Chingo De Dinero

After today, I am wondering how bad it can be in the future.  Really, if you look at valuations, it is crazy.  Even if the economy slows by a little, you can make a killing.  Based on prices now, the economy is going to come to an halt.

If you watch the news you will probably come up with the same idea, but if you take a step back, really how bad is it.  Go to the mall or a fancy resteraunt and surprise they still have people making purchases.  If you are looking for a home to purchase, you can still get a loan, with a relatively low rate.  It just doesn’t make sense to me, but we will see.  Watch Q3, if it comes in okay and the forecast isn’t too bad, we will see some big jumps.

A lot of people talk about options and know the power in the amount of leverage you can get with them.  The one area where most of the people I talk to lack knowledge is how to price stock options.  If I ask if the option is cheap or expensive, the give me the blank look.  If I ask about implied volatility I get an even funnier look.

In short, the price of stock options boils down to implied volatility, which is more or less the probabilities of wide variations in the underlying stocks price.  Using Black-Scholes which is more or less the space under the normal distribution curve that shows the probability at different prices for the underlying stock.  Less volital, the taller, thinner the curve is.  As volitility increases the wider the curve is.  So, as you get an option away from the current stock price, the area under the curve is larger when the volatility is higher.

If you are not familiar with this, I doubt my short explaination will help much, but it should plant some seeds which will make more sense as you research.

Sometimes when you commit a crime, you should sit in jail and reflect on what you have done, so in the future it will not happen again.  If you are simply let off you will not understand the extent of what you have done.

This is no different from the banking bailout now.  If the government takes responsibility for what others have done, those who made the mistakes will do it again.  Many times this is called moral hazard.  If I know someone will catch me if I fall, I will take risk which I normally would not take.  Although it is nice be caught when you fall, is comes at a cost, and inflicting that cost on those who are not willing is a violation of their rights.  There may be some trickle down, but it will not be as bad as if there is a bailout and risky actions are still taken, and we find ourselves in the same situation in the future.

I recently read a quote form a congressman that when he started Chrisler was going into bankruptcy, and the worry was that they could go bankrupt, and they needed to be saved.  Here we are again, and issue.  If they would have fallen the first time, there would have been room for a better company to step up, and we would have been better off.  Instead, they were bailed out and squeezed out new competition, only to mess it up again.

All the argument should be is does the calapse of the financial industry violate anyone’s rights.  The clear answer is no, but forcing people to pay for a bailout is clearly a violation of individual rights.  All of the arguments about the trickle down and the positive possibility of the assets being worth more than they are bought for are wrong, and just a short fix.  Kind of like when you get a wish from the geniue in the bottle, you make your wise, get it, but the unexpected side effects are worse than what you have gotten.

Don’t bail out the financial industry.  It may hurt for a little while, but we will make it through it and will be stronger after.

One important aspect which I left out of “Push vs Pull” was the dynamic aspect of the economy.  The rules of the game determine how people play.  A result of the push method is the inability to improve the amount of resources you control.  In plan terms, you are taxed so hard that even if you work harder you will not have more money.  People are not dumb, if they are in this situation, they work less, be it right or wrong, we are here for us, and are all concerned about ourselves.

So, not to get too deep in social theory and what is best, economically there is an impact.  People will work harder in a pull system because the harder they work the more resources they can control.  These resources could be directed towards a new car, bigger house, cure AIDS, help the poor, or any other activity.  Over time, the effect of this additional work can become very large.  If you look to the basics, “The Wealth of Nations” one of the main aspects that makes a nation wealthy is private property.  When you have private property, you can accumulate resources, and control them, which makes you work harder, which in turn generates wealth for the nation.  Additionally, we are more likely to invent or innovate.  If I know I can become very wealthy if I work hard and think of the next great invention, I will work harder to do so.  Maybe I will stay up later than normal, sacrifice sleep, sacrifice parting, etc.  If it would not see the benefit of my work, I would be more inclined to relax, enjoy life, and live for today.  Resulting in the invention never materializing.

In my opinion this result of choosing an economy is just as large as the “fairness” in allocating resources.  It is an investment in the future, which will pay large dividends and benefit society as a whole.