What a week. What a couple of weeks. And you have to wonder if another -- or several more -- shoes will drop. While you're wondering, here are five items you might wish to check out over the next couple of days.
- Jim Grant appeared with Jim Chanos on Pimm Fox's Bloomberg TV show Thursday evening. Great stuff from Grant, especially his pointing out the scandal of folks driving these firms into the ground while GDP is rising, all while collecting tens of millions. What a racket. At the end, Grant offers up an interesting play in -- get ready -- mortgages.
- Value blogger Sivaram links to a timely story on Marty Whitman of Third Avenue Value Fund. Whitman says this environment reminds him of the 1974 period, and names names of things he's buying. We saw real panic at times this week -- and reading the thoughts of folks who've seen panic and benefited from it the past is worthwhile.
- If you and I thought everything had been written in the wake of Sir John Templeton's recent passing, we were wrong. This obit has this nugget: "Templeton lived comfortably but frugally. Even when he had attained enormous wealth, he continued to buy used cars. His last was a Kia. "He thought it was good quality for the money," says Jack. He asked his staff to save papers that had print on only one side so that they could be flipped over and bound into notebooks, which he would use for his own purposes."
- The 21st Century hasn't been a good one for America's media. They did a horrible job in the lead-up to the Iraq War. And have been awful in the current election. Stuart Taylor writes about this in the National Journal, and any fair-minded person should find his piece a devastating critique of America's broadcast and print press. My hunch is that the media is losing, if it hasn't already, credibility with the broad public. And that would actually be a healthy development for American democracy.
- Michael Sesit writes in Bloomberg about ways to play the US Dollar. He thinks it is going down in the near term (or relatively so) and then will rebound nicely after that. Read the piece because he spells it out clearly. Just remember there are no guarantees.
Have a great weekend, everyone.
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