It is clear that I am not one to dole out stock recommendations (reference my call on Bear Stearns) but I did want to serve up a company worthy of your review if you are so inclined.  I read an article about Leucadia National (LUK) many years ago and was intrigued for several reasons.  First and foremost, the story of Ian Cumming and Joseph Steinberg and how they have taken a distressed company and over the past 30 some odd years built an enormous amount of shareholder value by making (mostly) smart investments is a fascinating story.

Leucadia is sometimes called the "next Berkshire Hathaway."  Let’s be clear – the "next" of anything rarely pans out so don’t be lured by the promise of finding the next Warren Buffet.  Do, however, check out Leucadia and the really entertaining (and informative) annual letter to shareholders here.  The website is not flashy but this company owns some really interesting things from iron ore mining in Australia to Pine Ridge Winery (one of my favorites) to a recent investment in investment bank Jefferies.  I have owned it for a while and enjoy learning a thing or two from the smart folks leading the company. 

I suppose you fall on one side of this or the other in reacting to the end-result of easy mortgages and access to capital.  I can’t help but fall on the personal accountability side.  Maybe that says a lot about me but I really believe people must be accountable for the financial decisions they make.  If you have ever bought a house, there are already way too many "sign this" forms put into place to ensure you understand what you are doing.  Even for someone comfortable with numbers and financial concepts, there are lots of moving pieces in a real estate transaction.

I agree with Paul Kedrosky here and his view on this story from the Washington Post.  It was shady..no doubt.  But it was shady on both sides of the transaction.  Just because you can doesn’t mean you should and it is not the role of government to protect you from yourself.  Right or wrong, we live in a free market/capitalist society where having access to capital carries a level of responsibility.

No one should lose their home and there is no shortage of bad actors involved both in this story as well as the broader debacle but this is as much the fault of the buyer as those that facilitated the transaction.

One undeniable maxim that holds true here is if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Can we all assume happy days are here again as Frank Quattrone returns to the game with Qatalyst Group?  Welcome back Frank.

And that is all I am going to get from Bear Stearns as JP Morgan acquires them.  Now, I certainly didn’t lose anywhere near as much as Joseph Lewis although I am sure the size of his portfolio allocated to speculation is a tad larger than mine. 

Let’s hope the financial levers that can be thrown by the powers that be will be and in the right direction or this is going to get really ugly (uglier than it already is). 

Bear Stearns…eck!  I made a strong statement in September that appears foolish at this point.  At least I had reduced my position…but not enough.

Invest in an undersea cable system linking Japan to the US like Google!  Six companies are pitching in $300MM for the project, so not much of a capital outlay.  Maybe somebody had a deal quota or there are a whole lot of Powerpoint slides describing how adding bandwidth to the world will help sell more ads.  Regardless, this is a pretty interesting data point on the continued interest in infrastructure shown by Google including the recent 700MHz spectrum auction.

I believe I once heard the best time to get into the stock market is when everyone else has gotten out…a capitulation of sorts.  Are we at that point in time?  I don’t know as I am not one to provide financial advice, but this nugget from Merrill Lynch certainly points that direction (via Paul Kedrosky).

"…41 percent of fund managers are overweight cash, the highest since September 2001’s terrorist attacks…"

I recently discovered a new tab on Yahoo! Finance entitled "Tech Ticker."  I don’t use Yahoo for much (sorry Microsoft) but do use the Finance section as well as maintain an email address although it is not my primary one.

The anchor content is a video blurb and over the past couple days there have been a couple snippets of an interview of Jim Rogers by Paul Kedrosky (I posted one below).  I have proclaimed my fan status of Paul previously, but I am also a fan of Rogers.  He is not so much a financial markets pundit as he is a (wealthy) pragmatist with pretty defined views.  I’ve read his first three books and am planning on picking up his newest "A Bull in China" as soon as I have some time.  His others are great reads combining travel stories (the first two listed here) with a bit of capital markets education.  Check out Investment Biker , Adventure Capitalist, or Hot Commodities.

http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/fop/embedflv/swf/fop_wrapper.swf?id=6321955&autoStart=0&prepanelEnable=1&infopanelEnable=1&carouselEnable=0

That this is probably the worst idea in the history of the world or at least extremely close.  Borrowing from your 401k via a debit card?  Let’s just let this run amok over the next few years and then blame the financial institutions for being greedy and unscrupulous.  Control your urges people…you need to "save" for retirement. 

I’m all about product/service innovation and access to capital but making it easier to borrow pre-tax dollars from yourself that you have to repay with after tax dollars (plus interest) to then be taxed again when you withdraw the dough does not compute.

As someone who spends a fair amount of his time working to present ideas and information graphically, I found this very entertaining (via The Big Picture from the WSJ).  It is all about scale so if we are talking about $100 billion dollars total, being on the "low end" of loss like Bear, Countrywide, or JP Morgan with a measly $1-2ish billion pales in comparison to Citi, Merrill, or UBS.  This is  very unsettling b/c this much loss doesn’t come without consequences.  It’s sort of like the real estate binge of the past several years was a game of musical chairs with crap debt being passed from originator to underwriter to "safe" fixed income holder.  Kinda like a game of musical chairs and somebody smashed the iPod with a boot….the music has stopped and those at the high end of this loss chart didn’t find a chair.