to satisfy the final payment for a property in Bowie, Md, is that.... he succeeded. Fox Biz has more: "CitiMortgage erroneously accepted the document and credited Gardner's mortgage account in full," according to a Secret Service affidavit. Within months, Gardner sold the property for $254,900 and then "distributed the proceeds to others," according to public records and the Secret Service affidavit. Investigators believe Gardner may have initially secured the mortgage under false pretenses. Through a spokesman, an FBI agent who investigates mortgage fraud said he was surprised the scheme succeeded, and a former Justice Department official who helped lead fraud enforcement efforts in the wake of the financial meltdown agreed, calling the approval of the money order "bizarre." Perhaps what is more bizarre is just how a plan like this, which a 3 year old could concoct, but not even a 3 year old would be dumb enough to believe it would fly, actually succeeded. Just how big is the pool of "unclaimed" cash on deposit at CitiMortgage is there was i) no actual account was debited for the full amount and ii) nobody noticed that the Treasury department was paying off a private mortgage.

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On a sad note, I'm pretty sure this isn't how they expected their honeymoon to end.

Bride sees groom eaten by a shark

A BRITISH bridegroom was killed by a shark off an idyllic honeymoon island yesterday - as the horrified bride he wed 11 days ago looked on.
Ian Redmond, 30, was attacked in shallow water 100ft off a Seychelles beach.

Bride Gemma Houghton, 27, from Wigan, was sunbathing and heard him shout "Help, help" as the Bull shark savaged him.
Ian suffered horrific injuries as the monster tore huge chunks of flesh from his body.
Fishermen carried him to the beach in a dinghy but he died before paramedics could arrive as his wife wept beside him and screamed "that's my husband".

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Silicon Valley billionaire funding creation of artificial libertarian islands

Pay Pal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters, according to a profile of the billionaire in Details magazine.
Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch--free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details says the experiment would be "a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons."

"There are quite a lot of people who think it's not possible," Thiel said at a Seasteading Institute Conference in 2009, according to Details. (His first donation was in 2008, for $500,000.) "That's a good thing. We don't need to really worry about those people very much, because since they don't think it's possible they won't take us very seriously. And they will not actually try to stop us until it's too late."

The Seasteading Institute's Patri Friedman says the group plans to launch an office park off the San Francisco coast next year, with the first full-time settlements following seven years later.

Thiel made news earlier this year for putting a portion of his $1.5 billion fortune into an initiative to encourage entrepreneurs to skip college.

Another Silicon Valley titan, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced in June that he would be funding the "Clock of the Long Now." The clock is designed to keep ticking for 10,000 years, and will be built in a mountain in west Texas.