Doug Hornig's Blog

We've written here before about the enormous amount of cash that is sitting idle overseas, because the companies involved don't want to pay the stiff tax bill that would result from repatriation. Most of the large corporations with sizeable international divisions - Microsoft, Pfizer, Oracle, Apple, Cisco, and the like - have enormous amounts stashed outside the country.

Contrary to popular opinion, the SPDR Gold Trust does not buy and sell gold. It creates and redeems paper shares in the company. These are passed through a group of market makers, who trade them on the NYSE, then deposit into or withdraw from the HSBC vault in London the corresponding amount of physical bullion, in the form of 400 oz. London Good Delivery bars.

You know an asset class is hot when the scam artists start coming out of the woodwork. Such was the case during the real estate bubble of this century's first decade, as those selling mortgages packaged them in ever more complex vehicles, many of which are now known to have been utterly fraudulent.

We're going broke. This is not news. Anyone who has looked at the country's fiscal mess with a minimum of objectivity has known this for years.

Considering all that it has put us through, you probably didn't realize that the Fed even had a soul. But it does (soon to be did). His name is Thomas Hoenig, and he's been president of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank for 20 years. Presently, he's also a voting member of the Fed's Open Market Committee, which sets monetary policy. (And is unrelated to yours truly - as far as I know.)

In raw numbers, in February of this year, households received $2.3 trillion in income support from unemployment benefits, Social Security, disability insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans' benefits, education assistance and other cash transfers of government funds to individuals. The same month, households paid $2.2 trillion in income, payroll, and other taxes. The difference was nearly $100 billion, or around 1% of personal income.

We know that our readers are probably riveted by the trials and tribulations of Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan. This is important stuff, no doubt. Chas and LiLo, they’re like, y’know, family.

In the field of robotics, we have no Newton. No one who, assisted by a falling fruit, cried out, “Eureka, I have it, and it is called a… I know… a robot.”

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission was given broad powers – by last year’s Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act – to restructure the futures and over-the-counter derivatives markets. And Gary Gensler, appointed to chair the commission in May of last year, is known to be something of an activist.

Developing nations are playing technological leapfrog. In the developed world, when we think of technology, the roots of much of what we do today were born decades, or even a century, ago. While the evolution has been fast paced, the progression from there through today is a straight line from the technologies that preceded them.