$2,650 for a baseball seat? Of course I read with great delight a recent article in my favorite paper, The New York Times, regarding the hubris of the Yankees baseball club. Here is part of the article from the Times which should have been entitled, “How I Enjoy Eating Crow”: “…..the team had first hinted at a change in ticket policy April 2 when Hal Steinbrenner, the team’s managing general partner, said, “There’s no doubt that a small amount of our tickets might be overpriced.”” two weeks before the home opener, Steinbrenner could not have anticipated the empty swaths of blue seats that were supposed to be filled with people willing to pay $500, $600, $850, $1,250 or $2,500 a game for a premium seat”.
Should have anticipated? You have to love this. I will go on record and saying they will be forced to 1) eat further crow and cut the now bargain-based price of $1,250 per seat even lower or 2) they will allow patrons from the lesser seats to fill in the wide swaths of empty premium seats at no charge after the third inning or so.
This column is a great read particularly if you are among those of us who think The Masters of the Universe on Wall Street have pretty much made a mess of things. read this: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27krugman.html?_r=2&em and you will be amused and disgusted. I too wonder what they did other than figure out of way to sell the same loaf of bread twenty times and take a fee each time. That is all the derivative marketplace was about.
First Oldsmobile and now Pontiac and even the vaunted Hummer join the Kaiser, Hudson and others in the halls of other Detroit losers. The irony is that Pontiac now has good cars, only a day late and a dollar short. The four-door G8, an Australian-sourced BMW wannabe, is probably as good a performer as the latter but half of the price. I have had my eye on a G8 GXP with a manual 6-speed for some time although I have yet to spy one on the road or tell my wife.
GM’s predictament is a testament to the results of intellectual inbreeding. All of those alleged car guys all lived and worked in the same upscale suburbs of Detroit and failed to realize that the auto world had tilted to the west. They continued to build cars for the guy in Iowa failing to notice the bulging populations of places like San Diego and Los Angeles. The Japanese figured this out early hiring West Coast hot-rodders and other car guys to design their cars.
In my view the denizens of Grosse Pointe wasted a national trust and as such should be held accountable. Years of efforts from the pioneers of the business was squandered. Michael Moore was right and most people ignored his film about my prime villian, GM’s chair Roger Smith. His smug provincialism drove GM into the ground. Under his watch he produced many truly horrid and forgettable cars.
My Dad started to be a GM man back in 1953 and recently purchased a new Cad. The difference in build quality and good design between his latest car and his last Olds was truly night and day. The worker who painted the Olds used a broom and I am convinced most of the assembly workers who screwed it together must have had their minds on the Lion’s game.
So GM should keep the fantastic G8 package and rebrand it as a Chevrolet. They appropriated the same chassis for the new Camaro and this would be easy. But are they smart enough?
This movie is a poorly executed and predictable cliche´ with little redeeming entertainment value. The movie is about a murder, two reporters, an editor and a congressman. These ingedients, when properly mixed, could produce a good film. This one, for the first 30 minutes, looked like a winner. Then something very bad happened on then and the credits. Russell Crowe spends the entire movie trying to imitate Dustin Hoffman in “All the President’s Men”. Do I really need to see the trash in the back seat of his beater-Saab? Of course I know all rumpled and slovenly hard core beat reporters live in a dumpy squallid apartments and drive crappy cars! Of course their desks look like a landfills! Give me a break.
Ben Affleck a the congressman is just as bad in that he adopts a fixed facial grimace early in the movie and refuse to change it. Maybe he just had a botox treatment or just came from the dentist. It must be one or the other.
I do not want to give the plot away, the actors will do that for you with brisk exclamations and plentyof raised eyebrows and knowing glances. Sufficed to say, you have probably already seen this movie as it re-uses one of the oldest government-corporate conspiracy themes around and has been done countless times.
For pure humor, the aimed for dramatic buddy-scene on the balcony between Affleck and Crowe is laughable and a real illustration on what bad acting looks like. They both mailed this one in and cashed their very large paychecks. Unfortunately, this sucker paid $9 of that.
It is being widely reported that the long anticipated second shoe is about to drop. A second wave of foreclosures is directly off-shore and moving quickly to make landfall. To make the whole picture even more gruesome, the politically imposed temporary moratoria on foreclosures is shortly ending. All of this spells a huge swell of cheap real estate that will shortly flood the market.
Even with this new inventory, the bottom portion of the market has set a price foundation. Under $250,000 homes are not going to depreciate any further as the demand is just too high for these bargains. Banks have priced these cheaper properties at irresistible levels and they all seem to get the multiple offers lenders wanted. The open question out there involves the higher-end properties. Thus far this market has been characterized with low sales volume but also low loss of value. Notices of Defaults are moving higher in the pricier communities so it stands to reason prices in places like Del Mar, Mission Hills and La Jolla may be seeing further price erosion.
So it is strangely quiet after having numerous house guests, including a toddler, over the past two weeks. All had gathered for the passing of my Mother-in-law. As good fortune would have it, my sister and niece as well as my wife’s dear friend from Portland were also here on scheduled visits. It will take some getting used to the old routine.
Of course there is still all of the business of wrapping up the loose ends of some one’s life. In death and in life, Brenda always managed to work her way into the center of the room. She was never dull and provided the family a constant and seemingly unending stream of stories, each one just as funny as the last. To say she had some quirks and eccentricities is a small understatement. She never failed to amuse and entertain me with her unusual beliefs, ideas and phobias.
Brenda stories abound and I will leave the recording of those to her daughter Amanda who could write the funniest emails detailing grandma’s latest unhappy encounter with the real world. It is when those worlds collided that an hilarious story would emerge, you could count on it.
In the years ahead I will continue to appreciate her zany view of life . I will miss her but I know at family gatherings there will always be a endless re-telling of Brenda stories. And that alone will be her way of staying in our lives.
President Obama is treading lightly on the latest twist and turn of the government’s bank bailout plan. The Street has now realized that the taxpayers own 36% of Citibank, as the President’s team seems bent on converting the bailout loans into common stock.
This idea makes perfect sense to me. At least the taxpayers have a fighting chance to make some money off of this debacle. I recognize that a 36% is effective total control of a corporation but I have to hope the Feds will tread lightly and defer to the civilians on the board.
All of the grousing by the opposition party does not seem to be gaining any real traction outside of Fox News. Still, the politically agile administration is working to neatly sidestep the issue.
Over the long run the Feds will divest themselves of all of their stock positions, hopefully at a profit.
I read an interesting article in New York Timesbusiness section concerning the fate on one Carlton Sheets, the one-time king of the real estate infomerical world. His stock in trade was the no-downpayment path to riches, hardly novel but his saturation of cable was unprecented. As you might imagine, his stock is low these days has both the idea of owning investment real estate and leverage are in disgrace.
In the article, there was a reference to a great debunker of the modern day snake oil salesman, his name is John Reed and you may be amused at his BS detector at http://www.johntreed.com/BSchecklist.html.
Or maybe my phone is working better these days. More buyers are coming out onto the market. Perhaps this long real estate winter is drawing to a close. It always has to get ugly before it gets better. I have welcomed all of the bad word because you need to hit bottom. Like an alcoholic on a bender, we needed to dry out.
I got an interesting email from Alan Nevin, a well known consultant for the local development industry, concerning land. Alan notes that there are only 600 finished lots in the inventory. For those not familiar with this lingo, all you need to know is that it takes years to go from some guy’s orchard to a lot ready to begin grading.
This means future shortages in homes. I think downstream we will see a crunch in all housing sectors as any new supply of apartments is also going to be miniscule.
I received a comment from someone who has also had the pleasure of attending a Fish Boil. He sneered at my apparently uniformed observation about the count and variety of vegetables that are tossed in with the fish. I went to this site to determine if any colored vegetables were allowed, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_boil.
What caught my attention in the Wikipedia article was the mention of ‘kerosene’ being introduced into the pot. That is really appetizing, as if the floating inert and surely rubbery white objects passing themselves off as fish were not enough.
