WARREN BUFFET - A MARKETING GENIUS...

Overlay a chart of the S & P 500 and Berkshire Hathaway since May of 2002.  It looks to me as if they both follow a very similar path throughout that entire period.  Why in the world Berkshire gets so much publicity seems to be a delusion of the press.

I knew a man who was once called a  Wall Street "Investing Legend" by the media and a major university.  Each time I examine his public investing record all I seem to find is under performance to the major averages.

Many of Berkshire's major division heads seem to be being paid millions of dollars a year to run Berkshire's various parts while Buffet publicizes that he doesn't hardly take a salary.  He doesn't take a salary so I guess he doesn't pay much taxes.  He doesn't pay a dividend on his shares and generally he doesn't buy back shares of his own company.  Since as you've seen the performance of Berkshire mirrors the S & P, shareholders seem to get a very mediocre return.  The emphasis seems to be on the maintenance of an illusion as to how rich Mr. Buffet is and how little taxes everybody else pays.

From what I can tell in the press when he dies his shares will go to a Foundation, hence there will be little taxes on his estate.  From what I can tell the Foundation receiving the shares of his estate spend a substantial amount of its money on projects outside the United States.

In summary, his stock doesn't perform relatively and there seems to be lots of missing important information in the company's annual report.  Additionally, Mr Buffet has figured out a method for avoiding substantial tax payments for himself while his poor little secretary goes to Congress and complains about other people's taxes.

Remember Berkshire Hathaway hasn't diverged much from the S & P performance for over a decade. Warren Buffet is a marketing genius.  

THE GADGET THAT BROUGHT DOWN AN INDUSTRY (FIRST PUBLISHED 4/14/11)

Many months ago when I bought my first IPAD I said to my business partner, "Holy Moly-this product is going to have some huge impact on PC sales". Months have passed and I have begun to think of how many people are employed in making PCS and their ancillary equipment.

The gadget that brought down an industry and we didn't see it coming. Holy Moly???

P.S. I must be crazy. "Laugh of the Day"

BLOG OF THE DAY...

This morning I looked at a stock market screen with almost 300 symbols on it. They were all red.  You mean to tell me everybody decided to sell all of these 300 stocks and all of the buyers decided to go away.  I don't think so.  I think massive computer programs kicked in for whatever reason.  Today, computer trading accounts for most of the transactions on the stock exchange.  The self centered argument for maintaining this gambling casino environment is as wrong as the housing market speculation was. We all have access to company information and the economy.  Only a limited few have access to huge computers where a push of a button executes the buying and selling of millions of shares.   This has to end before a machine controlling a machine controlling a machine pushes the wrong button.

WARREN BUFFET IS RICH..BUT IS HE THE ULTIMATE "SNAKE OIL" SALESMAN?

1. Warren Buffett tries to convince investors that his shares should be priced on book value.  On page two of his annual report he actually compares the change of the S&P to the change in the book value of his stock.  Why doesn't he compare book value to book value at the very least. Usually in modern times if it's real book value it's either based upon liquidation value or earnings power.

2. I have never seen a more complicated annual report. For example, you have to go all the way to page 59 to find that Berkshire owns a company called McLane that accounts for almost 25% of Berkshire's total revenues but contributes 2% to total earnings.

3. Consequently its fair to say that instead of $144 billion dollars of reported revenues Berkshire's real important base is closer to $111 billion dollars.

4. Nearly 15% of total Berkshire revenues are generated by the Burlington Railroad which Warren Buffett had absolutely nothing to do with building or creating.

5. By the time you take off $33 billion dollars of revenues from McLane and $20 billion dollars from Burlington you are left with about $90 billion dollars of revenue that one can impute to Berkshire management.

6. Of that $90 billion dollars of revenue, $32 billion dollars are in something called "other" businesses that seems to consist of about 100 little businesses and are nothing more than a huge conglomerate, usually not rewarded a high price earnings ratio by investors.

7, By the time you subtract the low profit margin of McLane and a huge conglomerate of dozens and dozens of companies, you are left with a $59 billion dollar business.

8. Another subsidiary called Marmon does another $7 billion dollars of business, requires $10 billion dollars of identifiable assets and probably earns about $600 million for a 6% return on investable assets.

9. You go to Berkshire's consolidated statement of earnings and you cant even find a mention of McLane, the food wholesaler that earns next to nothing.  It seems to be included in insurance and other.  That seems awfully  misleading to me.

10. I'm not even sure if the annual report, on page 27, is clear enough on the average number of shares outstanding. Value Line and Morningstar seem to show close to 2.4 billion shares outstanding, average or not.

11. On page 101, there is a list of non-insurance businesses and their number of employees, a total of 270,000.  There is about 60 non-insurance businesses, 40,000 people work for the railroad which has next to nothing to do with Buffet.  Marmon and McLane employ another 30,000 people, you can go figure out for yourself what the future profitability of these businesses is worth.  About 40,000 people work for fruit of the Loom and from what I can tell that company that doesn't seem to be doing well.

12. Where can you find the record of these individual companies?  I certainly couldn't.

13. You have to go all the way to the 60's though the early 80's to find when Berkshire's performance through book value significantly exceeded the performance of the S&P.   Recent years show an entirely different picture.

14. As regards to his large common stock positions on page 16 of the annual report he shows a $19 billion dollar profit of which $12 billion is in Coca Cola which he has probably held for 40 years. It shows another $4 billion dollars profit in Procter & Gamble which leaves very little profit on the rest of the portfolio. Has Buffet's performance on his stock portfolio been even close to the S & P?

15. Mr. Buffet talks about buying back his own stock up for up to no more than 10% of book value.  Well, if that is true why would he pay substantially more than book value for other stocks and not his own?

16. The company shows  a shareholder equity of $169 billion dollars.  There is $50 billion dollars of goodwill a non-asset asset and $76 billion dollars in equity securities most of which are probably float from the insurance companies and are not really Berkshire assets in my opinion.

17. I guess as Berkshire Hathaway common stock weakened into the high $60's Mr. Buffet was forced to buy back his own shares.  This may have been done to take attention away from the fact that Berkshire's share price had not changed since 2006 and was reaching the point where investors would begin to look for the real story.  Do your own analysis.

Seems to me that the cult of Warren Buffett, upon closer examination, is way out of proportion to reality.

Why in the world Buffets opinion on gold has any bearing on Berkshire Hathaway is beyond me except that he may have wanted to point out that in recent years you would have made a heck of alot more money on gold than on Berkshire's common shares.

GILEAD...WHO KNEW WHAT AND WHEN?

Recently a company called Gilead made an acquisition.  It paid $10 billion dollars cash for a company called Pharmasset.  Pharmasset had no revenues but it had a potential biotech product of significance.  A few months after the acquisition, the efficacy of Pharmasset's product is called into serious question by negative data on the pending product.

Everyone who owned shares of  Pharmasset was able to sell to Gilead (who seems to have done pretty sloppy due diligence), including insiders. I wonder if $10 billion dollars doesn't mean much if it's not your money?  Who knew what?  Was this the ultimate insider sale?

It's kind of ironic to note, that on February 7th (before the announcement of disappointments in the drug trials) insiders at Gilead sold a substantial number of shares.  Was this the ultimate double-pronged insider sale jigsaw puzzle?

WHY DID WE LOSE ALL THESE JOBS...

As President Obama ranted about not going to Las Vegas and flying on private planes, the jobs passed us right by.  Tens of thousand of jobs, from construction to everything else, were created in China building the world's most successful gambling hotels and resorts.  If you look deeply, you could create the case that Obama is really out to weaken the country's economic position.  Good jobs and lots of them, went away while our President who has never created one job used populist rhetoric to unite votes instead of creating jobs.  

STOP WORRYING ABOUT EVERYONE ELSE'S TAXES AND TAKE CARE OF YOUR SHAREHOLDERS...

For those of you that hang on to every word that Warren Buffet has to say, I hope you don't mind that I point out the following.  Berkshire Hathaway stock is selling at the same price that it did in 2007.

Mr. Buffett takes money that he earns in the insurance company and instead of reducing premiums, he takes the excess and invests it in mature companies like PG, JNJ, WPO, WFC, AXP, KO, KFT, etc.

He is a rich man but Berkshire Hathaway is nothing more than a conglomerate, period, end of subject.  Lots of hype, but no shareholder returns in many years.

OUR MISLEADING PRESIDENT

I was going to write a further review of the Presidents State of the Union Message. As I continued to read the speech, finding it so full of rhetoric and appeal to emotion, I came across a hugely misleading, out of context statement by the President. His comments are an attempt to make a laughing stock of the capacity of the average American to think for himself.

He spoke about how the CEO of Master Lock told him it made good business sense to bring jobs back home to America. He states that his unionized plant in Milwaukee was running at full capacity. Sadly, these are facts:

1. MASTER LOCK SENT JOBS OFFSHORE IN 1999 PUTTING AN ESTIMATED THIRTEEN HUNDRED UNITED AUTOWORKERS OUT OF WORK.

2. IN 2011, MASTER LOCK ANNOUNCED THAT 36 JOBS WERE BEING RETURNED FROM CHINA TO A PLANT THAT WOULD NOW EMPLOY LESS THAN 400 WORKERS.

3. MASTER LOCK SAID IT WOULD CONTINUE TO WORK WITH THREE CHINESE FACTORIES AND ABOUT 25 CHINESE SUPPLIERS AND WITH MEXICAN WORKERS NEAR THE ARIZONA BORDER DOING LABOR INTENSIVE WORK.

How absurd to use a small company that belonged to a tobacco company as an example. I can't believe that we will accept such flimsy contextually dishonest information from this President. He is good with words, but he almost never good with truth.

BLOG OF THE DAY..

President Obama referred to the GI Bill of Rights in the State of the Union speech. This highly partisan President did not make it clear as to certain facts about the origin of the bill.

1. Harry W. Colmery, the former REPUBLICAN National Committee Chairman wrote the first draft of the GI Bill of Rights.

2. Elizabeth Rogers, REPUBLICAN of Massachusetts is considered by many the "Mother of the GI Bill."

Isn't it interesting how the President presented this subject as if it was a democratic party achievement only?

Information primarily by Wikipedia.

COULD PRESIDENT OBAMA EVER MEET A PAYROLL?

When I read Obama's State of the Union message I remain flabbergasted by the flowering concepts and the total lack of ideas. Obama makes the statement that for the first time in nine years there are no Americans fighting in Iraq. He makes this statement as if its some type of accomplishment, but it's nine years later and time for this to end...anybody would know that.

He talks about the death of Osama Bin Laden while Egypt,Yemen, Syria and parts of Africa continue in total disarray. He speaks out of context as to reality. He compares the financial institutional problems to our American Armed forces, as if dying in combat can possibly belong in the same sentence as the housing crisis. He states that our Armed Forces are not consumed with personal ambition. Nothing could be further than the truth since many of our Armed Forces desire growth, opportunity and higher rank. He makes it sound as if the only ones that focus on the mission at hand are the Armed Forces. Words, not truth. He has never served in the Armed Forces and probably knows very little about the highly structured disciplined regime of the "enlisted man".

He talks about leading the world in education and offers no suggestion as to how to take our people out of the fields of poverty and low paying jobs in so many industries in this country. He speaks of an America that attracts high tech industry and high paying jobs with no specific ideas.

He wants to be in control of our own energy. Great! So why brag about pulling our forces out of the Middle East and complaining about the tax depletion allowances granted by Congress to incentivize the exploration of oil.

What in the world does his Grandfather being in Patton's Army have to do with the GI Bill. The GI Bill did not come into existence because his Grandfather was in Patton's Army. When World War II came the Germans were certainly way ahead in the quality of their Armed Forces equipment.

His family may have been optimistic people but before WWII the unemployment rate was approaching 20%. Whether you like it or not it was the War that brought the unemployment rate down.

Poverty stricken blacks and whites did not understand they were part of "something larger". They knew nothing of contributing to a story of success. Many were even children of the "dust bowl". They were struggling to survive.

The idea of raising a family, owning a home, going to college and putting a little away for retirement was the early attempt to raise one's standard of living. He is right when he says there is a shrinking number of people doing well not a growing number of people.

To imply that most Americans don't get a fair shot and that some groups of people don't do their fair share and that most don't play by the rules is again just words and if put to the test for facts, would be totally bogus. In general, you can't compare the SAT results of a first generation immigrant from South America to a family that has been through several generations in America.

I'm only on page two of the speech. I could keep going on since Obama's thinking on almost every part of this speech is analytically incorrect. I don't want to bore you anymore today.

ISSUES FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION...

It's well known that our democracy is some kind of mixture of everything. In today's world the Internet has given a venue where millions of us, (including me), have been provided with a forum for words, words, words. The words have become a cover up for solving the critical issues of our time. We have been able to function under the protective umbrella of the words "well at least we are better than any other system", even if those systems are failing on a multitude of levels.

An article in a renowned northeastern newspaper stated that there has been a significant increase in the tax auditing of the so called well to do. I'm not in favor of the tax cheats and certainly have no objection to a comprehensive and fair auditing of anyone.

Unfortunately the "left wing liberal elite" do not call auditing successful people profiling. The plain fact is that auditing any group, compared to any other group, is plain old profiling.

Lets assume you had two children, one stood on their own two feet and did whatever a kid was expected to do in acceptable terms. The other was a recalcitrant, lazy bully. The parents, cowering in fear of the bullying child, turns on the other child out of fear of antagonizing the negative one. Somehow this is backwards. Obama's mantra was change. What many of us assumed was he meant change in facing the real issues. That would have meant auditing rich and poor equally.

Almost in a reflection of desperation of these thoughts there has been a recent increase in the number of doctors filing for bankruptcy. You vote, predicable...yes or no. Two thousand pages of Obamacare...how many people in this country knows what it says? Profiling under the guise of auditing and a health care program that's losing our doctors are both examples of government behavior where the election is more important than doing the job right.

As I said before, labor's lack of flexibility has destroyed major American industries. Now the mighty "Union of Government", will over time, eat away at the underpinnings of people's desire to excel. Along with this we are now seeing the beginnings of a decline in our military establishment which will just be another industry driven to retreat by the misplaced but "feel good" attitude of our populist politics even when the results are negative. Declining relative military strength, along with declining relative economic strength, are the historical prescription for long term relative standards of living weakness.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF WHAT'S WRONG...

There are 600,000 people who are not 1 percenters working at Citicorp and Bank of America. 600,000 People!

The Obama administration recently prided itself on collecting a $335 million dollar fine from Bank of America for the egregious activities of Countrywide Mortgage well before the bank acquired Countrywide.

The bank now has $335 million dollar less to pay its employees, build up its reserves, invest in plant and equipment and make loans.

The few executives responsible for the Countrywide fiasco have long ago walked away, many of them extremely wealthy.

The headlines in the media about the great punishment of Bank of America is a complete farce. It's only value is to lie to the public. It sounds good to get that "big bad" bank. The poor 600,000 employed by Bank of America and Citicorp don't count because they don't have a voice.

The dynamics of the letting 600,000 employees bear the brunt of Barney Frank's hypocrisy does not speak well for the character of our nation.

In theory, lets fine the government every time they make a bad decision, starting with Solyndra.

STOP WORRYING ABOUT GLOBILIZATION...START WORRYING ABOUT OURSELF

A while back we wrote about the effect of the tablet on PC sales. At that time we didn't fully grasp the competitive impact. It's real, it will continue.

Meg Whitman is a smart woman. She was recently appointed CEO of Hewlett Packard. Traditionally, a new management of a historically great company, with a low share price based on historical financial relationships, would be a good place to consider investing. Over time, many financial assets that go out of favor return to favor at another time. But some do not. They go down, they stay down. Looking backwards to their prior greatness becomes a loser's game.

I took a quick look at the recent financials on Hewlett. I hadn't done it in awhile. What I found was a company with about $127 billion in revenues and costs which used up $115 billion of the $127 billion in revenues. That means that before taxes, interest and depreciation, Hewlett was making about $.10 per dollar of revenue. Now imagine this, you have to sell $130 billion dollars of goods, have a couple of hundred thousand employees and end up with what is low return on a dollar of sales.

But that's not the real story. The real story is much more dramatic. The implications are scary.

Way back when, a company like Hewlett Packard went to find manufacturers overseas for its products. It significantly dictated the terms as the foreign manufacturers needed business. Now, whether we like it or not, the negotiating power has shifted. It's as if the foreign manufacturers say "We'll make the product for you, we'll let you sell it under your name, but most of the money from the sale of the products will go to us". There are only so many places an American company can go to offset this type of negotiating tactic. It's complicated to change manufacturers. The net result is that power, in terms of trade, has shifted more than most of us realize. Obviously we now know what CEO Meg Whitman has to do, drive the cost of sales down .

Fifty years ago, the President of US Steel, when I asked him about imports said, "We are US Steel, we never lose".

WORDS THAT DESTROY RATHER THAN HEAL...PENN STATE VS. SMU

We sent our daughter to a Jewish religious school. One day my former wife and I came across a teacher beating up a ten year old child outside the classroom. We intervened but were told to mind our business. We were large contributors to the religious school. We went to see the Chairman of the Board to register our disgust. He was a much larger contributor than we were. We were actually told that we didn't know what we saw and should mind our business. We were told the reputation of the school was more important than the event. We went to see the Rabbi, but the Rabbi could be fired by the Chairman of the Board. He told us the kid probably needed discipline. We didn't go to the police.

A Cantor, at one of the most famous Jewish temples in New York City, was once arrested for child molestation. I don't know what happened to him but I'm pretty sure he was found guilty.

A few years later a Senior Rabbi at the same Temple was arrested for soliciting an underage child for sex.

My wife and I recently found an article about a Lutheran preacher who was arrested for solicitation for underage sex.

What's occurred with the Priests in the Catholic church is arguably among the most atrocious events in the history of this important institution.

The myriads of scandals in the Presbyterian and Baptist religious orders have made significant headlines over the years.

The point of this discourse really concerns an editorial by a well known left wing writer in a well known New York newspaper. I quote from this editorial:

"In words and deeds they have shown that their priorities are askew. After its death sentence SMU football (other crimes) never regained its previous prominence. But it would be okay if it wound up permanently diminished like SMU". (i.e. Penn State)

The writer in his egotistical wrath actually used the words "after its death sentence."

In accordance with this kind of thinking the mentioned Jewish temples, the Catholic Church, the Lutheran orders and the other religious orders would also be accorded a "death sentence" according to his way of thinking.

Human nature, being what it seems to be, dictates that in every large institution there will be transgressions by the criminal, psychopathic, borderline, narcissistic, weak minded personnel. With this writers kind of thinking, every city would be closed down because within it you would find criminal elements.

The criminal actions of a few individuals within a large institution or group should not constitute a "death sentence" for the entire institution or group. In all fairness, if that was the case, the abuses that have occurred in the large religious institutions would have also commanded enforcement of some type of "death sentence" to them also and society in general.

Mr. Sandusky maybe guilty of horrible crimes, but courage to step forward in a judicial process that would take ten years to convict him is naive especially when the perpetrator has power.

COURAGE IS A RARE COMMODITY...

The government fines an airline for keeping people in a plane for too long during a storm. The government fines the airline almost $1 million dollars. Now the airline has $1 million dollars less for raises, fuel purchases, airplane maintenance, etc. The airline will simply transfer this expense back to the consumer in the form of higher ticket prices.

Picture this plane, safety is first, therefore in trying to avoid a storm they get sent to a new landing field. When the plane gets there its storming. The weather forecast says it will clear in an hour. The airport tells the unexpected planes, "hey guys, clearing in an hour", but the weather forecast changes and the storm continues. So many planes have unexpectedly overloaded the airport that all the gates are filled. Its tough to move the planes out of the gates because there is nowhere to put them. The storm makes its dangerous to move the planes in the first place. There aren't any extra employees at the airport and certainly no highly trained ones. Several more planes arrive because all the other airports are closed. The pilot has rightfully upset passengers on the plane. These passengers have connections to make to get to where they were going in the first place. They are held up by the storm and throughout the whole country planes are waiting for passengers that never show up. Who was responsible to move a plane from the gate during the storm? Who would be responsible if a gate was cleared and a serious accident occurred by moving planes under hazardous conditions?

Some people think it was the airport that should have paid the fine. The airports are concrete and wires. The fact of the matter is that there is no system in place where the staff is large enough and trained enough to accommodate our airline system during unexpected hazardous weather conditions.

Fining the airlines, which is a paper entity, is another example of political expediency before honesty. There will always be a set of conditions where we can't get people off planes which might be a greater risk than leaving them on them.

So again instead of telling people the truth that no matter how hard we try, individual people, usually with limited authority and responsibility, will generally not take the risk of some extraordinary action plan that could jeopardize their jobs.

MORE LIES, MORE LIES AND MORE LIES...

The left wing socialist writer at that New York newspaper is so wrong about so much that it's just plain sad. On Monday, October 17th, he failed to recognize that one of the major reasons for the slow down in income growth from 1980 to 2007 was inflexible wages in our major manufacturing base.

We lost a major share of the auto, steel, textile, clothing and computer manufacturing business to countries with much cheaper labor.

Good, bad or indifferent, the millions of people employed by banks, pension funds, mutual fund companies, insurance companies, equipment leasing companies, lawyers, accountants, secretaries, cleaning people, and everybody else, was almost forced upon us by fear and ignorance and actually saved the economy from severe deprivation and depression.

It was government policy to provide homes for everyone.

THE ATALANTA SOSNOFF STORY WILL BE COMING SOON.

LAZY OCCUPIERS VERSUS REAL PROBLEMS

The rain didn't come. The country was already suffering. The crops withered and then withered some more. The land, the asset of productivity, became baron, and still the rain didn't come. To a great extent we were an agrarian society. The several hundred thousand tenant farmers, through generations of sweat but at the same time life, were obliterated by the drought. And so with no education, no money, no medical care, no unemployment benefits and really no food, they were ejected from the land by owners and circumstance.

They packed their bags and went into cars and trucks that would hardly move. They headed west, for what was thought of as a "place of plenty".

There were no real jobs, it was all fictitious. Some found jobs for 30 cents only to find hundreds of thousands of others willing to work for 20 cents and then 10 cents. At this point you couldn't buy food let alone anything else. The horror of the American farmer at that point of history is hard to comprehend. This was part of the Great Depression and a people without a backup plan and is the background for the classic book The Grapes of Wrath.

Obviously there are many questions, but who were these people? Who were their parents? They were farmers, they came from a farmers background. They were hard working; but their history, their struggles, their nature went from one generation to the next. Only a few had the luck or the psychological stamina to move away from the soil.

The Jews of the world have tended to be a persecuted minority for centuries. People have found that the Jewish people have dealt with the psychological trauma of Anti Semitism in different ways. Many converted, often believing that conversion would allow them to escape from discrimination. Many changed their names to non Jewish sounding names. Many chose the path of rising up to separate themselves and say "Look at me I'm successful". A good example would be Larry King whose birthname was Lawrence Harvey Zeigler.

The New York Times is a premier example of assimilating. The extent of the New York Times failure to support Jewish causes during the Holocaust belies why any Jew would ever buy this newspaper. The Roosevelt administration's complicity of not helping to save Jews from Hitler and the subsequent overwhelming support of the Jews for the Democratic party is the delusional aspect of historical victims separating fantasy from reality.

So the farmers suffered, the Jews suffered and now we see 40% unemployment in black teenagers and a black unemployment rate almost double the rest of the population.

The delusion of the blacks, as a general group, towards Obama and Democrats is the same as the Jewish delusions was towards Roosevelt and his Democratic administration.

See the farmers were left to starve, the Jews were left to die and Blacks are left to be unemployed. It is essential to recognize not as an excuse or an appeasement of any sort, but just the reality that the American attitude towards the Black community has impacted the psychology of the group. Granted some Blacks have moved beyond but many have not been able to.

The Farmers, the Jews, and the Blacks each have had historical problems impacting their behavior. For the record, there are many other groups within our society who have suffered through their own feelings of discrimination and chosen similar methods to address their situation.

But who are the Occupy Wall Street people?

A RETAILER MAKING COMPUTERS?

BLOG FIRST PUBLISHED APRIL 2011

Many months ago when I bought my first IPAD I said to my business partner, "Holy Moly-this product is going to have some huge impact on PC sales". Months have passed and I have begun to think of how many people are employed in making PCS and their ancillary equipment.

The gadget that brought down an industry and we didn't see it coming. Holy Moly???

P.S. I must be crazy. "Laugh of the Day"

Many months ago I first published the blog above about the IPAD. Now a second catalyst has caught our attention and seems to be just as destructive as the IPAD. The fact that a retailer (Amazon) is now manufacturing its own tablet is incredible. Not only does it appear that Amazon's tablet is quite a capable machine but it's also to be sold at a significant discount to its competitors. Look at what's happened to both Hewlett Packard and RIMM with their venture into the tablet business. One can only wonder what the implications are for the rest of the computer hardware industry.

At one point in time the only device used to draft written correspondence was the typewriter. With the introduction of the personal computer the days of the typewriter were limited. Will the same fate lie ahead for the manufacturers of portable computers as the competition increases and the prices decline with the perfection of the industry?

1930 REVISITED?

While the Democrats focus on "class warfare" and the Republicans focus on spending cuts the "battle to right the ship in a storm" is being lost. (The Forgotten Man)

Both parties are focusing on the wrong battles. The Republican party is so split that it's hard to see how they can beat Obama, in spite of his huge failings.

In June 1930, as the Depression was unfolding, the Congress actually passed a tariff bill intending to protect American business from competition. Instead, there was worldwide retaliation.

A stronger dollar, at this time, under these conditions is exactly the same as the tariff bill passed in 1930.

All the above, tax increases, confidence lost, potential for stronger dollar and balanced budgets are so wrong as to make one think the country is being run by people who actually want us to go down the drain. Let's hope that President Obama has the courage to resign.