Price of Oil vs Price of Dollar

Let's play a game.... looking at this graph, try to guess which year we went off the gold standard.

The other item to note is that an oz of gold buys just as much oil today as it did back in 1946, the year where this graph starts. I had gold prices going all the way back to 1800, but was too lazy to try to dig up oil prices that far back. Anyway, it illustrates pretty clearly what out monetary authorities have done to our dollar. Enjoy. I still can't figure out how to upload a good image here, so you might need to click on the photo to get a clearer view of the numbers.

Rafa has a girlfriend

Rafael Nadal has a girlfriend!  Much cuter than Federer's Mirka.  I don't know.. have any of you seen a hot girl from Switzerland?  Didn't think so.  Have any of you met any Spanish girl who wasn't hot?  Didn't think so either.  I guess each did what they could.

http://www.hola.com/famosos/galeria-de-imagenes.html?imagen=/famosos/2008/10/27/rafa-nadal-paris/imgs/nadal-xisca-a.jpg



--
Joe Petrides

Silicon Valley and the Financial Crisis

http://calacanis.com/

I hate linking to things, but this is a fantastic piece by Jason Calacanis, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and CEO of Mahalo.com.  It addresses a start-up guy´s view of the current financial crisis. It is long, but is an excellent read.

I´ll post more of my own work I promise.  In the meantime, I suggest looking up more Jim Rogers videos on YouTube.

Worthy Magister

http://www.peterkrupa.com/archives/404

Check out Peter Krupa's post about Venezuela and Hugo Chavez. Bottom line... he's just a clown that should be of very little worry to us.

Why I am voting for John McCain

It seems like I get more comments when I make lists, so I'm going to create another gem of a list. After watching the debate last night and the following punditry, I decided to cast my vote for John McCain. Thus, you can consider Joe Petrides fully endorsing John McCain for president. I encourage my vast international readership to vote for him, and I hope that this endorsement at least secures me a cabinet position. It certainly is necessary to thank some people for making my decision easier, and it is absolutely necessary to list them below.

1. CNN, specifically Anderson Cooper, Soledad O'Brien, and Wolf Blitzer. The post-debate punditry also convinced me to vote McCain.
2. ABC News
3. CBS News
4. Silicon Valley
5. Harvard Law School
6. Digg.com
7. Hollywood
8. Rolling Stone Magazine

Lists are much better when they reach a nice round number like 10, but 8 is sufficient. Before I explain, I have to admit that my vote is based on emotion rather than reason or logic. I strongly believe that this makes me much more credible as I better represent the average voting American. Reasonable people don't vote since they realize it doesn't matter. Ok, so here we go...

1. Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer and Soledad O'Brien (hot), mask themselves in the disguise of professional journalists who are really out there to find the truth. We all know they aren't, but what bugs me is that it is so obvious to all of us that they are plugging for Obama! They even plugged for him in the primaries which caused Hillary to soften up to Fox News. I have incredible respect for those who can hide their personal leanings, but these guys just don't have that talent. CNN's studio is filled with huge screens, and the anchors constantly show off cool technology they have such as google maps, and glorified smart boards. It's like their studio's focus is to look sleek and advanced when in reality it is all too much. Ditto for the post-debate punditry. They have this table of pundits (about 20 of them) all with laptops out and Anderson Cooper standing in the center asking questions that make him look journalistic while we are supposed sit in awe at how cutting edge CNN is. Give me a break. And why do they always have to talk so fast? Is this some sort of marketing ploy to always make it look like the world is on the brink? You guys are pathetic.

2. ABC News has always leaned liberal and it bothers me.

3. Ditto for CBS News.

4. Obama is a corrupt scoundrel just like everyone who looks at his past knows. However, he has developed incredible star power within the Silicon Valley elite community. It's trendy to vote for Obama out there and everyone is just going nuts because they think he is some sort of cool, tech savvy guy that is going to green the country and pull us out of Iraq. Of course, the truth doesn't matter. We all know that presidents do not do in office what they promise in their campaigns, so why should we believe that Obama is any different?

5. Who screwed up the financial system? Ivy League elites. Which politicians have the attitude that THEY know how to run your life better than you do? Ivy League elites. Who has run this country for the last 16 years? Ivy League elites. Come on folks, have you ever met an Ivy League grad who was a nice, down to earth regular guy who you never felt held you in contempt even though he/she is far smarter than you could ever dream to be? I know only one - he's a Princeton PhD who teaches philosophy at Hillsdale College. Still looking for others....

6. See #4. Obama's "cool factor" turned Digg.com from a Ron Paul fight the system group to a bunch of Obama robots. I used to like that place.

7. Hollywood is especially annoying. Obama is now so "cool" that everyone out there was fighting to see who could have the best attended Obama party. Do you all remember how in high school there were the "cool kids," but then there also was that group of kids whose parents were extremely wealthy? These kids somehow floated above everyone else and had that aura about them that they were above everything? They always had the parent-sponsored mansion parties with alcohol and the occasional recreational pharmaceutical. This group wanted everyone else to know that it went on but kept it enough under wraps so that you knew they were cool and did cool stuff, but you didn't know enough to be in the group. It helped them maintain a feeling of superiority. THAT's what these guys are, and Obama is an excuse for them to throw more parties like that.

8. I just got back from Buenos Aires where magazine kiosks are literally everywhere. Rolling Stone put Obama on the cover with this elitist pose. I had to look at it every damn day.

John McCain will not make a very good President, but he DID give a personal F-U to the commies out in Vietnam even as they tortured him. Anyone willing to do that for his or her country surely loves this place, even if he has bad policies.

New Blog

I started a new blog called Venga Franco.  This means "come on, Franco" in Spanish.  For those of you who want to read commentary in Spanish, I will try to translate my English posts as well as write some original work in Spanish.    This is mostly for my own benefit and practice, but for those of you who want practice reading badly written Spanish, feel free to peruse.  The link is vengafranco.blogspot.com.

The Dow was up almost 1000 points today.  What an incredible time to be interested in all things economics.  My advice is to buy yourself some gold if it gets into the low 800s or even dips into the 700s range.  We are going to have a serious inflation problem in about 5 years or so.

When do WE get to riot

An interesting monologue from Rush Limbaugh.  Love him or hate him, he is VERY entertaining to listen to and is incredibly talented.  I think he brings up a good point here.  I can't include myself in the "we" that he talks about because I'm not rich, but I certainly can understand where he is coming from.  You can see the entire monologue at http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_101008/content/01125110.guest.html.

RUSH: We always hear about riots.  We're going to have riots if that happens, going to have riots if that happens.  Who are the people rioting?  Who are the people protesting?  Well, when you look at who they are the vast majority of them are supported by those of us who play by the rules, we go to work every day, and we pay our taxes.  What do they have to riot about?  When do we get to riot?  Look at what we've had to pay for.  We've had to pay for the second New Deal.  The Great Society, LBJ comes along with the war on poverty, the Great Society.  Now we're learning that we had to pay for a totally corrupt mortgage housing scandal in which Obama and ACORN are deeply embedded.  

We have people who were given loans who had no way of paying them back, they weren't even asked to state their income.  And when we hear about all those foreclosures, people losing their homes, and we think, “Oh, my gosh, our fellow citizens are being thrown out.”  No!  It's the people who shoulda never been given the loans in the first place.  It's the people who weren't paying them in the first place.  It was people who were put into these homes when they had no business being put in these homes.  It's not a brief against them.  But this was a scheme and it was a tactic employed by the Democrat Party exclusively to create a never-ending and growing percentage of our population that was totally dependent and owed everything to the Democrat Party.  Now their candidate and their guy, James Carville, “Going to be very traumatic out there, very, very traumatic.”  We know what he means.  

When do we riot?  When do we stand up and say, “We have paid for all of this; we have played by the rules, and now you come to us and you tell us that the whole reason this happened is because we are unfair and we are too advantaged and we are too lucky, that it's not right that not everybody can win life's lottery?”  I'm not suggesting riots, don't misunderstand, folks, I'm just suggesting here that the people who are going to riot are the people who ought to be getting down and thanking every damn one of us, because the New Deal number two -- and, by the way, I think we're in the midst of the New Deal number three here.  And why do we need a New Deal number two if the New Deal number one didn't work?  The New Deal number one did not work.  

New Look Coming for Flint, MI

Now that I am back in my hometown of Flint, MI, I am starting to pay more attention to what is going on. I have long argued that Flint would be a great place to live but that the people are what is holding it back. Flint is much like Detroit in that the politics are dominated by racial tensions and corruption. We don't seem to care much since we keep voting clowns into office. This is partly because good people are either too busy being productive to run for office or simply too lazy. Of course, the quest for some false sense of power and importance propels the wrong people to be aggressive in seeking office which they ultimately win.

All that aside, I really want to be excited about the downtown development. I took a stroll down Saginaw street last week and was surprised to see construction going on. Readers can see the plans for downtown at www.whatsupdowntown.com. The reason I want to be excited is because I want to see the city I grew up in succeed. The reason I am not excited is because of the list of investors I see on the website. Normally, a sign of good things to come is indicated by a large number of private investors realizing that property and opportunity in the downtown area is significantly undervalued thereby resulting in a flood of investment. Unfortunately, I don't see names of many private investors. I see a list of government funds and community foundations which tells me that the private market largely does not see much profitability in downtown investment at this point. So why is any money being put into downtown? Well, it is because of pride in the city and a want to see it succed. This is all fine and well, and it speaks volumes for those involved - they are true patriots of the city. However, as much as we hate to admit it, the profit motive is the ultimate signal that an investment is worthwhile. This "community patriotism" always works temporarily, but I will be a believer when foundations and governments are no longer needed to make Flint a great place to live. We need private investment in Flint in the form of a new industry, plant, etc. This will be the building block of a productive, profitable Flint. To get this, we need better government and more of the "right" people. Which residents will step up?

That all being said... those loft apartments look really nice....

Dumb Americans are smarter than you think, Washington

I was not going to write about this bailout, but Jim Cramer pissed me off so bad, I just have to rant a little bit here. What did he say? He was a guest commentator on one of CNBC's afternoon shows last week and was asked, "If you had to pitch this plan to the American people, what would you say?" Jim's response was more or less like so, "Listen America, you are not as smart as me or my friends on Wall Street, or my friends in Washington. You don't understand what is going on. We do. Please, just shut up, get out of our way, and let us smart people take care of this problem." My response -"go to hell, Jim Cramer." Why should we let the people who caused this problem come up with a solution? They should be FIRED and replaced with others who DIDN'T cause the problem.

So, this bailout thing went down last week. It was not voted in the first time around because of the typical Washington infighting. It went around the second time once the Senate and House filled it up with pork projects. However, there is another reason the bill did not pass the first time around. Constituents were calling like mad to their representatives demanding a no vote. It must have been a bad day to be a congressional staffer fielding all those angry phone calls.

All of this makes me wonder. Congress said we need to do this. Wall Street and all of the mainstream press said we needed this, but the American public, for the most part was really pissed off and wanted nothing to do with a bailout bill. So, what did Washington, Wall Street and the media do? They resorted to scare tactics, telling us we would lose our jobs and our homes and the the economy would go into a deep recession. This was all reminicent of what we were told before the Iraq war. Did the American people buy it? Not really. We aren't financial wizards, we don't know how to work all the numbers and what exactly this bailout entails. But that doesn't matter because we knew what this was all about. Sure, we don't know the details and we can't prove anything, but everybody knows this is a bailout and not a rescue plan. We all know that Congress and Wall Street is a good ol boys club and it was a way for Congress to funnel money to their campaign donors. This is no secret to anyone, and the American public has a right to be pissed off about this. They are literally taking our money and giving it to a bunch of rich guys. Sure, CNBC pundits will try to explain to us that it is not "technically" a bailout, but we all know the truth. After following this whole saga, I have come to these undeniable facts of life. If you disagree with any of them, or want further detail, please comment and let's talk about them.

1. Barack Obama will not change anything.
2. John McCain will not change anything.
3. Sarah Palin will not change anything.
4. Joe Biden will not change anything, but he has a crush on Sarah Palin.
   
5. There is virtually no difference between Barack Obama and John McCain.
6. Barack Obama and John McCain will do very little of what they promise if elected.
   
7. The Washington elite considers the American public stupid.
8. The public reaction to the bailout shows that regular Americans are not stupid. We just lack access to inside information.
9. There is no place to find an objective media source. Not CNN, not Fox News, not ABC, NBC, MSNBC or anywhere else. You are better served by following your own instincts.
   
10. This bailout bill speeds up our approach to European-style socialism.
11. This financial mess has nothing to do with capitalism. It was the fault of the government and the Federal Reserve system.
12. A recession is not a bad thing and the government can only make it worse.

There you all go, let me know what you think!

Keyboard Layout

Well, folks. I made it back to the United States only to see banks crashing all over the place just as I saw from afar. I also am witnessing without a doubt the dumbest thing our government has done in my lifetime happen right before my very eyes. Anyway, this post is not about that.

I write this in English only because I´m short on time. BUT, have you ever wondered how to put accents like this áéíóú and tilde´s like this ññññ into your Spanish papers easily? Or how about writing in Greek like this ηελλο, τηισ ισ ξοε σπεακινγ... or any other language?? Well, follow the steps below and you can change your keyboard input language to any language in the world. Now, remember, you have to be accustomed to the layout of the keyboard. I grew knowledgeable of the Argentine keyboard layout at work and at the internet cafes, so I can use it without a problem. Ok, here is how you do it.



First, go to control panel and select Regional and Language Settings

Click on the Languages tab on top.. then click details
In the settings tab, select "add"
Select the keyboard layout you want. If you travelled to Mexico, you are probably familiar with the Mexican layout. I was in Argentina, so I know the Argentine layout.
Select your input language and the keyboard layout will automatically adjust.

Then click on the button labeled "language bar," and make sure these items are checked.Then click ok. A language bar should appear on your desktop. You should be able to drag it onto your taskbar to get it into a less intrusive place. You can change the language by clicking on the button and selecting the language. You may have to re-change the language if you move from Microsoft Word to Firefox or any other area where you may be typing. If you want to know what the keyboard layouts are, go ahead and google "keyboard layouts" and you will see them all there.
Happy typing!