This letter to espn insider cracked me up...

"The Cavs' "one potential star"? Have you actually seen Miles play this year? Every time he dribbles he bounces the ball off of his foot. When the ball is not in his hands, he stands there. Watching. Praying the ball doesn't come to him from 15 feet out. I watch every Cavs game I possibly can. Diop has a smoother-looking jump shot than Darius. After he came off the IR, I was worried about the safety of the cheerleaders sitting under the hoop. You don't form an offense around someone who has no range beyond 1 inch. -- Michael Winchell, Kent, Ohio"

In case you haven't laughed recently, check out scrappleface. Glad we got that out of the way.

Mogambo Guru is fast becoming my favorite read of the week. Find out what is so great for yourself.

The PPI for January came out, and sure enough there was the price inflation that excessive money creation always engenders. Producer Prices increased at the fastest pace since 1990. Wholesale prices jumped 1.6% The core PPI (ex food and energy), jumped 0.9%. Finished Goods were up 1.6%. Intermediate Materials up 1.3% and Crude Materials up an eye-opening 6.9%.

Let's concentrate on Finished Goods, which, checking the figures again was 1.6% for the month. Like Jethro Bodine of the Beverly Hillbillies, I now cipher for your edification. Let's see, I multiply 1.6% times twelve months, and the number that pops up is 19.2% a year. Now, let's multiply the 6.9% for Crude Materials by twelve months and we get, something must be wrong with my glasses, let me just wipe them off....Okay, it says Auuuggghhhh! Code blue! Code blue!

Now, before you rush to your computer and dash me off a note, relax. I am already aware that Greenspan and every yahoo that collects a government check considers 20% price inflation as tame, because they consider all price inflation to be tame, all the time. And I am acutely aware that higher producer prices do not mean that consumer prices will ever necessarily rise, as the New Era economic models are predicated on the brilliant idea that businesses can happily absorb monumental losses into perpetuity, and in fact the evidence will show that businesses will actually prosper by recording continual losses because investors love to buy the stocks of companies that lose money, and bankers love to loan new money to those companies that cannot hope to pay back previous loans. And even if they do, all you gotta do is look at a newspaper to note that a lot of debt is being bought at rates that are, in relation to rising price inflation and monetary inflation, insane. To paraphrase a schtick, "Rates so low they're insaaaaaannnnne!" I think I got a paper cut while desperately looking through my Economics 101 texts, trying to find the part where, "In response to higher inflation, bond buyers will bid UP the price of bonds, further decreasing their real, inflation-adjusted, yield." I can just see the graph in my head: along the bottom axis is "inflation rate, %" and the vertical axis is labeled "yield to bond holders, %" And the line clearly shows that as inflation soars to infinity, investors will demand a yield closer and closer to zero.

I mean, this is exactly the situation with bonds right now! So it HAS to be true, since I can reach out and literally touch it, so where is that dang-blang graph?
And, anyway, even if consumer prices do rise, then it will only be for those luxury non-essentials like food and energy, and since nobody needs those things anymore, therefore there is no inflation will not be tame, non-existent, nothing to ever worry about.

That is why when the idea of stagflation arises, there is always a chorus of hotshots all proclaiming that stagflation is NOT here, which never fails to soothe my ragged nerves and basic gloomy nature. Hmmm. Let's see. Do we have inflation? Check. Do we have stagnation in the economy? Check. Damn! Now I'm all gloomy again.

Oil at $80 a barrel, Drudge is saying it could happen. No kidding....

My boy Kozy's tracks on looplabs is posted under "man of steel". He has two jams, both quality ("Liquid Slave" and "Ode to Goa"). Check out his jam and mine by champology entitled "in the chill mix".

Great Matt Welch piece on newspapers and the current battle that is going on in Chicago by the Trib and Sun Times for young readers of their Red Streak and Red Eye papers. Personally, I think they are both trash and find it amusing that they have been giving these papers out for free for at least 5-6 months now. Some people do really like them, but we will see if they will pony up a quarter a day once the freebies stop. Oh how papers want to get their hands on some young readers.

In newspaperville, all eyes are on Chicago. Last June, the Chicago Tribune decided its double-digit profit margins and 300,000 circulation lead over the Sun-Times was no longer enough. "In newspapers, our future success will depend on younger readers," Dennis FitzSimons, Tribune Co. president and CEO, told a Media Week conference last December. "Our success will also be determined by whether we take the risks to be innovative."

The Tribune soon announced it was launching the Red Eye, a splashy tabloid aimed explicitly at the elusive 18-to-34 demographic. "An awful lot of people in the industry are watching what's going on in Chicago with deep interest," said newspaper analyst Morton, who has been telling his clients for years that long-term circulation decline could be their biggest threat. "All of the studies show that, over the last 30 or so years, the readership in basically the 20- to 25-year group ... has dropped by about half. ... Which means that fewer people are developing a newspaper-reading habit. ... It's sort of a classic geometric progression."

Is it working? A full 75% of the Philly Metro's readership is under 44, McDonald reports. The median age of a New York Times reader, by comparison, is now over 50.

If the RedEye youth-movement experiment works, Tribune Co. has said it will consider launching similar papers in its other markets. First, though, it has to face down competition from Red Streak, launched by the Sun-Times to protect its own lower-brow turf. Since both Chicago tabloids are distributed for free and aimed directly at the young (the RedEye includes expansive entertainment listings), they might actually take a bite out of Chicago's two free weeklies, who share some of the same advertisers. "It looks like an old-fashioned newspaper war," FitzSimons said. "Which is ultimately a great thing for bringing focus and new energy to the business."

This and that...

Kozy has a song up on looplabs.com, but I didn't email the name home. I'll have it posted manana.


Wake moved to 19-4 after getting by UVA in a close one at home. Look for the Deacons to take the ACC tournament in March.

Old School is probably the most hysterical movie that I have ever seen. If you haven't seen it yet, add it to the to do list.
Note - I rarely think highly of movies especially when I shell out 10 bones to see the

Article via Economist.com from J Lloyd. Basic premise is that everything is up in the air and no one really knows what the future holds from a global economic perspective. The odds are that things get worse, before they get any better.


America's over-indebted households, Japan's deflation and its crippled banks, Europe's structural rigidities and its overly tight fiscal and monetary policies: all these mean that the world economy is horribly vulnerable to shocks of any kind. Moreover, after the Gulf war America's initial recovery was sluggish, due to the need for firms to reduce their debts from the excesses of the 1980s. Yet the excesses of the 1990s were much larger. America's fragile economy is, in a manner of speaking, being held together by duct tape. The 1.3% jump in retail sales (excluding cars and petrol) in January may partly reflect precautionary stockpiling of canned foods, bottled water and other goods.

Great comment from this week's Barron's interview with Raj Gupta...

Q: Are you concerned with inflation or deflation at this point?

A: Housing has important implications for the macro outlook on inflation and deflation. The Center of Economic and Policy Research put out a paper comparing the cost of renting a home to the cost of owning a home. Starting somewhere in the mid-'Nineties, there has been a pretty sharp increase in the real cost of owning a home compared with renting a home. It is the largest gap since 1975, and it is among the largest gaps ever, and in absolute terms it is very large. To correct this gap requires some decline in house prices. House prices in the U.S., other than in the 1930s, have never really declined. The rate of appreciation slows, but prices have tended to be stable. It will be very hard to close the gap between the two by having rental prices go up. The rental market is in bad shape and vacancies are rising. By definition, housing prices have got to weaken. That's the key to what happens next on the inflation front. When housing prices weaken, we will enter into a lower inflationary regime than we are currently in.

Can someone tell George Clooney to shut up? I am seriously considering never paying to see any movie that this guy is in ever again.