Spent the wk touring monuments. The ones in NY get built by boys who make money. The ones in DC by boys who spend it. The former is gritty, dirty and electric, just like the business that foots the bill. NY monuments make money, just take a deep breath at Rockafeller, you can smell it. I love it. I’m biased, I know, it’s my hometown. Anyhow, went for a sunrise jog in DC. Empty streets, that city sleeps. Circled Georg

Hope all goes well. Had a great wk in NY & DC. Saw 22 investors and politicos. Closed a deal with a lotta zeros. He’d been watching us since birth, ignored our adolescence, thinks we’re grown up now. Navigated markets well. Friday’s decline was a shocker, traders are dizzier than Iranian yellow-cake. Overall: 23 S&P 500 companies reported this wk. All but 3 beat earnings estimates, and revenue/share grew by 2

I know 3 brothers. Boomers. Went to great schools, got great jobs, raised great families. Mid-to-late sixties now. One loved to ski and moved north, another loved golf moved south, the 3rd loved big living and small bills, moved to Mexico. El Guapo lived off real estate deals, now he’s as broke as the unfinished resorts he peddled to gringos. Vermont planned well, just put the big house of bricks up for sale, time to

Major brain damage this wk. UBS cut yr-end call for S&P 500 from 1,350 to 1,150, Barton Biggs sold his tech shares, JP Morgan called for declines in EM stocks, Investors Intelligence hit highest bearish sentiment since Jul ’09, and stocks dutifully surged. EM stocks had best wk in 7mths as China said they’d keep policy moderately loose and Korea hiked rates for 1st time in a show of confidence. European CDS sprea

Hope all goes well. Packed a lot into a short wk. Lots of traders reaching for air-sickness bags. It’s Summer. Getting busy in sleepy Santa Barbara. Lots of new friends stopping by. Must be the open invite and good weather. Overall: Major brain damage this wk. UBS cut yr-end call for S&P 500 from 1,350 to 1,150, Barton Biggs sold his tech shares, JP Morgan called for declines in EM stocks, Investors Intelligence

One of my boys runs product mgmt for a cloud computing start-up, few yrs old. Amazon.com realized they had enough servers to handle Christmas orders and too many for the other 49wks of the yr. Figured they could earn a buck leasing their spare capacity. Obvious and smart. But my boys’ company figured out how to build the pipes and interfaces to connect users and capacity faster than Amazon could, so they let him do i

Overall: Global purchasing manager indexes roll-over from strong growth mode. Biggest-ever decline in US pending home sales, drop in Chinese LEI, austere G20 communiqué, and fears over a sequential decline in stimulus spending prompts continued risk-aversion. Weak job growth caps a terrible run, with S&P’s -12% in Q2, at new lows for ’10. Analysts/strategists reluctantly revise forecasts lower, Goldman softening

Global purchasing manager indexes roll-over from strong growth mode. Biggest-ever decline in US pending home sales, drop in Chinese LEI, austere G20 communiqué, and fears over a sequential decline in stimulus spending prompts continued risk-aversion. Weak job growth caps a terrible run, with S&P’s -12% in Q2, at new lows for ’10. Analysts/strategists reluctantly revise forecasts lower, Goldman softening and Merri

A Mon rally on China’s FX flexibility failed miserably, setting a “sell-rallies” tone for wk. Ozzy presented an austere looking budget — said the right things. Japan’s Kan pledged to cap spending for 3yrs, the German cuts thru ’14 look to be 80bln Euros. Austrians in; Keynes out. Soros warns Germany leading EU down deflationary funnel (The Economist, Krugman and his ilk agree). US housing data collapsed, sparki

My Dad fought in Korea, engineering PhD on GI bill, designed spy planes and spaceships. Raced the Reds most of his life. He moved on. Designs Predators to hunt cavemen. We have fun talking economics, he finds the theories amusing, and no one dies. I explain Ricardian Comparitive Advantage Theory and the shift of labor overseas. He says sounds great, then drives me through the Hartford ghetto, once a gem of US manufac