Just a quick post today... Just under one year ago I wrote a blog post:

August 13, 2008 11:26AM

No Brainer Trade: Short Dubai in August 2008

By Cody Willard

As a kid, I often got to stay up late on Thursday nights and watch Hill Street Blues, a great cop show based in Chicago. For the first few seasons, every episode started with the cops all gathered for their morning meeting, listening to their supervisor, Sergeant Esterhaus, tell them about what to expect out there – the latest crimes, what criminals to look for, and what else they needed to be ... read more

In 2007 and 2008, Goldman Sachs was selling trillions of dollars of worthless mortgage securities and as they later had to pay fines after being prosecuted for knowingly selling investors worthless junk, Goldman apparently knew that this stuff was worthless. At the same time, Goldman was risking their depositor’s and shareholders’ and lenders’ capital by leveraging up on ... read more

Throughout his tenure, the CEO of Goldman was borrowing tens of billions of dollars to buy back his own company's stock and pay out executive bonuses. The whole time he told regulators, investors and clients that they had more than enough money on their balance sheet to risk in the markets, right into the teeth of the financial collapse of 2008…and weeks after publishing his third quarter 2008 ... read more

In 2008, consumers and businesses around the world bought almost 1,200,000,000 cell phones. Yeah, that's 1.2 billion gadgets connected to the wireless telecom networks around this world. That's a lot of cell phones. In fact, given that there's about 6 and a half billion people on the Earth, that's one cell phone sold for EVERY FIVE people on the entire planet. Put in other words, it's as if ... read more

One of the primary tenets of my theory called Revolutionomics is that those who empower, win; and that those who try to control, lose. This theory applies to governments as people tend to fight oppressors, and it applies to businesses as well. And on the Internet, it applies to everything. That is, people will always migrate towards any site that empowers them to easily access or distribute ... read more

So PPIP, one of the largest wealth redistribution upwards in the history of our planet (second only to TARP and ahead of TALF...but then where does Fed setting rates below the market for banks fit it?...I digress) is a go after all. U.S. Treasury May Tap Eight to 10 PPIP Asset Managers This Week - Bloomberg You should be sickened, angered and ready to fight the ... read more

Once again I ask -- did anybody bother to read what's actually in this 1000 plus page bill that your elected Republicans and Democrats are voting on whether it should become THE LAW OF THE LAND, enforced in the end by police, courts, and prisons. And I also ask this, after reading a part of what's in this 1000 plus page climate bill -- Does anybody really think making the following the law of ... read more

Before I ran a hedge fund, but after a few years after I'd been a stock broker, I worked for a tech incubator and eventually ran the wholesale division of a billion dollar telecom company that's actually still around. (Any guesses what CLEC I once worked at?) One of that telecom company's biggest successes was when we signed AT&T, the long distance carrier, as a customer when they were trying to ... read more

I'm walking down the 47th street yesterday and a dude in a suit on the sidewalk hollers out, "Hey, Cody -- what do I do about my Motorola?" Yup, even as the financial marketplace as we knew it in our lifetimes died in the last year or so, even as the economy turned recessionary and the stock markets plunged, even as credit has dried up, the world still goes on. Investments must be made, gambles ... read more