A new Health Food?

This Runner's World article confirms what Gopher Girl learned long ago: Peanut butter is the perfect food. "Peanut butter-yes, that sticky companion to jelly on all those sandwiches your mom made-just might be the best runner's food on the planet."

Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter

This website is devoted to tracking the mortgage finance meltdown. Is this guy nothing more than a tool of the shorts? He might be, but it's still a good read with lots of good information.

The New Tycoons

This thought-provoking NY Times article exposes the 21st century robber barrons: “…[S]tarting in the late 1970s, as the constraints receded, new tycoons gradually emerged, and now their concentrated wealth has made the early years of the 21st century truly another Gilded Age. Only twice before over the last century has 5 percent of the national income gone to families in the upper one-one-hundredth of a percent of the income distribution — currently, the almost 15,000 families with incomes of $9.5 million or more a year, according to an analysis of tax returns by the economists Emmanuel Saez at the University of California, Berkeley and Thomas Piketty at the Paris School of Economics. Such concentration at the very top occurred in 1915 and 1916, as the Gilded Age was ending, and again briefly in the late 1920s, before the stock market crash. Now it is back…”

No One Likes a Neglected Blog...

And for that, I apologize. The good news is that Pat Neshek's nomination for the AL All-Star team motivated me to get off the couch and on to the computer. Click here to vote, and vote, and vote, and vote...for Pat.

Email Overload

Apparently, Gopher Girl is not the only person for whom a clogged electronic inbox has become a bane. According to the Washington Post, a blogger and venture capitalist’s last month in declaring email bankruptcy could be the start of a new trend: “The supposed convenience of electronic mail, like so many other innovations of technology, has become too much for some people. Swamped by an unmanageable number of messages -- the volume of e-mail traffic has nearly doubled in the past two years, according to research firm DYS Analytics -- and plagued by annoying spam and viruses, some users are saying "Enough!" Those declaring bankruptcy are swearing off e-mail entirely or, more commonly, deleting all old messages and starting fresh.”

China + Private Equity

A few of my favorite things (NOT.) According to the Wall Street Journal, the Chinese government has decided to enter the private equity bubble, which it is largely responsible for creating. "The key thing to take away from the Chinese government's plan to take a $3 billion stake in private-equity firm Blackstone Group: If you're paying for the fuel, you might as well get some of the heat. China's huge trade surplus with the U.S. and other countries has given it plenty of cash -- and a problem figuring out what to do with it. Because China lets its currency, the yuan, fluctuate only in a narrow band against a basket of foreign currencies, it can't easily convert all the money it makes overseas into yuan; to do so would send the yuan higher. So China has been sticking its money into overseas assets... The 10-year Treasury note yields just 4.79%, less than the rate of 5.25% that the Federal Reserve has set on overnight bank loans. Mortgage-backed securities and agencies don't yield much more. A key factor behind those low yields has been that Chinese demand has kept prices propped up. (Prices and yields move in opposite directions.) Those low yields are part of what has driven demand for riskier investments such as junk bonds, emerging-market debt and, yes, private-equity firms. That's driven up prices and driven down yields on these securities, making it cheaper for private-equity firms to borrow and invest."

More on China

The news about tainted imported goods from China just keeps getting scarier and scarier.