Bickel Blog

Some pretty sobbering forecasts from Goldman Sachs means more bad news is on the way. Highlights to me are the fact we could go over 9% unemployment (meaning 50% more people will be without a job than today), and that inflation will be negative (but they say this is not really the "D" word). The bolding is mine... BOTTOM LINE: We have marked down our forecasts for US real GDP in response to continuing signs of falling domestic and foreign demand, labor market deterioration, renewed tightening in financial conditions, and an apparent impasse in fiscal policy pending the transfer of power to the Obama administration in late January. As a result, we expect the unemployment rate to reach 9% by the fourth quarter of 2009, profits to fall 25% for 2009 as a whole following an estimated 10% drop this year, and the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to use nontraditional policy tools more aggressively, as detailed below. MAIN POINTS: 1. A weaker growth profile...We now estimate ...

The DJIA went below 8000 today. A financial person told me that if you listen to the sage advice of Buffet, Lynch, etal, then you will invest now because it is tough to time market bottoms. But I just saw a headline that makes me thing we have not hit bottom yet. The title was " Dow falls below 8,000, S&P at 5-year low ". If this is the worst financial crisis since the Depression, and it is much broader than the 2000-2003 meltdown, then why would the stock market not reflect that? IMHO the world economy is far worse with no real tangible turnaround on the horizon in spite of the Goverment's efforts to free up the money supply and increase the velocity of money. So the stock market is in for more downward trends...

I have never been more proud of our country.

A frequent topic of conversation these days is the declining market. It is particularly interesting because so many people are affected by it, and certainly my own portfolio has taken a real bruising over the past year. I told my broker my original thesis last March that the credit "issues" back then would have repercusions in the real earnings power of companies and bring down stock prices to the Dow 10,000 level. We made a lunch bet on it - I won that one. Now the question is how much further it will fall - or have we reached the bottom. There are many pundits in the market today. They talk about the pressure of Hedge Funds, and the deleveraging of the credit market. I think about the habit of history repeating itself. Maybe not in the terms of the Great Depression - but possibly in the terms of the 1970's and early 80's. So I thought I would do a bit of research and share it... First, I decided to look at the DJIA price 20 years ago and what the Inflation ra...

Shaun decided to put up what we were almost ready to put into Beta. You can watch a very good example video here . Although Ringside is winding down, this technology may see the light of day - and might help with the socialization of the web (I know, Sarah Palin won't like the sound of that!).

A year ago, a group of us met in a pizza parlor to discuss how we could bring the social web to every website and business. In January, we launched Ringside Networks with seed funding from Matrix Partners, one of the best VC firms in the country. By the end of March we released into open source an initial beta of our Social Application Server – a very ambitious project. We got some very positive reviews on our approach, our implementation and the need in the marketplace for every website to become social. We were ready for our Series A round of funding, and in late May we received a number of term sheet offers from the very best VC firms. As we were about to finalize our funding, one of the biggest non-evil Internet companies asked if we would have interest in being acquired instead. After a lot of thought and debate, we decided that the larger company would enable us to get our technology to market sooner and with more impact. The story sounds almost too good to be true. And it w...

Ringside is bringing the power of the Social Web to any website in two very simple, yet powerful services. Yesterday, we released a demonstration of the idea that any website could easily integrate the idea of Social Activities . Today, we are releasing a demo of our new Ringside Site Connect , which is meant to allow any website with a set of users to allow those users to become social. Many websites have large and dedicated user bases. Ringside Site Connect provides a simple way for those users to connect with each other within the website, as well as reach out and map users in the large Social Networks like Facebook and MySpace. In this demonstration , we have shown how the Food Network website could be extended to allow their users to connect thru a social application for people with similar tastes in recipes. In this application, the Food Network: - Enables users to login - Chooses which applications are available (they can use any Open Social or Facebook application, or develop...