Posted on November 14, 2008 by emsnews
The Cave of Wealth and Death has many residents. These are all elemental gods and goddesses. The goddesses are, by far, the most annoying and difficult characters in the mythological regime there. There is Libra, guardian of the Gates who is the one we fear to meet because she is very stern and quite moral. Then there are the Inflation/Depression twins. These creatures love infinity and zero. They are lightning goddesses, too.
There are others: Derivative Beast is the union of banking gnomes and the Infinity/Zero goddesses. Then there is Risky. She wants us to do dangerous things for the fun of it. Then there is her twin, Safety. Aside from them there is this other dire set of goddessess: the Fates and the Furies.
Oh, you do not want to meet them in a dark alley. They are usually silent, when I was young, I called them, ‘Watchers’ because they haunt our dream world and when manifest in the waking world, make our lives hellish. The ancient Greeks took these vulture-type goddesses very seriously. They coined a word to describe what gets these red-eyed denizens of the darkest corners of the Cave of Wealth and Death agitated: Hubris <ὕβρις>.
If there is any man on earth who deserves a nightmare visit of these terrible ladies of the night, it is Mr. Friedman who gets to reign on the New York Times editorial pages. For years, I have made fun of this loopy and very dangerous man. If the goddesses grant me one wish, it would be for this guy to be as poor as I was when my family had to live in a tent for ten years!
And so it is: the goddesses heard and agree, he needs to be brought down a few billion pegs. So they unleashed the Derivatives Beast and it roared into action and ate nearly all of Friedman’s vast wealth. This man who is one of the biggest, most brazen bellowers for ‘free trade’ is now learning the hard way, his way was the way to hell, not eternal wealth.
Thomas Friedman’s World Is Flat Broke: Politics and Power: vanityfair.com
That’s because the author’s wife, Ann (née Bucksbaum), is an heir to the General Growth fortune. In the past year, the couple—who live in an 11,400-square-foot mansion in Bethesda, Maryland—have watched helplessly as General Growth stock has fallen 99 percent, from a high of $51 to a recent 35 cents a share.
He lost 99% of his wealth? This is good news. I wonder if he will finally figure out that he was a fool, a knave and a bastard? He is totally at fault here. The mess that ate up his wealth is the same that is eating all wealth: too much debt. The organization that allowed this beastly man to live in a mansion and ride in a private jet and lecture us little people from his high perch was all based on debt.
I have virtually no debts. I worked very hard and suffered a lot of privation in order to gain this tiny victory. So few of us can reach this goal! It took me all my life, too! This guy, on the other hand, reaped great wealth by going deeper and deeper into debt. Namely, the organization that fed him and his wife and kept them cozy was based entirely on red ink. This is the man who mocks people like me, for warning everyone about the flood of red ink. Let’s look some more into the collapsing Flat Earth Business of the Friedman family:
Insiders Charge Into General Growth - Barron’s Online August 7, 2007:
Over the past 90 days, three senior executives and a director have doled out $46.6 million to acquire 803,000 shares, according to Thomson Financial data. They have spent $46.1 million to purchase 790,500 shares on the open market and $427,500 to exercise options for 12,500 shares…..
The purchases began in May with the stock priced at around $63 and continued as the stock fell to around $46 last week. The options were priced at $30.94 to $47.26 apiece.
Jonathan Moreland, director of research at InsiderInsights.com, says that General Growth’s “insider profile has consistently been bullish and it has generally paid off for investors.” But right now, he says the technicals are “still looking pretty gruesome” for REITs and financial stocks in general, despite positive insider signals….
Freibaum’s buys indicate that he feels the stock “is oversold,” but it is difficult to pinpoint when the stock will bottom out given fears over the credit market, Silverman adds.
Meanwhile, Chief Executive Officer John Bucksbaum, a member of the Bucksbaum family that founded the REIT in 1954, bought 20,000 shares for $1.09 million on June 19….
On Aug. 1, Deutsche Bank Securities analyst Lou Taylor attributed the recent pullback to debt-market turmoil and mutual-fund redemptions despite a solid quarter. He moved General Growth to the top of his Buy list with a $65 price target.
Earlier this week, Credit Suisse analyst John J. Stewart named General Growth a top defensive play, but noted that its Las Vegas assets added an element of volatility. (See Investors’ Soapbox, “New Metrics to Find the Right REITs,” Aug. 6, 2007.)
Moreland says the stock is a “perfectly good candidate if you are a long-term investor right now, and it will be a good candidate to get into when the technicals improve for a short-term investor.”
Several things here: note how the experts were totally off base. Anyone who paid to read the Barron’s brainiacs discuss business were misled very badly. All the pros were being misled. Here is my own story from August 7, 2007: Money Matters: Hedge Fund Midas Touch Turns To Lead
So it is with money men: once they manage to use the power of magic to conjure money out of thin air, they then want everything to freeze up with them holding all this fragile number-magic wealth so they can be rich forever! But if they do this, they cause a depression and everyone becomes very, very poor in actuality. This leads to political instability and the destruction of those holding all the money. In other words, the desire for eternal wealth and power leads to heads being chopped off or a total collapse of a society.
Back to the Bears Stearns story: when the magicians goofed and their magic failed, they had to admit they had nothing but a zillion debts and in order to save themselves, they had to make an accounting only the numbers say, ‘You are now a totally poor person’ and they hate this. At first, they admitted the real numbers but then the reaction was, all the investors ran to get their money out so they closed the doors to the bank vault. Then they told investors, they will pay themselves first and the investors last.
This entire Culture of Life article from 2007 is an important read. I explain magic numbers and the magic of making money out of thin air and how this all connects with ancient religions and how this was beginning to bedevil our super-wealth upper 1% class. They were entering into a huge battle with massive, religious and magical forces that are far smarter and much more relentless than mere humans.
We, poor humans, live only a short while on this lovely earth. These creatures, on the other hand, live forever, in the case of Lady Luck. The goddesses of Infinity and Zero
are also extremely old. Only they didn’t exist except maybe as the two dice held by Lady Luck. This is an interesting idea, actually.
Lady Luck rolls her dice. They just came up as snake eyes for Flat Earth Friedman. And these dice are actually an expression of the capacity of Infinity and Zero interacting with random chance. In the Universe, everything has natural dynamics. Things don’t disappear. They change their relative positions or expression of their dynamics. For example, a photon unit, once it flows from a star, will travel for eons and eons and it is still something that exists until it hits something and changes that something even if it is very slight.
The entire Universe has a birth point and presumably, a death point. And between these lies all the goddesses and their dynamic systems. It is very peculiar that these same systems work in the mini-economic realm run by mere humans. Let’s go back to General Growth stock’s withering on the vine:
General Growth stock plummets under debt stress
The nation’s second-largest shopping center company, which owns or manages more than 200 regional shopping malls in 44 states, has $1.2 billion in debt coming due this year, and the credit market crisis has led analysts to question whether General Growth will be able to refinance its near-term obligations….
Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services on Monday lowered its corporate credit rating on General Growth by a half notch from BB to B+, signifying that it believes the company has the capacity to meet its financial commitments but that adverse economic conditions will likely impair its ability to do so….
Jeffrey Laverty, an analyst at Oscar Gruss & Son, in New York, who has a “sell” rating on the company’s shares, said restructuring “is inevitable” for General Growth.
“It’s more than likely they get wiped out,” he said of General Growth shareholders.
Couldn’t these clowns operate on less debt? Didn’t they ever hear of living within your means? :razz: Of course not! They think they can simply get more and more loans to infinity. This means the Goddesses who control inflation or depressions waken. ’Oh, he wants infinite wealth? HAHAHAHA!’ yells Infinity as she takes off in search of new fresh meat. As this organization that funneled amazing amounts of imports into our country via the whole ‘consumer culture’ business goes under, let us wave Flat Earth Friedman goodbye.
May he and his books be buried six feet under. His wife’s stock fell over 60% today and is now officially ‘penny stock’. The graph below shows a classic bubble/bust profile:
Continued>>>
http://emsnews.wordpress.com/2008/11/14/flat-earth-friedmans-wealth-is-vanishing/#more-206
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