I liked your first comment on this thead so much that I have taken the liberty to republish it on our blog.

Howard Richman
http://www.tradeandtaxes.blogspot.com

That was the missing piece, I was looking for, of course. Quarterly outflows.
My estimate from what I’ve seen in EM equity and currencies is: they were ugly.

And yes, they do contribute to real productivity. A lot actually.
Not the quants. But funds with a long term horizon doing actual research.

Small companies in “commodities extraction” in countries with insufficient internal savings depend on them.

That sounds like too big a piece of the $110 final number anyway, if they are also doing things like modifying the alternative minimum tax.

So I figure I just wait and see if they tell us what the final itemized list is after it gets passed.

anyone know more about the $110b in biz tax breaks in the senate bill?

Add a tax cut cut to a spending bill and you can get anything to pass. Don’t buy US stock yet, it still needs to be passed by the House. Be sure to add to your savings account, we are going to need the money.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Even as the Senate voted, House leaders were hunting for the 12 votes they would need to turn around Monday’s 228-205 defeat. They were especially targeting the 133 Republicans who voted “no.”

Their opposition appeared to be easing after the Senate added $110 billion in tax breaks for businesses and the middle class, plus a provision to raise, from $100,000 to $250,000, the cap on federal deposit insurance.

They were also cheering a decision Tuesday by the Securities and Exchange Commission to ease rules that force companies to devalue assets on their balance sheets to reflect the price they can get on the market.

There were worries, though, that the tax breaks would cause some conservative-leaning Democrats who voted for the rescue Monday to abandon it because it would swell the federal deficit.

“I’m concerned about that,” said Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., the majority leader.

As revised by the Senate, the package extends several tax breaks popular with businesses. It would keep the alternative minimum tax from hitting 20 million middle-income Americans and provide $8 billion in tax relief for those hit by natural disasters in the Midwest, Texas and Louisiana.

It doesn’t designate a way to pay for many of the tax cuts, though, angering the House’s band of conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats.”

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/081001/financial_meltdown.html

btw, your site was so overwhlemed on tues morning (asia time, approx mon evening EST) – guess the vote was really shocking huh.

how’s the latest vote going?

Tongue in cheek, of course, but over the last 30 years I think we had a huge amount of monetary inflation covering up a steady deflation of what was our real economy, and monetary authorities focused on the ideal inflation rate of 2% the whole time, which makes it all ok in their minds.

The Information Age was the last push in the US to increase the productivity of pushing retail items and financial paper. Tho it is good for pushing knowledge around, just like the early nineties sci-fi novels predicted where sci-fi authors had global blogs communing on all the issues of the day.

Now we have the problem of high commodity prices. The final frontier.

So after going where no man wants to go,and using our investment instead, if we solve that one, we won’t have work or money, just like on Star Trek.

Just a crazy thought.

whatever one may think of him, Ron Paul had a brilliant line the other day:

what we are again learning from history is that we are again incapable of learning from history.

…or something like that…

your point well taken.