Posts Made By: Paul Kammueller

Huh! Just to see if anyone still checks in here, what do you guys think of this: Note that major interest rate peaks seem to happen around 4-5 years apart, as do major bottoms. Note also that the last two cycles the trip upward has been pretty fast (rate bottom to rate top in a year or so). Looking at the longer-term interest-rate trend, there is oddly enough some chart case to be made for the fact that we are nearing the top of the interest rate cycle. That said, the 20+ year bull market in bonds is getting very long in the tooth, and sooner or later that long-term downward rate trend must break. But it's an interesting near-term possibility that could take the 30-year yield below 4%.

My mother always felt that God's sense of humor was demonstrated by the fact that He allows televangelists to exist.

In all the billions of years of history that have existed in this universe, do you consider it a remarkable coincidence that 'the present' just happens to be during your brief lifespan here on earth, roughly 1/100,000,000 of the time that has existed?

Or is it simply that it cannot be any other way, that time as such does not exist and we perceive the 'present' to be during our lives simply because it is the only 'time' we are aware of?

Chew on that one for a while.

Just reviewing the budget forecasts in the Economic Report of the President.

It seems the deficit is projected to drop a bit in 2005, due mainly to a sudden 14% increase in personal income tax revenue. Since the President does not intend to raise taxes, the math dictates that everyone's income will increase 14% in 2005.

Let's PARTYYYYYY!

One thing no candidate seems to have the courage to really confront: Social Security -- Bush at least hints at privatization, though even this does not address the macroeconomic crux of the matter: the labor force must support an increasing share of the population that is no longer working.

Whether that support is funnelled through the govt via social security or funneled through the capital markets through dividends and interest, the labor/non-labor ratio is the same macroeconomic problem.

At some point, retirement age will have to increase or benefits will have to decrease (or go away). There is no way out or 'round or through. This is the mathematically inescapable reality. But no one will talk about it.

With record-shattering deficits, and the fastest growth in non-defense domestic discretionary spending since the Nixon administration, notice how the budget just isn't even an ISSUE this election? :S

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't a Perot voter. But he did point out the elephant in the living room, forcing everyone to acknowledge that it was there.

I think in retrospect my favorite kind of government was a democrat president with a republican congress. President didn't let any tax cuts through, the congress was full of conservatives that didn't get wild with spending, so whattya know, the government shrank as a % of GDP, the revenue grew, before we knew it the budget was in the black, interest rates were moderate, the economy grew, and life was good.

Checks and balances, sometimes it really works. I guess those Founding Fathers were on to something.

Kerry proposes to pull the troops from Iraq within 4 years.

Initially I think, if 4 years is the fast track, how long of an occupation are we looking at here?

But on the other hand, it seems ridiculous to me to just set some arbitrary time line, whether it's 4 years or 4 days. I was initially against getting in, but now that we're in by god we'd better stay in until the job's done, or we will rue the day we ever went in there.

One thing I wish somebody, a candidate, whoever, would talk about, is the sloppy way in which the war has been defined.

A war on terrorism: The phrasing of this was erroneous at the outset. Terrorism is not a person, a country, or even an ideology. It's a methodology, like crime. It is a method of combat chosen by zealots who have no realistic hope of a conventional military victory. As a methodology it will always exist somewhere as long as there are zealous groups with some political cause.

And like crime, it will always be around to some extent. Which of course makes the war as stated unwinnable, but then what's the goal -- It's obvious who the enemy is: Al Qaeda. The immediate goal is their elimination. More broadly, the ideology that we're up against is the whole sub-religion of Wahhabism, or Islamic Fundamentalism.

For some reason the administration doesn't want to acknowledge either of these out loud -- perhaps because wahhabism is the dominant faith in Saudi Arabia, and we don't want to get the Saudis upset now do we. Also, I suppose a "War on Terror" has the advantage of being vague and open-ended. So we can attack pretty much whoever we want from now on.

Just looking at the map, whatever one feels about the merits of the Iraq war, from a technical point of view the result is very interesting:

1) We have now effectively encircled Iran on the east, west and south sides
2) We now have a large land front near the oil fields of Saudi Arabia should that government fall to radicals
3) The strongest military power in the region is neutralized

Objectively, in terms of regional strategy this looks pretty smart, provided that the center holds in Iraq. Was Iraq a strategic goal? What you guys think?