Target Gives Credit Cards a Good Name
Greetings from New York, where I spent the better part of last night trying to rebook a flight. Seemed relatively simple: I’m in the biggest city in the country, I’m going to San Antonio which has a Ripley’s Believe it or Not across the street from the Alamo, and a basketball team that calls to mind the mid to late '60s Yankees. They should have non-stops hourly, or least every couple hours. As it turns out, they don’t. At least not more than once a day.
What’s worse, you can’t gather such information from the commercial online sites like Expedia (EXPE) or Priceline (PCLN). As it happens, they have limited flight and airline choices. So to determine whether a flight option exists, you have to go airline by airline. This is a deeply painful exercise when you don’t find the flight you want. There are no consumer protection acts being driven down Congress’s throat to fix the scam driving EXPE's (up 92% ytd) and PCLN’s (up 50%) businesses. This despite all the well-intentioned, responsible people who are trying to pay for a flight responsibly. The productivity waste is enormous.
Also not being protected: “smart phone” consumers, tied to long-term, fiscally onerous contracts that effectively leave users stuck for at least 2 years paying above-market prices for phones that do everything except make reliable phone calls. I’ve got an Apple (AAPL) iPhone with the latest OS. The operating system upgrade improves my ability to text, has some cool new apps, and seems to lessen the phone's freezing. What it doesn’t do is what it can’t: The new OS doesn’t improve the horrific AT&T (T) network. So, now I shake my iPhone to make the songs shuffle.
I enjoy those features, but what I’d really like to do is place reliable phone calls. No dice on AT&T’s network. One can only imagine what AT&T paid (via subsidies, most likely) to get the iPhone account. Doesn’t matter. My point is 2 large corporations struck a deal that cost consumers meaningfully, and the government simply doesn’t care.
I was dumb to buy an iPhone. It would cost me dearly to change back to a BlackBerry,(RIMM), or to try the intriguing Pre from Sprint (S). Consumers are getting crushed; what we’re being protected from are “banks too large to fail.” This is a concept that dates back 100-odd years to the Roosevelt administration. The Teddy Roosevelt administration.
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If you're leaving the show, I have no more reasons to watch it! You're my wife's fave too and she has ZERO interest in stocks.
Charles
One of the things I like about your commentary (both written and spoken)is that it often comes out without benefit of a "filter"--that is, you write like you talk and you say what's on your mind. If that got you axed from CNBC, then it's their loss. I can say without hesitation that Fast Money took a decidedly downward turn when Dylan left, and another downward leg has started since your departure. Pete, Guy, and Karen (and to a lesser degree, Joe)still hold my interest somewhat, but I don't tune in the way I used to. I'm sure I'm not the only one, either...
CNBC's loss is another network's gain...and Minyanville's, too, if it means you'll be posting your thoughts more often!
Minyan Adam Weinstein
Orlando, FL
Jeff,
good call on AGU last time, please continue your posting here, so I can get idea how to make money :)
Thanks
Viks
Good luck in all you do Jeff.
CNBC is a one of the liberal media, does want every anchor to say what they decide, you are my favorite stock Picker and my family and 13 friend of mine too.
you will be more successful man then you are,
Chirag Patel
yer fan...dlf
Have a good trip!
Love Adami - am a Hoya myself. Karen and Pete are also household fav's. Wherever you go see if you can't get the gang back together.
In the meantime - We'll just follow you here.....
So yippee - Jeff Macke has left the world of Max Headroom and will be spending more time here, where I spend time.
I came to MV because of your posts, and have sorely missed them. Watched FM for your take, notable aphorisms and the fun interplay, but that's been missing a goodly while. They'll rue the day they ran off the Scalded Chimp and his Redheaded Cousin.
"Gone to Texas" was the historical novel that gave us that great Clint Eastwood film (his personal favorite). Feeling a bit like The Outlaw Josey Wales, are ya? Betrayed and beset by a government that formally stands for liberty, trust and rule of law but actually... not.
Well, wish you and a few thousand like you would move here, maybe reverse the tide. We're not NY or CA yet but seem headed that way lickety split. Of course, if you and your tax dollars left Bloomberg would probably squeal like a stuck pig.
Wondered what happened this week when you were gone. Obviously I missed something somewhere, but am sad to see you gone now too. Hope you really do show up somewhere else and good luck in whatever it is.
Even when you're right, this "no filter on what I say" issue is a mixed blessing.
Besides, David Fitzsimmons, I was less calling for intervention than pointing out the idiocy of their choices. We're going to put $100,000,000,000 into GM; a company that should be dead by all right. They were clearly going to fail, so it's understandable (politically, anyway) to "save" so many jobs to get folks to work on a car no one on earth (or certainly not the United States) will buy.
The rich are paying for the mindless GM boondoggle. We're stuck with political programs most of us never expected or wanted. There are smarter ways to "punish the successful". Apple, with their shockingly good balance sheet and utterly disingenuous BOD, should pay for upgrades that never happened and a device that works insanely well, save for it not being a "phone" at all.
As for TV; I don't blame CNBC anymore than I blame the scorpion biting the frog halfway through a river passing on the frog's back. As they both sunk into certain death the frog croakingly asked the scorpion why he would do something so dumb and cruel.
"It's just what I do" replied the Scorpion.
CNBC fires the current Main Event of Fast Money because they are the scorpion. That's why they put up the Dennis Kneale clip with no context whatsoever. I got knee-capped for doing a favor by appearing. Then they implied they "fired" me when that's not the case in the least. I'd been sitting on that corner watching the network divorce from Fast Money for the original, smart, concept of having people who trade for a living ask questions of corporate types and offering real opinions on what we heard.
CEOs who were honest or were gifted managers were praised to the moon. Those who chose to lie or spin to me and our audience got thrashed. It was always Rule 1. Now it's not part of the show at all. I didn't move here because I was good enough to sit at the corner of a desk, wildly underpaid and insulted, for another 3 years.
You folks are insanely kind but you haven't worked with me daily for 3 years. I don't mind being wrong and I harp on my mistakes. Frankly, handling losses well and staying humble about your victories are how casual traders lose everything. There are more lessons in a beating than being right and graceless about it.... which, as it happens seems to be the new format for the show.
I'll be back on TV as soon as I find a vehicle that lets me be who I am, TV wise. But I have no intention of disappearing in the meantime.
As for GM, harness the union and your problem is solved. That, however, is not the case.
So while we the taxpayers can do nothing, as a trader, at least we can be wise to the opportunities presented (and equally aware of the critical limitations).
Regarding CNBC, for my two cents, I simply cannot watch FM anymore, although I do respect Finerman, Najarian and Adami. Hopefully they are maintaining their sanity.
Best regards,
