Free Republic

The Mistakes Of Our Grandparents?...We hold the folks at the Bank Credit Analyst in relative high esteem for their quantitative skills. They are widely read among the institutional investment crowd, at least among those still taking the time to do some reading these days. A month or so back they put out their 2004 outlook. In very short fashion, they don't believe that any of the imbalances facing the economy or the financial markets will come home to roost in 2004. From our vantage point, that's pretty much consensus thinking right about now. They are believers that the great reflation...

The Producers Guild of America honored New Line's "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" with the Darryl Zanuck Producer of the Year Award in theatrical motion pictures during its awards ceremony Saturday night.

Dealing With Our Issues...As opposed to our normal routine of addressing one or two issues pertinent to the financial markets in these monthly discussions, we thought we'd kick-off 2004 by briefly covering a multiplicity of items we believe will be important as we move into the year ahead. The topics are more random than not and could comprise full discussions by themselves. We believe the following are important to both the financial markets and real economy. We wish we had the answer to eventual issue resolution or outcomes, but no one does. Our hope is that trying to understand...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Put the inventor of the light-emitting diode and the maker of the world's fastest transistor together in a research laboratory and what kinds of bright ideas might surface? One answer is a light-emitting transistor that could revolutionize the electronics industry. Professors Nick Holonyak Jr. and Milton Feng at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have uncovered a light-emitting transistor that could make the transistor the fundamental element in optoelectronics as well as in electronics. The scientists report their discovery in the Jan. 5 issue of the journal Applied Physics Letters. "We have demonstrated light emission from the...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., Dec. 22, 2003 -- Imagine a jet engine able to cleanly burn cheap, plentiful diesel fuel, or a car able to run on gasoline very efficiently and produce practically no emissions. Three Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers are imagining just these things and are embarking on a new experimental roadway that may someday arrive at this reality. The technology, a plasma combustion technique that applies electrical voltage to the gaseous-phase fuel stream prior to combustion-turning the fuel into a plasma-has already produced excellent results with propane. The next step, according to the research team, Don Coates, an...

Scientists have identified a gene in the cerebral cortex that apparently controls the developmental clock of embryonic nerve cells, a finding that could open another door to tissue replacement therapy in the central nervous system. In a new study, the researchers found that they could rewind the clock in young cortical cells in mice by eliminating a gene called Foxg1. The finding could potentially form the basis of a new method to push progenitor cells in the brain to generate a far wider array of tissue than is now possible. The study, led by researchers at NYU School of Medicine,...

CARACAS: The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) could discuss trading oil in euros or a basket of currencies other than the US dollar because of concerns over the slide in the greenback?s value, said the cartel?s secretary-general, Alvaro Silva. ?There is talk of trading crude in euros. It?s one of the alternatives ... either that or a basket of currencies. It is possible that the organisation will discuss this and take a decision at a given time,? Silva told the Venezuelan state news agency Venpres in an interview from Vienna. Opec has aimed to keep oil prices within its...

<p>Dec. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Taiwan was shaken by a 6.6-magnitude earthquake, causing buildings to sway in Taipei at 12.38 p.m. local time. No casualties were reported.</p> <p>The epicenter was 3 kilometers south of the island's eastern coastal city of Taitung and 10 kilometers underground. The quake was followed by two aftershocks of 5 and 5.1 magnitudes.</p>

"Water is a public good; water is the common property of all; access to water is a fundamental human right; no one has the right to profit from water." These are some of the commonly held beliefs of those who oppose any private water ownership or private provision of water services. Yet constantly repeating these water mantras will not magically improve the access the people have to clean water; in fact it will do quite the opposite and encourage the misuse and waste of a precious resource. The one fundamental problem with declaring anything a public good or common property...

Perhaps the most astonishing development of the last six years is not the scandals that have surfaced and not even the routine acceptance of same by investors.  The passing of prior generations and the "sizzle" of new technology have conspired to convince investors and speculators that the environment has changed for the better, for the MUCH better and permanently so.  However, the market remains an arena where human frailties can cause the grossest judgments to occur.  It is not only the emotional response of the mania that has brought us closer to a fall out from which we will not...

WILMINGTON, Del. -- A collaborative group of DuPont-led scientists have discovered an innovative way to advance electronics applications through the use of DNA that sorts carbon nanotubes. This research in the emerging field of nanotechnology appears in the current issue of the journal Science, which is published by the AAAS ? the world's largest general scientific organization. The research paper is titled "Structure-Based Carbon Nanotube Sorting by Sequence-Dependent DNA Assembly." Carbon nanotubes possess excellent electrical properties that make them potential building blocks in a broad range of nanotechnology-related electronic applications, including highly sensitive medical diagnostic devices and mini-transistors more than...

Since the end of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1971, the dollar has been an irredeemable currency, no longer defined or measured in terms of gold.  Nonetheless, in an ironic twist, it has become the world’s dominant currency and the core reserve asset of central banks all over the world. It has replaced gold as an international currency.  The transformation has not happened without consequences. One of these is that the discipline imposed by the gold standard is no longer operative. Another consequence, related to the first, is the profound effect this has had on international trade. The Discipline of Gold In the...

What does Dow 10,000 tell us? By itself, nothing. Without other information, the price alone is irrelevant. It's like saying that a bond trades at par. Without knowing the coupon, there's no way of determining whether it's attractive or not. If the coupon rate on a bond were 1%, you'd probably have little interest, but if it were 10%, you might be very interested. So it is with stocks (or an index of stocks, like the Dow ($INDU)). At one level of earnings, a particular price might seem expensive. At another, higher level of earnings, the same price might be...

The immensely powerful Long Valuation Waves drive long-term trends in the stock markets. We examine them today in light of growing bullishness. The single most powerful force driving the stock markets over the long-term is valuation, the level at which the marketplace is pricing the current earnings power of publicly traded corporations.   While valuations can sometimes be successfully ignored over the short-term, it is absolutely suicidal to fight them over the long-term.  Popular greed and fear can certainly lead to short-term market movements contrary to what the state of valuations suggests ought to happen, but centuries of market...

GLAMIS ? A 19-year-old Encinitas man remains in a wheelchair with limited mobility after suffering spinal cord injuries here Nov. 2 allegedly caused by a Bureau of Land Management ranger against whom allegations of abuse of power and use of excessive force have been raised. The Federal Bureau of Investigation's office in El Centro is investigating the incident that a third-party witness described as being "pretty tragic" and "a shame." Brian Boyd suffered bruising to the spinal cord in the neck area as well as having vertebrae in his neck and lower back wrenched out of place, said Tom Boyd,...

A University of Southern California inventor has created a machine that can produce 3-dimensional "printouts" in plastic and even metal more quickly and cheaply than widely-used existing systems. The new machine is a significant improvement on the laser sintering machines now widely used around the world to build complex 3D forms from computer files, according to its creator, Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis of the USC School of Engineering's Daniel J. Epstein department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. One patent has been granted and others are pending on the process, which may eventually put 3D object-making within reach of home offices. Both...

Can't break this hobbit: Will Frodo destroy the ring? Will Aragorn wear the crown? An exclusive first look at director Peter Jackson's exhilarating "Lord of the Rings" finale, "The Return of the King"--and at the battles the cast waged on-screen and off.

Bioethicist Garrett James Hardin, who coined the term "tragedy of the commons," passed away this September at the age of 88. In his now famous 1968 essay,  "The Tragedy of the Commons," Hardin describes how common, i.e., public, property, is overused until it deteriorates or is destroyed. Because of his essay, many consider him to have fathered the concept of the tragedy of the commons; however, Ludwig von Mises describes this concept in relation to external costs in his 1940 Nationalökonomie[1] and, later, in Human Action (1949): "If land is not owned by anybody, although legal formalism may call it public...

November 21, 2003 -? Using sophisticated computer algorithms running on standard desktop computers, researchers have designed and constructed a novel functional protein that is not found in nature. The achievement should enable researchers to explore larger questions about how proteins evolved and why nature ?chose? certain protein folds over others. The ability to specify and design artificial proteins also opens the way for researchers to engineer artificial protein enzymes for use as medicines or industrial catalysts, said the study's lead author, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator David Baker at the University of Washington. Baker and colleagues Brian Kuhlman, who is...

The Census Bureau informs us that median household incomes are falling. In 2002 they fell for the third year running to $42,409. The official poverty rate, defined as an income below $18,392 for a family of four, rose for the second year in a row, from 11.7 percent to 12.1 percent of the population. 34.6 million Americans are said to live in poverty now. Moreover, the number of Americans without health insurance, which is believed to be an important symptom of poverty, rose by 5.7 percent to 43.6 million, which is the biggest single-year increase in a decade. No matter...