Dear rss free blog,

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October’s
Harvard Magazine
includes an article by David Moss about how banking should be better
regulated in the future. While this is a domestic political issue,
the Harvard Business School professor makes comments about the New
Deal reforms. I have been defending the FDIC and Glass-Steagall on
the web. But I am the last New Dealer left standing; here is Prof.
Moss:

“Ironically,
it is possible that the success of New Deal financial regulation
actually contributed to its own undoing. After 50 years of relative
financial calm, academics and policymakers alike may have begun to
take that stability for granted. Given that mindset, financial
regulation looked like an unnecessary burden. It was if, after
sharply reducing deadly epidemics through public health measures,
policy makers concluded that [they] weren’t really necessary, since
major epidemics were not a threat anymore.

“The
prevailing view of financial regulation was that less was more,
because private actors could be trusted to optimize financial
decisionmaking on their own. Alan Greenspan in 2002 … explained his
view this way: ‘By design, this market, presumbed to involve dealings
among sophisticated professions, has been largerly exempt from
government regulation. This exemption reflects that view that
professionals do not require the investor protections commonly
afforded to markets in which retail investors partivcipate. But
regulation is not only unnecessary in these markets; it is
potentially damaging because regulation presupposes disclosure and
forced disclosure of proprietary information can undercut innovations
in financial markets.’” (To read more visit
www.hbs.edu/research.pdf/09-087.pdf;
the original paper was published for the TARP Congressional
Oversight Panel.)

What the USA needs is liberal Republicans able to work with liberal Democrats, says this former staffer of Sen. Clifford Case (R-NJ), and former voter for Jack Javits (R-NY). Where is the new Weicker? Where is the 21st century Percy?

Even Nixon favored healthcare reform and wanted to work on it with Teddy Kennedy, I learn from today’s New York Times.

The
biggest BRIC market is now Brazil, Dow-Jones Indexes reports. It has
overtaken India.

Japan’s
election tsunami spells trouble for China’s solar manufacturers
because Japanese firms have more experience and big volumes thanks to being into chips. And
the new government is committed to expanding solar cell sales.
Moreover, it is also committed to consumer spending. We will publish
stock picks for this when our Japan reporter Chris Loew gets them to
us.

Here
is information from Roger the webmaster about making this e-mail
larger after which there are notes on our stocks for paid subscribers:

visit http://globalinvesting.memberlodge.com/blog.html and paid subscribers can read the newsletter on the website;

instead of copying the email post into ms-word, pretend you wand to reply to it and change the format;

if all fails, use: http://www.w3.org/WAI/changedesign.html#text.

*I
changed how we calculate our gains in the Model Portfolio. Instead of
taking a numeric average of the gains by category (yield, buy and
hold, speculative) I added the value of spinoffs to the gain on the
original share. This removes the zero gains for shares we got without
paying for them, which penalized our average performance. With
spinoffs in non-Canadian pink sheet ADRs, you get no information
on how to divide your cost basis for the two stocks.

However,
despite my jiggling, the average performance of the speculative
portfolio is still down from that of the buy-and-hold one, which is
not normal.

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