Things are really moving faster than I have time to process and blog about it. Big thing on deck is AIG — Huge liquidity problems. They’ve been downgraded by Moody’s and S&P. I turn on CNBC and FIRST thing I see is an AIG ad….15/mo for 250k worth of coverage for someone 40 years old. You can [Continue]
LEH is BK I had a short dated put on these clowns that I got “chickened out” of when gov/fed/treasury interventions sent the financials (lehman included) soaring. What I “learned” was that shorting financial companies is very dangerous — they are experts at raising additional money and manipulating their share prices. [Continue]
Ok…back to the Peru trip. We were slated to stay in Cuzco, Peru for a day and a half before taking off on the next leg of our journey. It’s really a funky city and unfortunately, I wasn’t in the mood for taking the “city tour” and didn’t bring my camera the few times we went out. [Continue]
(note: i tried to post this last night and blogger was f-ing up. so now you have one less day to act!) I’ve been telling friends and family privately for some time that our friends at Washington Mutual are probably finished. While it’s true some combination of government intervention, relaxation of acctg rules, looking the other [Continue]
One of the more refreshing things about this latest trip to Peru is that they speak Spanish in Peru….As it turns out they speak it throughout MOST of latin america as well. Although it’s been 20 years since I formally studied Spanish, I’ve managed to retain quite a bit — and subsquent exposure to [Continue]
“All your GSE are Belong to Us!” Good grief. The only thing more disturbing than the corruption is apathy I guess. Fannie and Freddie were declared solvent and strong enough to stand on their own what — two months ago?? Interestingly, the Russians who wrote about the collapse of communism reported that those that did the best [Continue]
After Chilling at the Hotel and neighborhood of MiraFlores for a day and half we were off on the next leg of the journey — Cuzco Peru. Believe it or not, I think I heard something about Cuzco being the old capitol of Peru — or at least where the royalty used to hang out in [Continue]
GOLD!, I say…. although i’ve been a littel lukewarm for the yellow metal as a speculation recently. that’s pretty much just the charts being an utter disaster. BUT …being in the actual physical presence of gold got my fever going. It turns out, that upscale mall had an exposition they were putting on — on [Continue]
We finally got in the van and on the way to the touristic neighborhood of Miraflores in Lima. Since we arrived around midnight, my initial impressions of Lima were as viewed through the “late night” lense. My first impression was that it appeared to be much more US-centric than Montevideo. It wasn’t just that there were a [Continue]
This travel log is going to be different than many people who find this site via search engines, etc. will be expecting. The reason? While it’s written in English, this trip is originating from Montevideo, Uruguay — not North America. Our trip began at Uruguay’s largest airport in the Carrasco neighborhood in the outskirts of [Continue]
