[On] the short list of investment-grade U.S. bond funds that cover the waterfront in this corner of the capital markets.
The first point to note is that the short list really is short. That’s partly because there’s only a handful of ETFs that cover the broad spectrum of investment-grade bonds in the U.S. in one fell swoop. We’re talking here of Treasuries, government agencies, corporates, and a small amount of international dollar-denominated bonds (inflation-protected Treasuries and munis are excluded, however). We’re also limiting the choices to market-cap weighted benchmarks exclusively in the ETF space. That leaves us with four choices, as shown in the tableComment: The absolute easiest way to invest in bonds is through a Bond ETF. We have investments in both BND and AGG. Neither are exciting (like an IBM) but they are stable.
After Tuesday votes in Mississippi, Alabama, Hawaii and American Samoa: DELEGATES WON
- 41 Romney
- 35 Santorum
- 24 Gingrich
- 1 Paul
Vikings stadium bill trips over projections of gaming revenue
Excerpt:
Gov. Mark Dayton and supporters of a new Minnesota Vikings stadium scrambled on Monday to blunt doubts that electronic bingo and pulltabs could raise enough money to pay the state's share of the $975 million project without putting taxpayers at risk if gaming revenue falls short.
Over the weekend, Dayton and Revenue Commissioner Myron Frans reached out to charitable gambling officials to dull growing criticism of the state's $398 million financing proposal. Charities had fought for years to increase their take from pulltabs and bingo, only to see stadium supporters take much of the new revenue to pay for a Vikings stadium.
With a crucial legislative deadline fast approaching, King Wilson, the executive director of Allied Charities of Minnesota, said a "large gap" remained between the charities and the governor on the issue.
The impasse left key legislators unsure about pressing forward, particularly those on House and Senate panels where the stadium legislation would get its first votes. One DFL legislator said on Monday -- two days before the bill's first Senate hearing -- that the proposal was being held together with "duct tape."
"I do have some concerns ... about the funding -- absolutely -- whether or not it truly is a stable source of revenue," said Sen. Claire Robling, R-Jordan, a member of the Senate Local Government and Elections Committee.Comment: And of course if the funding comes up short ... raise general revenue to pay for it!
It was simply called the "Dayton Exercise" and for obvious reasons it was kept secret for decades. It was also one of the clearest examples of the trouble the United States encounters when it decides to precipitously draw back its military in a troubled world.
.. On Aug. 19, 1949, the Soviets successfully tested their first atomic bomb, years before U.S. intelligence believed they would. Six weeks later, Mao Zedong's communist army took control of China. Eight months after that, the North Koreans crossed the border and quickly crushed U.S. and South Korean forces. Things have a way of changing when you least expect it.
One year after World War II, the U.S. had placed its strategic nuclear advantage in the hands of a new entity called the Strategic Air Command (SAC). It made sense to hand the country's nuclear punch over to this new branch of the Air Force, since only that service branch had the delivery system and prior experience. The B-29s of SAC were meant to so petrify any foe that they would never consider an attack on the U.S. The reality was that the new command was a shockingly disorganized, ill-equipped, nonfunctioning organization. Worse, no one seemed to care.
In 1948, the commander of SAC was replaced by Gen. Curtis LeMay, who had proven himself the ultimate problem solver in World War II, first in Europe and then in the Pacific. LeMay immediately understood the severity of the problem. He also comprehended the constantly changing geopolitical landscape.
So he walked into his office in Omaha, Neb., on one of his earliest days on the job and ordered every single bomber in SAC to take off immediately and electronically "bomb" Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.
Compared with a real war, this should have been a cakewalk. Crews would not have to fly over an ocean, nor would they be flying into unfamiliar or unfriendly territory. Everyone knew Wright-Pat. It was a relatively short, peaceful distance away. The control tower in Dayton would be able to track the trajectory of each plane's "bombs" by radar.
But it turned out that many of the planes couldn't even take off. The best mechanics had left the service for higher-paying and easier civilian jobs after the war ended, leaving SAC's planes in woeful condition. Of the planes that could get to Dayton, not one was able to hit the target. Not one. For obvious reasons, the results were kept classified.
... The Dayton lesson serves as a cautionary tale. The next time some unforeseen event threatens the mainland as the U.S. is slashing its military budget, this country won't have the luxury of time to rebuild what it will no doubt need.Comment: Image and article on the B-36. On 8/19/1949 ... this boy was born!
Mitt Romney has all but won the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, top senator Lindsey Graham said Sunday, agreeing with the candidate that "mathematically, this thing is about over."
Romney has won 14 of 25 state-by-state votes that decide which Republican candidate takes on President Barack Obama in November, compared to eight wins for Rick Santorum and just two for former House speaker Newt Gingrich.
These victories have given Romney almost 40 percent of the 1,144 delegates needed to secure the nomination. He has 446 delegates, Santorum 199 and Gingrich 117, according to authoritative poll aggregator RealClearPolitics.
"Mathematically, Rick would have to win 75 percent of what remains," Graham, a senior Republican who serves on various Senate committees, told ABC's "This Week" program.
"He's done an outstanding job, Rick has, of starting with almost nothing and being a real contender, and Newt's come back from the dead two or three times," Graham said. "But mathematically, this thing is about over, but emotionally it's not."
Graham was speaking ahead of two do-or-die contests for Gingrich on Tuesday in the conservative southern states of Mississippi and Alabama -- although the former House speaker has pledged to stay in the race until the bitter end.Comment: Image Source.
[Bob Greenberg] wrote the city charter amendment that now poses the greatest hurdle to supporters of a Vikings stadium in Minneapolis -- mandating a citywide vote on stadium subsidies of $10 million or more. Seventy percent of city voters approved that language in 1997 during talks of a new Twins ballpark, but it now faces its first real test as the Legislature considers a bill to ignore it altogether.
"I did not write this charter amendment to prevent the building of a stadium," said Greenberg, a former Twin Cities activist who moved into a woodland tent two years ago and lives off the land, including roadkill. "But only to force the city to put it before the voters."
The activists who fought for the referendum requirement have long parted ways, but now find themselves revisiting the passionate case they made for a public say in sports subsidies. Some are offended at what's going on. Others have changed their minds.
The three sentences in the Minneapolis charter have prompted a majority of the City Council to speak out against the latest stadium plan, which would bypass the referendum. When the referendum idea was born around a table in St. Paul 15 years ago, then-Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton wanted to dedicate $50 million to a new home for the Twins.
"I knew, as I said at those meetings, that they were going to get around it," said then-mayoral candidate and City Council Member Barbara Carlson, who supported the referendum requirement. But times change. Carlson now believes it was "a bad decision" and "referendums are insanity."
Mayor R.T. Rybak's latest proposal to fund a Vikings stadium in downtown Minneapolis would pay for the city's share of the facility by redirecting a group of sales taxes that currently pay for the convention center. That money becomes available when the convention center debt is paid in 2020. Stadium backers argue the sales taxes are state-authorized and therefore not city resources, an argument reflected in the stadium bill introduced Friday.
Greenberg knew any loopholes would be exploited, which was why he included a laundry list of funding options to spur a vote, including "sales tax or other taxes."
"I pulled my brains out [imagining] what is every single way that they could finance this? How could they find a way around this?"
Rybak has argued that his deal, which he says will lower property taxes by paying debt on Target Center, is a much more complicated package than what the referendum is meant to address. But Council Member Gary Schiff, who developed the idea with Greenberg, says voters still want a voice in this deal.Comment: The two flaws ... and they are major:
But in at least two studies before the 1981 Uniform Determination of Death Act, some "brain-dead" patients were found to be emitting brain waves. One, from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in the 1970s, found that out of 503 patients who met the usual criteria of brain death, 17 showed activity in an EEG.
Even some of the sharpest critics of the brain-death criteria argue that there is no possibility that donors will be in pain during the harvesting of their organs. One, Robert Truog, professor of medical ethics, anesthesia and pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, compared the topic of pain in an organ donor to an argument over "whether it is OK to kick a rock."
But BHCs [beating-heart cadaver]—who don't receive anesthetics during an organ harvest operation—react to the scalpel like inadequately anesthetized live patients, exhibiting high blood pressure and sometimes soaring heart rates. Doctors say these are simply reflexes.
What if there is sound evidence that you are alive after being declared brain dead? In a 1999 article in the peer-reviewed journal Anesthesiology, Gail A. Van Norman, a professor of anesthesiology at the University of Washington, reported a case in which a 30-year-old patient with severe head trauma began breathing spontaneously after being declared brain dead. The physicians said that, because there was no chance of recovery, he could still be considered dead. The harvest proceeded over the objections of the anesthesiologist, who saw the donor move, and then react to the scalpel with hypertension.
Organ transplantation—from procurement of organs to transplant to the first year of postoperative care—is a $20 billion per year business. Average recipients are charged $750,000 for a transplant, and at an average 3.3 organs, that is more than $2 million per body. Neither donors nor their families can be paid for organs.
It is possible that not being a donor on your license can give you more bargaining power. If you leave instructions with your next of kin, they can perhaps negotiate a better deal. Instead of just the usual icewater-in-the-ears, why not ask for a blood-flow study to make sure your cortex is truly out of commission?
And how about some anesthetic? Although he doesn't believe the brain dead feel pain, Dr. Truog has used two light anesthetics, high-dose fentanyl and sufentanil, which won't harm organs, to quell high blood pressure or heart rate during harvesting operations. "If it were my family," he said, "I'd request them."Comment: Makes on wonder!
In large red type against a black background, Time boiled those ideas down to three words: “Is God Dead?” It became one of the magazine’s most famous covers, and it upended Dr. Hamilton’s quiet life as an academic theologian.
The article, appearing in the season of Easter and Passover, gave a primer on the history of the war between religious and secular ideas in Western culture going back to Copernicus. It quoted Billy Graham and Simone de Beauvoir as exemplars of the two sides, and it introduced the world to Dr. Hamilton as the leader of a new school of religious thinking it called the “Death of God Movement.”Comment: Original Time cover below:
New car shoppers who look up a car’s invoice price, shop multiple dealerships and aren’t afraid to haggle can save as much as $800 on average on a vehicle purchase, according to a study that is one of the first to test economic bargaining theory against real world data from the $340 billion U.S. auto business.
Just coming to a dealership armed with the invoice price of a vehicle can save a shopper as much as $140, according to an analysis of data from 1,402 shoppers who purchased one of eight car models in California between April and May 2002. The analysis is the foundation of a paper by F. Scott Morton of Yale University, Jorge Silva-Risso of the University of California Riverside and Florian Zettelmeyer of Northwestern University.
... Shopping around, visiting at least one additional dealership to get a competing quote, can save more, the study found.Comment: The first new car I "bought" was for a widow who needed a new car. She wanted a Pontiac. I was a senior in college. I shopped and shopped the details (it was much harder back before the Internet) and called and called. I used my deepest voice to sound as adult as I could sound (I was 21). Basically I negotiated the deal over the phone and went to the dealership with her. This was back when I lived in Cincinnati. The best deal was in Northern Kentucky .... I think in Covington. It was a 1971 Pontiac Ventura. New cars are easier to buy than used because there are less variables and there is more information available. The keys (just off the top of my head):
The Associated Press' estimate puts Romney currently at 415 delegates, to Santorum's 176, with Gingrich and Paul controlling 105 and 47, respectively. A candidate needs a majority of all delegates in order to win the nomination, which this year comes to 1,144.
Two of the remaining winner-take-all states will be uncontested, Utah and Pennsylvania. Romney is all but guaranteed to win Utah's 40 delegates on June 26, and so if Santorum win his home state's 72 delegates on April 24, his net gain is 32 -- leaving him about 200 behind Romney, with about 1430 remaining. The remaining states are scattered geographically and demographically, distributed evenly between Romney's base (the Northeast), Santorum's (the heartland), as well as the Romney-leaning West and the Gingrich-Santorum South.
If Romney were to stumble and win only a third of the delegates in the remaining states, Santorum would have to win more than half of all the delegates in order to pull ahead, meaning that Gingrich and Paul together would have to be held below 16 percent. To date, not even counting Romney's blowout in Massachusetts, Romney has won nearly half of the delegates while Santorum has won about one-fourth. That means the only path to Romney losing is Santorum doubling his past haul, while Romney dropping by about 70 percent. That's not likely.Comment: Image from Romney campaign email. Remember delegate math is imprecise. On why Gingrich continues (basically his campaign is paying him):
Gingrich, meanwhile, directly benefits from continuing to run. His campaign has paid him, personally, more than $100,000 in "unspecified expenses in what amounted to petty cash," as the Washington Times' Luke Roziak puts it. The Gingrich campaign has also paid or otherwise subsidized Gingrich's for-profit enterprises, in the process raising his profile and, presumably, his speaking fees. Gingrich's top aides are rewarding themselves with plenty of Sheldon Adelson money, too -- one super-PAC aide paid herself $220,000 for about 10 weeks of work.
A major pillar of the Vikings stadium proposal unveiled last week is tax revenue from an expansion in charitable gambling. But such a financing plan has lots of unknowns — and one key question: Will the introduction of electronic gambling gizmos generate enough income to repay the bonds?
The financing proposal depends on electronic pull-tabs supplying funds to repay $398 million in bonds the state plans to float to build the facility. (Minneapolis will back another $150 million in bonds with sales taxes, pending City Council endorsement to the financial arrangement.
The entire public financing plan, Gov. Mark Dayton said last week, wouldn't use "a single dollar of general fund tax revenues.")
Minnesota already allows paper pull-tabs. To win cash prizes, players match pictures on the front of the cards they purchase, usually for $2 each, under tabs that they tear off. Bars and restaurants sell them on behalf of nonprofits, and the proceeds -- minus the prize money, expenses and taxes -- go to charity. Among those who benefit in Minnesota: American Legion posts, VFW groups and others who use the money to support local sports leagues, scholarships and the like.Comment: I'm not particularly naive but until pull tabs were recently explained to me, I didn't even know what they were. Sounds like a giant waste of time and money! The linked article examines the dubious propects of the electronic pull tab revenue source. A must read because if this stream fails, all Minnesotans will be holdlng the bag for the Vikings stadium
Romney is being widely panned by the press for an “inability to close the deal,” and yet the description seems far more apt for Santorum, who now has blown huge leads in the most critical contests of recent weeks, Ohio and Michigan. If anything, the more voters look at Santorum, the more concerned they become and less likely they are to sign on the dotted line....
All reporting is now sports reporting. Reporters love a battle and they love to go on TV and rave about how exciting everything is. And editors seek a bracing and never-ending storyline because it draws readers and ultimately pleases their corporate bosses, who want to sell papers and generate pageviews.
The headline “Romney Scores Six Wins and Continues Methodical Drive Toward Nomination” is just not going to drive eyeballs to your story.
And reporters also tend to be moderate to liberal. Bloodletting among Republicans at some level is agreeable to many of them. I have to believe that if this was Obama instead of Romney, the stories would be about the growing inevitability of Obama’s nomination.
That Romney is in all likelihood on the march toward nomination will probably soon become too apparent for any serious journalist to deny. At that point, for the reasons listed above, we will begin to hear feverish talk about the prospects for a third party candidacy.Comments: Source of images: 1. bloodletting; 2. Screen capture.
The DJ Wilshire 5000 and MSCI U.S. Broad Market index both try to measure the entire stock market. Unlike the Standard & Poor's 500, which tracks 500 of the stock market's most valuable companies, the DJ Wilshire 5000 and MSCI U.S. Broad Market indexes try to own the big, the small and everything in between.
... It's also easy to track the DJ Wilshire 5000 because investors can buy shares in an ETF that tracks it, the SPDR DJ Wilshire Total Market ETF (TMW). You can track the index by entering TMW into any stock quote service.Comment: Chart above (from Yahoo finance) shows it beating the DOW over 2 years.
