Five for the Weekend #47 -- July 4th Weekend Edition

With Saturday being Independence Day here in the US, Controlled Greed is declaring victory and taking Friday off. We hope all our Canadian readers enjoyed a great Canada Day on Wednesday. Here are five items you might wish to check out over the next three days.

• The jobs report was a downer, showing US unemployment at 9.5%. The Lex take in the Financial Times: "This is a volatile measure. But if the disheartened are only now ceasing their search for work, that suggests a drawn out period in which they rejoin the labour force, lifting the unemployment rate. And they are right to be discouraged: the mean duration of unemployment is rising, points out Forward Capital, while at 54 per cent, the proportion of the unemployed permanently, rather than temporarily, laid off is at its highest since records began." In all fairness, President Obama cannot be saddled with this (sorry to all my conservative friends). At least not yet. My hunch is the economy doesn't become his until 2011 and 2012. I just wish he was as fair to bond holders.

• Alice Schroeder writes on Bloomberg about promoting her Warren Buffett biography in China: "It is just as strange that Buffett, the man of patient capital accumulation, has been so fetishized in China, the land of instant everything. The tour gave me a window into the attitude of Chinese investors. It resembled no book tour imaginable in the U.S., consisting of marathon two-plus-hour press conferences and six-hour “forums” (a speech of at least 60 minutes, followed by a panel, then audience questions and answers followed by a book signing and a banquet) in Beijing, Nanjing, Shenzhen, and Shanghai."

• I don't own Johnson & Johnson directly. Prem Watsa has raved about the company so I assume Fairfax Financial (FFH) still holds stock in the healthcare giant. I recently linked to a Barron's Online article claiming Johnson & Johnson was attractively priced. Now Barron's is running another article giving thumbs-up to the company acquiring Irish drug maker Elan.

• Matthew Lynn writes in The Spectator about the three-generation feud between German auto makers Porsche and VW. A bit: "Both trace their origins to one of the most brilliant industrial designers of the 20th century, Ferdinand Porsche, who was an engineer in the 1920s for Daimler-Benz — which turned down his plans for a small city car, preferring to concentrate on upmarket Mercedes limousines. Hitler was more impressed, however, and asked Porsche to design the Beetle, the ‘people’s car’ that launched Volkswagen. Over the next few years, he came up with other nifty vehicles for the Führer, such as the Tiger tank which made its debut on the Eastern Front in 1942. But it was the Beetle that was his enduring triumph."

• Mark Steyn may be the best obituary writer in the English language (he also used to write great movie reviews in The Spectator). Here's his take on Michael Jackson.

Well, that's it for now. Happy July 4th to everyone in the US. And for readers everywhere, the hunt for value enters the second half of 2009.

Comments

[Patrick]

I agree that Obama has treated bondholders unfairly. But I that he has been overly generous in shipping piles of taxpayer money to them via sending money to the automakers (who then send it along to redeem their otherwise worthless bonds). On what planet are you living?

[John]

@Patrick: If you've read this blog for anytime at all, you know the whole bailout thing has been wrongheaded in this and the previous administration. Specifically regarding Chrysler & GM, they should have gone through real bankruptcies, not the pre-packaged payoff to the UAW we got.