They will be fighting about a lot more next year

Real Clear Politics: If Senate Republicans stay united, they can confirm President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees without any support from Democrats. But even if the minority party can’t block nominees, its members still plan to turn Trump’s Cabinet choices into a major fight early next year.
The president-elect has nominated about half his Cabinet at this point – plus nominees for ambassador to the United Nations and CIA director – with a number of key positions, including secretary of state, still to be determined. But some of the earliest picks have raised serious red flags for Democrats, who have vowed tough questioning and intense confirmation processes.

I already have three expenses that are unexpected, the interest payment jumped, the student loans are due, and someone has to come up with a huge chunk to pay off the insurance companies.  Add the the extra we need for boomer retirement, they have  bunched up.  Those loans are due in a few months. Congress is likely facing interest costs of twice what they currently pay, and it is a new Congress, a Congress likely unable and unwilling to add.

OK, let us consider value investing and the trading pits

Apply this idea [value investing]  to stocks and you have value investing, plain and simple. Any time you buy a stock, you want its intrinsic value to be higher than its market price. If you have the right temperament and you're willing to put in the effort, you can learn how to successfully invest in individual stocks using value investing techniques. This tutorial will help you get started. (To learn more, refer to The Value Investor's Handbook.)
Read more: Value Investing: Introduction | Investopedia http://www.investopedia.com/university/value-investing/#ixzz4RieDwIOn 

And reading further we would learn how to evaluate instrinsic value from book value, pricing history, dividend stream; in ways I do not know,yet.

But I do know this, I can represent the balance sheet and cash flow of any organized accounting sheet as accurate as necessary for value investing, if I can get the raw inputs and capture the amount of redundant vs innovative data the comes through. Once I have that, then I can re-create all the variables needed for value investing, except I have the precision of that data captured in a systematic way. 

That is, the mathematician astrophysicist can make the balance sheet a distribution with which we can do convolutions. Same data, the balance sheets look the same. We is just we apply the old chart analysis in real time, and represent the data as a series of probable 'tipping' points'.  In other words, we can tell you when a Graham and Dodd estimation is off base, try another chapter

Matt Levine min-rages about banker bot

What about the real traders, the folks who know this stuff, he asks:

People still read Graham and Dodd! [The standard inverstment text] People still invest by trying to understand the workings of the stock market, the economic fundamentals of an industry, the competitive position of a company. Doesn't that seem like it should work? And then you have the scientists who don't even know what asset class they're looking at. The scientists seem to be ascendant these days. What will happen to the understanders? Will the astrophysicists end up running the whole financial world? Will they think of Graham-and-Dodd fundamental investing the way they think of astrology now? It is a pretty story that has captured the imagination of many people for so much of history, but perhaps modern science will just expose it as superstition and wipe it away.

Bots, that is who will be reading the Graham and Dodd text, with the help of human traders.
The knowledge in that text becomes operational python software snippets, and the bot sits at the ready, next to the trading pit, and on time, The bot will  grab info from the trading graph, do some Graham and Dodd estimations, then drop a bid/ask into the pit. The pit boss crunches the bid/ask pairs to balance the graph, Win or lose depending who read Graham and Dodd more carefully.

If your aim was to get astrophysicists to read Graham and Dodd, you succeeded.

Another racist group in the Swamp

Folks of a specific race organized a coalition in Congress?

The Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, which advocates for AAPI issues, sent a letter to Trump last week, citing immigration, civil rights and education as some of the critical topics the group wants to discuss. 

I thought  Asians were smart, you know, having actually read recent American  history about banning racist organizations in government. Asians shouldn't include Pacific Americans, which includes Californians. Californians are not a minority, we are technically still citizens

Well, if they cannot figure out racism, then they are likely cheating on  the calculus tests.

No discernable effect?

Sandra Black, Jason Furman, Laura Giuliano, Wilson Powell found no discernable influence on minimum wage hikes across states and districts.

This column examines the impact of the more recent state increases on wages, weekly earnings, and employment among workers in the low-wage leisure and hospitality Industry. 

Except their last chart which shows that no discernable difference means that states with higher minimum wages consistently have less employment,  the yellow line consistently below the blue line.

The problem, of course,  the stats are dominated by California and New York, making this an immediate fraud.  California and New York always have fewer jobs for the poor, they always have the poor priced out of the market, as the chart shows.

This research is good enough to fool a UC Berkeley or MIT professor, but Rednecks catch this crap all the time.

Looks unstable to me

Seems a bit unbalanced and it does seem to cause a crash as indicate by the 1929 condition. Where does the wealth concentrate? New York, home of the Swamp price fixers. 

 Trading pits isolate and remove price fixing, no more wealthy socialists getting in on Goodie Committees at the Swamp.

The committee to guarantee the jobs of committee members

(New York, NY) – President-elect Donald J. Trump today announced that he is establishing the President’s Strategic and Policy Forum. The Forum, which is composed of some of America’s most highly respected and successful business leaders, will be called upon to meet with the President frequently to share their specific experience and knowledge as the President implements his plan to bring back jobs and Make America Great Again. The Forum will be chaired by Stephen A. Schwarzman, Chairman, CEO, and Co-Founder of Blackstone.
Members of the Forum will be charged with providing their individual views to the President – informed by their unique vantage points in the private sector – on how government policy impacts economic growth, job creation, and productivity. The Forum is designed to provide direct input to the President from many of the best and brightest in the business world in a frank, non-bureaucratic, and non-partisan manner.

The greatest productivity challenge we face is eliminating the letter_to_janet() for each transaction.  Trump has assembled a group of NYC bankers to make sure we always send it to them. 

Time is regulated, do not trade it

Merkel: The somewhat popular P2P bitcoin loan service BitLendingClub has been forced to close up shop due to alleged “regularity pressures”. The platform will remain in a state of limited functionality while existent loans are repaid or written off. BitLendingClub, a Bitcoin/Blockchain startup launched in 2014 as a peer-to-peer lending marketplace, has been forced to shut down due to regulatory pressures. The company sent an email to its customers on Wednesday informing them about the upcoming service termination:
We’ve worked extremely hard to build a platform and a community which is uniquely positioned to provide the Bitcoin ecosystem with a greatly needed service. However, over the last year or so, the regulatory pressures have been increasing to the point that it is no longer feasible to maintain the operation of the platform. We are regretfully announcing that we will have to begin terminating the services effective immediately.
With this blunt statement, the startup defended its decision. Although the Company’s email addressed most of the common questions about the platform’s functionality, the statement didn’t contain any references to the entities or governments pressuring for the application of regulations.

Trading pits have no concept of time, it is a human thing.   Instead, bet in probability thaty loans are recalled, then  win  the significance game when borrowers cover. The regulators cannot really regulate this as a bank, it does not claim 'payments over time', we would beat the federales in court; and become regulated as a securities market.

Time is regulated differently because time and event sequences are matched by human judgement, in reality they are matched by the maximum entropy funcyion by trading, traders will not gp beyond some bound  in market precision.

Banker bot gets a badge

Financial News: “It will be much better for the health of the federal banking system and everyone who relies on these institutions, if these companies enter the system through a clearly marked front gate, rather than in some back door, where risks may not be as thoughtfully assessed and managed,” Thomas Curry, the head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, said in remarks prepared for delivery Friday morning at Georgetown University Law Center.
In a document released along with his speech, the OCC said it soon would allow so-called fintech firms – which offer loans through online platforms and payment systems through smartphone apps and websites – to become “special purpose national banks,” a move the tech industry has long lobbied to achieve.

The change would make it easier for them to do business by giving them a chance to operate nationally on their own with one license, rather than seeking permits state by state, or without partnering with a traditional brick-and-mortar bank. Many firms say the current process is cumbersome and costly, making it difficult to expand as a startup with limited resources.

How does this eliminate state by state regulation?  States never really taxed cash anyway.  This is more of a signaling thing, like graduating from one of the Amazon mail order classes.
To see how immaterial, consider that all the trading pits are likely to be buried in the snow in Canada somewhere, completely oblivious to state boundaries, unless they can be traded.

Many of the double voters likely voted for Trump

Statistics on the illegal voting from a report in NRO:

Noncitizen Voting Has Not Been ‘Debunked’
In criticizing Donald Trump’s unsupported claim that millions of noncitizens swung the popular vote, the media have gone too far in the other direction, dismissing legitimate — albeit merely suggestive — evidence that significant noncitizen voting does occur in American elections. Take the much-discussed study [pdf] by Jesse Richman, Gulshan Chattha, and David Earnest, published in the journal Electoral Studies. Based on a national survey, the authors found that a small percentage of noncitizens do report voting — roughly 6 percent in 2008 — and that their votes might be enough to affect very close elections, such as the Minnesota Senate race between Al Franken and Norm Coleman.

Trump's claim, unverified, is not baseless, as we all know.   And I watched the Obama interview, he did indeed say, just vote and worry about citizenship later.  Nancy and the Dems did indeed go to our courts to remove verification requirements,and they did indeed blame is on Black stupidity.  And, certainly, identity politics is a code word for racism, and the Dems never left the philosophy, never in their history.

These are not undocumented voters, most of them have valid voter ID cards from heir home nation, and vote there.  But in California, the likely outcome would have been more votes for Trump, as many unverified voters where wealthy foreign home  owners.

The message is simple, when Dems act like friggen idiots from another century, they likely are.