The Kim Jong Il scenes are the best. I found a video with just the best ones.
"Quit bustin' my balls Hans Blix!"
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Our Teleprompter in Chief is a piece of work. I can't believe one word that came out of his mouth on Tuesday. Here is a perfect example.
Obama Mentions Successful Energy Company in Speech, Then it Files Chapter 11
Andrew Restuccia of The Hill is reporting that Ener1, a battery company that President Obama referenced in his State of The Union Speech on Tuesday as an example of successful energy investments, has just filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy.
That's just two days after the speech.
“In three years, our partnership with the private sector has already positioned America to be the world’s leading manufacturer of high-tech batteries,” Obama said in his speech.
According to Phil Milford and Dawn McCarty at Businessweek, Ener1 had received a $118 million U.S. Energy Department grant to make electric-car batteries. And the grant received bi-partisan support, so it is not entirely on Obama's shoulders. From Businessweek:
Under President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package, the Energy Department awarded grants in an attempt to create a U.S. electric-car industry. Ener1 subsidiary EnerDel was the grant recipient and has received about $55 million of its grant so far. A spokesman for the Energy Department, Jen Stutsman, said the department would provide comment soon.
In the 2010 State of the Union address, Obama mentioned Solyndra as another successful investment by the government in private-sector green-energy companies:
"You can see the results of last year's investments in clean energy. A North Carolina company that will create 1,200 jobs nationwide helping to make advanced batteries. Or in the California business, that will put a thousand people to work making solar panels,"
Solyndra, that California business, received a $535 million loan guarantee from the government before going bankrupt last September. Its top executives were enthusiastic Obama campaign donors. Solyndra had also spent nearly $1.8 million lobbying the government prior to receiving the loan guarantee.
It's obviously hugely embarrassing for the president to give another green-energy company a shout-out in his prime-time speech only to have it declare bankruptcy two days later.
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Some interesting points from Stansberry today:
Did you see Our Dear Leader's address on Tuesday night? I tried to watch the whole thing. But, while I had enjoyed my dinner, I didn't want to taste it again. So I turned the TV off. I read the whole speech this morning. It was possibly the most jingoistic State of the Union address in at least a dozen years – Obama used the word "America" 87 times. (George W. Bush's record was 72 mentions.)
Obama started out like any good fascist, praising the military and telling us all we should be more like them. The police where I live are way ahead of Komrade Obama. They're taking target practice in my town's poor neighborhoods.
The End of America seems to have staked out some ground by me (Dan Ferris). In the past month, the police have needlessly shot and killed two young men. The cops seem to be basically taking target practice in the city's poorest neighborhoods.
One victim was surrounded by Federal marshals, while driving a car in a grocery store parking lot. He was wanted for leaving a drug rehab program. The other was on the porch of his own home, threatening to kill himself with a kitchen knife. The cops tried to taze him. But when it didn't work, they shot and killed him. His mother called the police because he threatened to kill himself. They needed help. But they called the wrong people – our militarized police force. All the witnesses in these shootings are flabbergasted. They don't understand why the cops went to deadly force since they were never in any real danger.
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The juice is already starting to flow… Yesterday, the day after the Fed meeting… I went to make a deposit at the bank, and the teller offered me a credit card with 0% on balance transfers – for 18 months. That's never happened before… six or 12 months, yes… But not 18 months.
I shook my head and left the bank. Maybe I should have taken my deposit up to the coin shop to buy some Krugerrands. I visit the shop every month. Maybe I'll step that up to every two weeks…
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Nobody tried harder to execute a flawed blueprint for the U.S. economy than Greenspan, who served as chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987-2006… Yet Greenspan, like Stossel, made his own condemnation yesterday of the futility of government interference in the economy.
In an editorial published by the Financial Times, Greenspan said, "Meddle with the market at your peril." He decried crony capitalism as corruption, noting how poorly bankers managed their assets during the housing bubble. Greenspan conveniently never mentions his own culpability in creating the bubble.
He did point out the huge difference between East and West Germany, though. Anybody who sees what happened to those two economies while the Berlin Wall was up and believes there's anything better than a market economy for creating widespread prosperity is simply not paying attention. East Germany's planned economy fell apart and created widespread corruption and poverty. West Germany did just fine, thank you very much. I'm appalled there are adults in the world who don't understand the profound implications of this example.
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From CNBC this morning:
"That’s our danger zone, our high-risk peaking zone," Zimmerman said. "We’re looking at the S&P pushing into key resistance with a bullish sentiment extreme and an extremely overbought market."
Various sentiment gauges are showing bulls dominating the market, often a contrarian sign.
The latest numbers released Thursday from the American Association for Individual Investors indicated the bulls ahead by a whopping 48.4 percent to 18.9 percent margin.
Zimmerman points to the widely followed Market Vane newsletter, which has bulls in the 62 percent range and "consistent with every major top in the S&P in the last 10 years."
"It just adds up to a high-risk environment," he said. "If you see this kind of excess bullish sentiment, history is pretty clear: You want to move to the sidelines."
While investor sentiment has been on a straight path higher, investor behavior has been less predictable.
The 2012 rally has been fed by low volume and money coming primarily from institutional rather than retail investors.
In its weekly market breakdown, the TrimTabs research firm cites five factors demonstrating that optimistic hedge funds managers and other large market-movers are doing the buying. The case is bolstered by a staggering $932 billion flow into checking and savings accounts in 2011, and a modest $1.2 billion flow into stock mutual funds thus far in January.
The factors are:
1) Plunging short interest.
2) Complacent options buying, demonstrated through a below-average put-call ratio and plummeting Volatility Index [VIX 18.57 --- UNCH ].
3) A strongly bullish reading of 42 percent in the BarclayHedge sentiment survey.
4) Investors Intelligence, a survey that gauges optimism among investor newsletters, reports a 51.1 percent bullish trend, the highest since April 2011.
5) The recent Bank of America Merrill Lynch fund managers survey, which showed cash levels falling to their lowest since July 2011.
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