Pachyderm or Picasso?

THIS HOUSE WILL NEVER SELL

Dean Reinemann: ‘Want to live forever? [Yes! – A.T.] I don’t, but in the NY Times today, a new take on how to do so or at least prolong the inevitable. Don’t miss the three-minute multimedia slide show.’

☞ It’s beyond silly . . . but oddly beautiful. A $2 million house designed to be so uncomfortable as to relieve your anxieties about losing comfort (by taking it away to begin with) and to keep you young by making everything difficult.

‘They ought to build hospitals like this,’ one of the designers is quoted.

Reads the next line:

A reporter, who thinks they should never, ever build hospitals like this, tried to go with the flow.

I laughed out loud at that – and laughter, unarguably, keeps you young.

YALIE, UP 28% LAST YEAR, HAS GOOD ADVICE

Stewart Dean: ‘Quick, see an orthopedic surgeon! There may still be hope that you could get your arms un-dislocated after patting yourself on the back (so vigorously! with both hands!) for having finished the crossword puzzle and acrostic. [Oops. Too much? – A.T.] In the meantime, you might want to share this link.’

☞ And a fine link it is, to a story on David Swensen, who bumped Yale’s endowment up by $5 billion last year – 28% – and who has been delivering astonishing returns for two decades. His advice: diversify, keep your transaction costs low (mainly through index funds), and ‘rebalance’ periodically, especially within retirement plans, where there’s no tax cost to doing so. If this is in any way new to you, for heaven’s sake click that link.

FMD

Guru says: ‘FMD will not recover until the securitization markets open up (or the markets anticipate that they will) . . . and when they do, their business model may need to change a bit (upfront fees taken out of securitization vs. more traditional spread lending). Like all financial assets, delinquency and charge-off will be stressed for the next 12-18 months, but this should be pretty well discounted at this point. Future prepayment risk (which in many ways is equally if not more threatening than credit risk to the long term economic model) should actually diminish as home equity loans and mortgage refinance opportunity recedes. Capital (and potential access to additional funding) seems to be adequate. Long term, private student lending is still a huge and quickly growing market, many of the weaker players have exited the business, removing capacity and competition.’

☞ So, while recognizing the risks, he would not sell, and I haven’t either.

BUT CAN HE DO AN ACROSTIC?

Bob Novick: ‘This from YouTube is either very cleverly staged or is in fact an elephant painting a self portrait.’

Tomorrow, perhaps: More of Your Thoughts on Macs, Safari, Mozy and All That