Tell It To Al

How much oil does a nation need to produce to warrant a U.S. intervention?

Somewhere between 500,000 and 1.8 billion barrels per day, according the U.S. News and World report columnist and blogger Rick Newman. Click here to read Newman’s analysis. “Wherever the next bombs fly, one safe bet is that the ultimate target will be oil,” he writes.

As the Middle East increasingly descends into chaos, Newman tries to forecast which countries will see interventions and which won’t based on daily oil output, alone.

“Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Oman, and Egypt are probably safe from Western intervention,” he writes.  “Qatar and Kuwait are blissed out on oil money, with little likelihood of upheaval. Algeria is a wild card that could end up like Libya, if its dictator loses control. Iraq and Saudi Arabia are both governed by regimes friendly to the United States. … And Iran is the most problematic big oil producer, but it’s also the riskiest to tangle with.”

America may not be back from the Great Recession, but Starbucks is.

Not many CEOs can turn around a company amid one of the worst downturns in U.S. history. Fewer still write books about it. But Howard Schultz has pulled it off.

Click here to read my column on my interview with Schultz as he releases his new book “Onward: How Starbucks Fought For It’s Life Without Losing It’s Soul.”

I have not always been so easy on Schultz.

Click here to read what I wrote about him before the turnaround, as Starbucks faced it’s darkest hour. I have to admit, I thought the recession would be a lot harder on a company that charges $4 for coffee. And I didn’t think Schultz was up to the challenge, based on some of his rhetoric.

Schultz is scheduled to appear at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business on April 6 to talk about his new book. Click here for details.

Securities and Exchange Commissioner Luis Aguilar is a regulator out to regulate.

And for good reason. Some highlights from a speech he gave yesterday:

“Deregulated markets were instrumental in the misallocation of our country’s capital and other scarce resources, which resulted in trillions in mispriced assets, devastated the savings of American families, and resulted in painful levels of unemployment that persists to this day. Just as a few examples . . . American families who had saved for decades — did everything right — could no longer afford to send their children to college. Hardworking men and women entering their retirement years have had to continue working because their retirement nest eggs significantly diminished. Businesses large and small watched their lending costs soar and loan commitments disappear. The negative effects on capital formation in our country were devastating.

“We need the financial services industry as a whole to re-dedicate itself to basic principles — principles of integrity, fair dealing, meaningful disclosures, and good business practices.

“One of the fundamentals of regulation is that regulators must have direct access to information about those we regulate and the activities that they engage in.

“I have repeatedly spoken about the need for the Commission to have direct access to real-time data about the markets and market participants that we regulate, and I will continue to do so until this goal has been reached. Specifically, I have advocated for the Commission to have ongoing, direct access to real-time trading data and current and historical broker-dealer registration data. Currently we need to request this information from third parties.”

Click here to read Aguilar’s speech. And click here to read what I wrote about Aguilar in October.

Somehow, I found this press release amusing, in a tragic/comic sort of way.

Crisis after crisis, one so-called once-in-a-lifetime event after the next, and the good news is we’re still here to suffer the next round.

Boy,  I can’t wait to see what happens in December 2012.

———-

Financial Advisor Gives Reassurance in Hard Times

Troy, MI March 29, 2011 – “Ugly events come to our attention, and then we look at the outcomes and in a flash of human nature, start to actually see the issues,” says Leon LaBrecque, managing partner and founder of LJPR, LLC, a firm managing over $350 million in assets.  “When such events come as a surprise and have a major impact, how will it all shake out?”

“I see the current world landscape like a Greek play: there’s act one, the build up; act two, the crisis; and act three, the finale,” continues LaBrecque. “We have had many unpredicted and undirected events take place in the past decade – the September 11^th attacks, 78% decline in the NASDAQ, the 2004 tsunami in Sumatra , Indonesia, the 2008 Myanmar cyclone, the failure of Lehman Brothers and the sale and liquidation of Bear Stearns, the 2010 Port-Au-Prince, Haiti earthquake, BP’s 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the 2010 market flash crash, the surge of unrest in the Middle East, and the very present earthquake and tsunami in Japan.”

“All that and we’re still here,” says LaBrecque. “In our case at hand, Japan will rebuild (probably better than before), nuclear plants will be safer and better, earthquakes will continue, some budgets will be balanced, and other budgets will be largely ignored. Markets will rise, and markets will fall. And we’ll be surprised by the next ‘once-in a lifetime’ event. And after the horses have run out of the barns, we’ll close the door.”

About LJPR:LJPR, LLC is an independent wealth management firm headquartered in Troy, MI.  For over 20 years, LJPR has been reducing uncertainty for their clients’ finances by providing creative wealth management solutions in investments, taxes, financial planning and estate planning.  For more information about the firm, including the firm’s blog, visit their site. Leon C. LaBrecque is an attorney, CPA, CFP®, and CFA (Chartered Financial analyst).  Leon is CEO and chief strategist for the independent wealth management firm, LJPR. Leon has been analyzing and investing in (to the tune of about $100M) individual Bonds, particularly Michigan municipal bonds. To view Leon’s and Brad Reynolds’ entire White Paper, click here.  To view their current executive summary of the Michigan Municipal Market, click here.  For Leon’s white paper on Roth IRAs, click here. Leon LaBrecque’s direct e-mail is leon.labrecque@ljpr.com.  The Firm’s telephone is 248-641-7400.

Wal-Mart is using a strategy right out of the crisis PR  playbook, arguing that if it has a discrimination problem, it’s only in a few isolated instances.

It will be interesting to see what the U.S. Supreme Court decides to do with the 500,000 to 1.6 million women who are suing Wal-Mart for discrimination. A decision is expected tomorrow.

The case has dragged on for years – so long, that it appears Wal-Mart has cleaned up much of its act in the meantime. But the opportunity to have an impact on social change with a case like this may be too enticing for the court to pass up. Click here to read more from the Associated Press.

Did you know that Wal-Mart has a “vice president for people”?  That would be Giesel Ruiz, who heads human resources and clings to the company line that if there are cases of discrimination, they are isolated instances.  “People will make errors,” the people VP  told the Associated Press. “People are people.”

Yep. And people file class-action lawsuits, too.

Medical marijuana and unemployment – two trends that almost seem to go hand in hand. I talk about both with Matt Flener of Denver’s NBC affiliate, 9News:

It’s my just my luck that whenever I write something good about an industry, something bad happens.

That’s how it went when I interviewed Gerald Grandey, CEO of Cameco Corp., one of the world’s largest uranium mining companies. In a Feb. 22 column, I channeled his views that nuclear power had proven to be a safe form of energy, despite all the hysteria from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.  Three weeks later … Japan.

Grandey now points out that the worst has happened – and, really, when you compare it to other disasters such as BP’s  Gulf spill last spring – it isn’t so bad.

Click here to read my column in The Sunday Wall Street Journal. And click here to read my previous column on Grandey.

Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank President Dennis Lockhart set the record straight today: “Contrary to popular opinion, Federal Reserve officials do actually eat and fill up their gas tanks.”

And here I thought Fed officials were cyborgs controlled by the global banking industry, only needing an occasional battery charge.

Lockhart’s comments came in response to concerns about inflation, which the Fed still counts as low, despite rising gasoline and food prices that are actually fomenting riots in other countries. Click here to read more.

You’d think someone who’d risen to the level of a Fed president would have people to put gas in their cars for them. I respect a man who goes to the self-serve pump and fills his own tank. But somehow I just can’t imagine Ben Bernanke and Co. doing it.

Medical marijuana selling as well as Viagra. Imagine that.

Click here to read my column.

I talk about it with Simon Constable on the Wall Street Journal’s News Hub:

Did the Great Recession spark a wave of entrepreneurship, as some economists predicted?

Scott Shane, a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, says no.

“The Great Recession had a negative impact on US entrepreneurship,” writes Shane. “At the end of the recession, the US had fewer businesses and self-employed people than it had before the downturn began.”

From December 2007 through June of 2009, self-employment fell, many small businesses that employ others disappeared, and fewer employer businesses were born. Click here to read more from Shane.