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Nothing like a lil history to put today’s economic environment in perspective. The DJIA has crossed 9500, the level it’s at today, some nine times since it first crossed it more than a decade ago: Feb 1999 up March 2001 down April 2001 up Sept 2001 down Nov 2001 up June 2002 down Sept 2003 up Oct 2008 down Aug 2009 up In Feb 1999, the biz headlines included ... read more

Some quick thoughts on the budget. We'll be hitting on this topic hard when I host Scoreboard tonight, by the way. 7 and 10pm EST -- check it out, please. Given that neither the CBO nor anybody else has ever gotten a budget projection right more than a year or two out (remember we were gonna have SURPLUSES for YEARS according to the CBO back in 1999…at the top), I think it’s important to ... read more

Here are some of my latest tweets. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/codywillard if you so desire. Bailouts for "Too big to fail" firms made me an antitrust advocate. I used to be anti-antitrust just 2 yrs ago. They let them roll up and then they call them too big to fail and then they bail them out. I'm fine with letting these companies doom themselves by rolling up competition ... read more

Abby Joseph Cohen is a genius.  How else can you explain that we see people reporting what The Strategist at Goldman Sachs thinks about the markets and the economy at all ever?  People listen to her even though I’m not sure she’s ever been right about anything and the only reason her boss doesn’t bounce the checks he writes her is because you and I saved her firm from sure bankruptcy by ... read more

Everybody from the Republican and Democrat Regime seems to agree that more competition in health care in general and in health insurance specifically is a good thing. Some say that a public option is good for competition, others say that a public option is bad for competition.  I’ve asked before and I’ll ask again – if we want competition in health insurance, why don’t we simply enforce ... read more

Here's what I've been tweeting about lately. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/codywillard if you're so inclined. 16 mos later-Think my people here in this Happy Hour flashback to a Willet's Point Auto Show are better off from the bailouts,stimulus, & other wealth redistribution gimmicks? http://bit.ly/DptAC My good bud David Merkel with an insightful and provocative piece on ... read more

American Express filed a Form 8-K Regulation FD Disclosure today that underscores all that's wrong with the way our publicly traded companies game the regulations that they themselves wrote. (I'm going to disclose a digression of my own here by noting that if you actually write out the FD as in "Full Disclosure" you end up with the phrase "Form 8-K Regulation Full Disclosure Disclosure...back to ... read more

Highlighted tweets from my twitter this week. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/codywillard. * Break up the insurance companies by simply enforcing existing anti-trust law and let innovation take place for the rest of us. Think of it this way -- If we break the five biggest companies in each of the insurance, pharma, and hospital industries int five or ten companies each -- by simply ... read more

Here're my tweets from this week: My shot clock as I was hitting balls into centerfield from home plate at Yankee Stadium http://bit.ly/2kI9cr What a rush! "I will sacrifice my body." @brianstelter: "Here's my first "Night Out With" column for NYTimes: Cody Willard http://bit.ly/WcDcf Shot Clock: I'm all over Jamie Dimon and the other crooks at JPM. And a real passage from the health care ... read more

Numbers don't lie. And it's gonna take a lot of huge numbers to make stocks get back to their levels from late 2007. You have any idea how much Caterpillar and MMM, for example, are going to have to grow their toplines in order to get them back close to what they were just four quarters ago? Caterpillar was generating $13-$14 billion per quarter in sales in 2008. Last quarter, that dropped ... read more