Balta1701

QUOTE (Tony82087 @ Mar 9, 2009 -> 10:30 AM) Williams deserves a lot of credit right now. As you say, every day more and more it seems like this team is going to compete for a division crown in 2009, while at the same time Williams has started to re-build the farm with high end players like Beckham, Poreda, Viciedo, Allen,Flowers, Shelby, and Danks. Along with that, the influx of Danks-Floyd-Quentin-Alexei has made the current major league core something to get excited about. On top of it all, there isn't a long term deal on the books right now that is really hurting the franchise. Pretty nice spot to be. And we're holding 4 picks in the first 2 rounds this year. And we've got a couple guys who have their contracts up at the end of this year who we might legitimately be able to offer arbitration to if they have solid years (Colon) to add more next year.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Mar 9, 2009 -> 10:04 AM) It makes a big difference, because it is the write downs that are killing the banks right now. If they weren't writing down assets, we wouldn't have a probelm. Even if they aren't what you judge them to be, they are murdering the capital ratios of banks and making money just disappear from the system. Speaking as someone who actually deals with securities valuations on an everyday basis, its also worth noting that just because there isn't someone who is willing to pay a price for something, doesn't mean that is not what they are worth. Exchanges give valuations to all kinds of things all of the time which aren't based on trades. Heck I would estimate something like 95% of all exchanged based options contracts are settled on a nominal value, and not a traded actual value at the end of the day. Valuing these securities at something other than a traded price is the overwealming common practice. But is it not true that the thing that is forcing the banks to write down these assets is the fact that they're losing money on the investment in the first place? You and I both seem to be agreeing that the mortgage and other debt-backed assets are simply worth less than what the banks are accounting them as right now, as you said, no one will buy up something if they think they'll lose money on the deal. You seem to be taking a position that makes no sense to me; these things are worth less than the banks are saying they're worth, so we should allow the banks to pretend they're worth even more so that the banks don't have to take the write-downs, thus improving the condition of the banks' books. The only way that allowing the banks to pretend these assets are worth even more will help is if the assets really aren't as bad as everyone thinks they are. I don't know if I need to point out the numbers again but I'll do so. 1/5 of American homeowners are now under water, at the point where they owe more on their mortgage than their home is worth. 1/8 homeowners are either behind on their mortgage or are somewhere in the foreclosure process. And the Housing Market still has a ways to go. I posted the other day that AAA rated assets made up of mortgage backed securities from 2006 and 2007 were returning $.05 on a $1 investment. These assets are simply garbage. There is no other way around it. There's a reason why these assets are treated by everyone other than the Fed as worth less than what the books of the banks say they're worth. Because they're already bad, there's every reason to believe they're going to get worse, and no one wants to be the one caught holding them when the free money trains from the government run out.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Mar 9, 2009 -> 09:49 AM) No one is buying this s*** because they have no confidence in the system. The response by both administrations has been a clusterf*** of enormus proportions that has show no one enough confidence in the system to where they feel that a bottom has been put in in asset valuations. This doesn't just mean the stock market, but all of the assets backing all of these securities. Why would you buy something that you are pretty convinced will be worth less tomorrow than it is today? The answer is, you don't. You wait until you are pretty convinced that the bottom has been put in, even if this means missing the absolute lows of valuations. This is the exact type of reason I keep going back to the market being scared of the current President. He has yet to be able to convince the people who employ people in this country that their business will be safe and sound tomorrow. I heard Mort Zuckerman on Meet the Press say it best yesterday. To paraphrase he said the President while popular, isn't very inspirational. I'm pretty sure this is my point exactly. The problem is that these assets are worth significantly less in the long term than what the Banks are accounting them as worth today, and everyone knows it. Hence, repealing Mark to Market, allowing the banks to pretend they're somehow worth even more, isn't going to make a bit of difference except perhaps to kill off any bank that's run by anyone stupider than the people running C and BOFA.

Red Sox give Lester 5 years, $30 million, $13 million option for 2014. Not sure exactly but based on a little bit of Googling I think they directly bought out 1 year of FA from him and have an option on his 2nd year. Possibly setting the market for Floyd/Danks?

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Mar 9, 2009 -> 09:41 AM) This pitching staff is dangerous if the two of them are healthy. With Marquez looking good, and Poreda sliding in to the 7th starter/2nd backup option where he ought to be, this pitching staff is dangerous even if only 1 of them is healthy at a time.

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Mar 9, 2009 -> 09:31 AM) Balta, either your missing a piece of the puzzle or I'm missing your point, because if these assets are worth more then "nothing" then why would the banks go insolvent? They have already written down the value because of mark to market accounting rules. But not entirely... that's the catch here, which is very complicated to explain. I need to go get my 201K taken care of... and a couple of other errands. Because the assets are worth far less to everyone except the Federal Reserve than what they've been written down to, and there are other assets that probably haven't been written down yet at all (credit card debt, commercial real estate holdings). That's why I'm saying that the problem isn't mark-to-market. The balance sheets of BOFA, C, etc., have so much of this bad debt on them that if they wrote them down all the way to where they need to be, the banks would be closed. It's only these accounting games where they can dump piles of the stuff on to the Fed/Treasury and delay the write-downs in the hope that things recover that has kept them from going in to the red. Edit: Just look at the signals from the market if you don't believe me. If these assets were worth so much more than the nearly-zero returns they're generating currently, then people would be trying to scoop them up at bargain rates. They're not. If these assets were worth so much, then someone other than the federal reserve would be interested in buying them at the discount rate. If these assets were in the long run going to be worth more rather than less, then why is Citibank's stock worth what I pay for lunch over 2 days despite having $50 billion in guarantees from the Treasury? It's because no one else out there wants this stuff, and no one believes it's worth enough for these banks to be viable unless they can dump even more on to the government.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Mar 9, 2009 -> 09:13 AM) They are not all worthless. In fact most have at least some value. The problem is...if they actually were treated as having a reasonable amount of value given the implosion of an $8 trillion housing bubble, that's enough to make the banks insolvent. Which is why no one wants to buy them in the first place. If they were actually treated as having a reasonable amount of value given the returns they're generating, the big banks go down.

QUOTE (Melissa1334 @ Mar 9, 2009 -> 08:47 AM) hes really good, great, but i dont put him in the same category as others , like pujols >someone brought this up yest, is there any way this could happen?: SS - Beckham 2B - Getz CF - Alexei Getz hasn't exactly shined yet this spring either. Yesterday was his first decent game, he's currently 5/18 on the spring.

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Mar 9, 2009 -> 07:53 AM) That's part of it. I think the makers of the market is why we have the nuclear holocost right now. So, just to see if I get what you're saying, you're saying that the problem is not that these assets which are returning $.05 on the dollar are worthless, the problem is that people are under-valuing them? (Assuming you meant Markers nad not makers. I'd agree it's the Makers of the market, not the markers of the market). Who are you, Timothy Geithner? Ben Bernanke? The argument I'd make is that right now, no one wants anything to do with these assets. Given that we're actually seeing the returns people are getting on them and the AAA rated stuff is coming back with a return of $.05 on the dollar, no one is going to want anything to do with them, so they should be worthless. The only reason they're not worthless is that there's a crazy bearded man out there who's realized that if they're actually accounted for as worthless then there's nothing left to do but have the government seize the banks, and so he's used his considerable power to give somewhere over $2 trillion in loans to the same banks using those worthless securities as collateral, thus, they have value greater than zero only because the Federal Reserve has gotten in to the game. This is of course why every one of these Geithner/Paulson TARP type bailout proposals keeps failing to gain traction. They're all based on the idea that these assets are worth more than the market would pay for them right now and we only need to wait things out until the next housing bubble starts for everyone to realize it. But, no one except the people running the Fed and the Treasury think that's actually going to happen.

Ervin Santana will start the season on the DL with elbow problems. No one seems to know yet how bad it actually is, he wasn't supposed to be out that long.

QUOTE (jenks45monster @ Mar 8, 2009 -> 03:22 PM) Does it just have to be after the first game of the season or is there a certain time period? There is a certain time period. You need to be up for a large enough fraction of the year for it to count. The date IIRC is usually sometime around June 1. Re: Becks starting this season at 2b: am I the only one who noticed that he was hitting .231 coming in to today? Yes, he had a day today, but come on.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Mar 8, 2009 -> 08:30 AM) You'll see the financial bounce back quicker with this change than any other I have heard talked about so far. If any of the banks were actually accounting these mortgage-backed securities for the zero dollars they could get for them on the market right now, they'd already be insolvent. The only think keeping their books out of the red is that they're already doing that.

QUOTE (SoxFan562004 @ Mar 7, 2009 -> 05:03 PM) That and a lot of the Sox current heavy contracts are gone after this year, so the Sox would just have to eat it for a year and be back at square one after the season where the Tigers have alot of money sticking around. Man, Fukudome helped the Sox dodge a major bullet by taking the Cubs offer And Torii Hunter.

Rachel Maddow with some excellently deserved scorn for the "Hoover wasn't even this dumb" spending freeze proposal. .msnbcLinks {font-size:11px; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #999; margin-top: 5px; background: transparent; text-align: center; width: 425px;} .msnbcLinks a {text-decoration:none !important; border-bottom: 1px dotted #999 !important; font-weight:normal !important; height: 13px;} .msnbcLinks a:link, .msnbcLinks a:visited {color: #5799db !important;} .msnbcLinks a:hover, .msnbcLinks a:active {color:#CC0000 !important;} Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Mar 7, 2009 -> 04:38 PM) If they get off to a bad start they are in trouble. Than again, you could say that about the Sox if they have an awful season. Chicago doesn't have nearly the economic collapse worries that Detroit currently does.

The frightening thing is...there's probably more to their reasoning than wins. TO is going to sell tickets in a place that is trying to fall apart economically so much that their football team winds up in L.A. Worst thing that happens is he puts paying customers in the chairs. TO keeping the franchise in Buffalo. Yowza.

Because if there's any coach who can keep Owens in line, it's...Dick Jauron?

QUOTE (daa84 @ Mar 7, 2009 -> 01:21 PM) nunez in to pitch Sweet, would be nice for him to keep going. He's got a reasonable shot at that 7th bullpen slot so far.

Gosh, they really took Wise out early today.

QUOTE (flavum @ Mar 7, 2009 -> 01:05 PM) God love Kenny Williams, but that trade and extension of MacDougal is right up there as his worst move as GM. The trade for MacDougal on paper wasn't a bad one. The top guy we gave up hasn't amounted to anything, and we got a solid 2nd half of 2006 out of him (25 innings, 1.80 ERA, 1.00 WHIP). In a playoff chase, that's hard to complain about. Even if the guy blows up afterwards, if you're making a playoff run and you get a guy who gives you those numbers, it's not a bad move. The extension is the part that has blown up.

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Mar 7, 2009 -> 12:49 PM) However, the CF situation seemingly is getting worse by the day. It can't be DeWayne Wise, can it? I just hope KW doesn't make some sort of desperation move like Juan Pierre. Really, right now, if Kroeger can handle CF (he really needs some games there) then he's got to be the frontrunner on all accounts right now. A Kroeger/Anderson platoon/defensive replacement setup would be something we could probably handle, especially if the last bench spot went to Lillibridge, who also hasn't had a lot of time yet but hasn't looked bad. In other words, right now, my bench/2b/CF is: 2b: Nix CF: Kroeger Bench: Betemit, Anderson, Lillibridge, backup Catcher.

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Mar 7, 2009 -> 12:33 PM) The Rangers' announcers were very complimentary to Viciedo. Said that was as long a throw as you can make, and that his reactions were "quick" down there. He also made a nice throw to end the inning with the forceout at 2B. It's amazing how much more exciting it is when Beckham, Viciedo, Flowers, Nix, Kroeger, Jordan Danks, etc., are in the line-up instead of our "normal" somewhat boring line-up. I guess we have Getz and Viciedo, but Torres isn't the kind of hitter you stand around and watch in BP either. Fields is tearing it up this spring. No excitement for him?

Excellent lines:

QUOTE (whitesoxfan101 @ Mar 7, 2009 -> 06:13 AM) I took a quick look at this and can confirm it, as Noah has 150 rebounds since February 1st (and that includes a 1 rebound game to start the stretch on February 3rd against Houston), a span of 15 games. Good to see him hitting the glass, and it was good to see the Bulls playing well last night. This summer, someone needs to take Noah's weed, go to the weight room, figure out what amount Noah is doing on various machines and hide his weed under an extra 20 lbs, so that he has to actually work hard in the summer to earn his weed (and not come to camp out of shape where it takes him 2 months to get his body back). If Towlie can learn that lesson, I think Noah can.

QUOTE (Cubano @ Mar 6, 2009 -> 05:17 PM) Certainly, Viciedo does not have a place with the Yanks. Maybe, in Boston with Lowel in his way out soon. I think he will be a free agent soon, but I am not sure plus Boston wants to get rid of him. How about signing for less with other team for a chance to be in the MLB roster for that team? I do not know how many teams and how much those teams offered for sure. Anyways, let see what happens. I do not think Viciedo is the next Baby Ruth. I will never make those projections. Lowell is signed through the end of 2010 for $12 million a year, and Boston already has a DH who tends to be pretty good, so Lowell would have to be ridiculously bad for them to not play him. He's not going anywhere other than to the DL for the next 2 years.