Professor Elam

Prof Elam Weekly Newspaper Column

The State of Andrews’  Mind

Andrews Texas, indeed the Permian Basin, does not change very much.  The same street map that worked when I was in high school will basically get you around even Midland or Odessa today. The social mood of  the Andrews population or the collective state of mind however changes drastically, and in short periods of time.

Consider the real estate expansion in Andrews. Northwest 12-14^th streets were built in the relative boom of the 1960s. Indeed the fall of 1965 saw the Billionth Barrel celebration in Andrews, The Oak Ridge Boys  appeared in person at the football stadium gala. Confidence was high and money was spent on what was then  more luxurious homes. Things started downhill by the end of the 1960s but an oil embargo considerably improved the collective state of mind.  Houses were in short supply.  The price of my modest home on NW 11^th doubled in three short years. We tend to apply Newton’s Theory of motion to social trends. In short we assume that an economic boom will stay in place and continue. And as Newton observed, it does until it meets that equal force in the opposite direction. The Second Oil Embargo in 1979 really improved the state of mind. That is when the subdivision north of Mustang Drive, separated by a brick wall no less, got going. Significantly, many of those homes were built after the price of oil peaked in 1981. While folks may wax nostalgic about that time, the truth is that the price of oil never went double digit until after the second embargo. It then soared from $10 to $36 in two short years! 

The resulting crash in oil prices saw a derivative collapse in housing prices by the late 1980s.

Well here we go again. Some 12,000 people left the Permian Basin in a three month period in 1998.  Oil plummeted to $12.   Oil rose to $80 by 2006 and fell to just $50 by January or 2007, just two years ago!  (Yes it did, I just looked it up).  Readers may find that hard to believe. But history repeats itself.  Oil then soared form $50 to $150 in eighteen short months.  That is when this column began to warn of an oil price bubble.  Not surprisingly  no one sent me an e mail nor did I get any invitations to speak on the topic last summer.  Ahem.

Now oil is a mere ten dollars less at around $40 than it was in January of 2007!  Yet the collective conscious of Andrews and indeed America has proclaimed how can this be?  Indeed, even the  media seems to be linking cheap oil with reduced demand, and a therefore very weak economy.

 

Can all the King’s horses and all the King’s men put Humpty Dumpty back together again?  There is no record of government ever doing such a thing. Instead the collective mood of the public, whether in  Andrews or America or indeed the world has to improve. 

Will the same houses be around in Andrews in another ten years or even ten months? Will there still be Devonian reserves below the ground? Yes to all the above.  Now the collective mind set is to watch daily prices. This is the difference between a daily look in the mirror and a glance at your high school yearbook, whoops. Step back from the daily prices, and the yearbook for that matter.

The trick to being a successful investor/trader is to go against the collective mind set at market tops and bottoms.  There is no money to be made fighting the tape while the trend is up or down, instead, enjoy the ride.  If your time frame is that Billionth Barrel Celebration in 1965, we are just minutes from some sort of meaningful bottom in prices. But if your time frame is merely day to day, this can be a scary time.

January and February oil futures have traded in the mid $30 range, not for long however. And that may be the case for the next couple of months. After all, that was the price Andrews ‘enjoyed’ in 2003, you know, when the collective conscious and expectations were still on the way up.

Dennis Elam teaches at Texas A & M San Antonio and can be reached at [email protected].

 

More Caroline Kennedy

It is impossible to post articles about wannabe or real politicians without having some with obvious opinion. The current Illinois Senator versus NY Senator controversy is such an issue but I think will make for an interesting discussion. Here Brent Bozell compares things said about Caroline Kennedy versus things said about Sarah Palin. THis raises the ethical issues of bias and point of view.

ONe of my favorite cut thru the clutter commentators is John Stossel.  John points out that Caroline is as qualified as anyone else, maybe more so in that Senators usually comment on things they have no expertise at, spend other people's money, and have to look good on tv.  

Walter Williams on the Effective Classroom

Walter Williams and Tom Sowell are two fo my favories. IN this columnh Prof Williams lays out his rules for running an effective class. He also mentions several fallacies that foks can engage in, such as assuming if this then that. For example, every day we hear the media assume some outside factor acted upon the collective conscious causing markets to move one way or the other.  For example, investors snapped up stock bargains...while just yesterday those same investors were selling them as fast as they could. We will be discussing multiple points of view in the Ethics class, reading this column is a good start on keeping our perspective.

Sure enough I found a great, as usual, Tom Sowell column and linked it too, read what he says about politicians promising the impossible. 

Madoff Again

Outliers - Patterning Success

Tom Sowell reviews the new book Outliers, calling it one of the best of 2008. That alone qualifies it for our consideration.  The book examines how individuals achieve outstanding success. Some are the result of a particular selection process. But others are a result of commitment.

I have watched students, both when I was there as a student, across years of CPA practice, and now that I am on the other side of the desk so to speak. I recall one of my friends who 'said' he wanted to become a CPA, I replied he needed to study the Gleim review book and pointed to mine. He grabbed it assuming I would loan it to him. No way I replied, it was too important to me even after I had passed the exam. I noted that it only cost $15 and if he was not even $15 interested, he would not pass anyway. I doubt he bought the book and I know he never passed. He did have a littany of excuses after taking the Becker review course as to why he did not pass.

My point here is that you are at a crossroads in your academic career. To succeed, attain a professional designation, you will need to commit to a goal. Commitment means that you must align your life to a pattern for success. This means your whole family has to commit. You will need much more time to study than anyone in your family realizes. You will need a quiet organized place to do so. You will need multiple hours per day of study. In short you need to make a short term sacrifice to reach a long term goal.

Michael Phelps practiced swimming every day for years and years.  He won a race at the Olympics because he did not look up at the end, his opponent did.  such is the difference betweeen number one and number two.

You will only be with us for four semesters and that is what I mean by making a short term sacrifice to achieve a long term goal. For example, I am not sure how the Dallas Cowboys managed to play so badly against the Philly Eagles this past sunday, losing 44-6. The actual game was worse than the score suggests. Half of the Eagles scores were due to Dallas fumbles errors and turnovers. My point being Philly did not make those kinds of mistakes when it mattered.

Plan on making a short term commitment to attain a long term goal, now.

US Collapse Within Two Years - Igor Panarin

Igor Panarin predicts the US will collapse within two years and break into six regions.  China will be come the new finance superpower and Russia will rule Eurasia.

No kidding, click and read the article, better yet, Google Panarin

I think we have a bit longer than this but I do not know how much longer, the US Dollar is a fiat currency and we are printing bonds and dollars like crazy, the first sign will be when the US has to start paying more to borrow money.

Contemporary Liars

There is no shortage of ethical failures as I put the ethics syllabus together.

One Herman Rosenblat concocted Angel at the Fence, supposedly a story of how he met his wife at a concentration camp. Oprah hailed it as a great love story, only problem it is not true.  Herman says he just wanted to write a great story, well Herman file it under fiction.

James Frey managed to do the same thing with A Million Little Pieces. DIfferent story but his suposed story of drug addiciton and redemption was not true either. Another Oprah Book of the Month Hoax. BUt Opray is not alone in being short of fact checkers.

Lena Guerrero claimed to have been the daughter of migrant workers, a Phi Beta Kappa UT grad which led then Gov Anne Richards to appoint her to the Tx RR Commission. But alas she was none of those things. SHe resigned after it came to public notice.  HOw did such an incident pass the governor's fact checking group?

Alex Haley became quite the cause celeb with his supposed historic novel, Roots. Made into a television mini series it was watched by millions of people. But it turns out that Alex simply turned the facts to fiction to fit a great story and copied the plot of another novel.

This is why professional auditors are cautioned to use professional skepticism. This does not mean about meaningless detail but about the big picture which is how the Bernie Madoff's manage to fool everyone. THey get the details right, and then seemingly no one asks the question, but does the king have new clothes?

Well Um You Know, It's Caroline Kennedy

We have a class in business communications, thanks for Helen King for that!  Read this excerpt from Caroline Kennedy to grasp why this is so important.  Her speech is punctuated with uhs and ya knows. ONe reporter yesterday on television observed that Caroline would never have gotten into Harvard if she had not been a Kennedy, ouch! Our aim is to prepare you for interviews and appearances so this does not happen to you.

King Tut versus Twilight

THE Dallas Art Museum had high hopes for its exhibit of King Tut, the gold statutes, et all from 1300 BC Egypt.  It planned on about one million guests based on how the exhibit did in Chicago and LA. Guess what, attendance is not as expected. If you log on to the museum site, one has to buy tickets at $56 a couple and that is M-Thursday, Fri-Sun twenty bucks higher, for half hour increments during the day. Apparently the museum assumed it would be standing in line crowds. This has my wife wondering if the exhibit tour is only a half hour long, not a bad question.

Hope fades to fear, now the museum is hoping people coming to the Cowboy game might attend, are they smoking something here or what? The exhibit runs until May and estimates are now scaled back to 800,000.  The reason all this matters is that the museum has purchased the exhibit for a fixed cost not a percent of the gate whatever that turns out to be. The slowdown in the economy is blamed for the problem.

Perhaps you thought I was kidding on my description of socionomics and the American fascination with vampires. IN the same Dallas paper, it is reported that Stephanie Meyers Twilight series has now sold over 7 million copies, and of course the movie is a smash hit, HBO has another with the Sookie series entitled True Blood. P T Barnum said one can never go wrong underestimating the taste of the public, or something like that,

If Angelina Jolie were autographing a book at the Museum would that help, of course it would.  And it may be that scheduling events like that would rescue the Tut show. It was no accident that Obama scheduled voter registration drives before and after rock concerts, you gotta go where they go.

The Black Swan book mentions the importance of the outlier, the unexpected event. While this happened to the Tut exhibit, I will bet the Cowboy playoff game, like the Twilight series, is a sellout today. Failing to anticipate a change in the economy was one problem for the Museum. The second was assuming the public would have the same yearning for culture exhibits that the Museum Board possesses.

We will be discussing Point of View in Ethics class, an all important consideration in estimating what the public is liable to do.

Economic Circling the Wagons Begins

Pat Buchanan like Ross Perot vigorously opposed NAFTA saying it would lead to a loss of jobs here. Now he notes that countries around the world are growing more protectionist.   And that incldes the 11th hour save of GM and GMAC.  THe Smoot Hawley tariffs passed in the 1930s slowed round the world trade.  Actually the real problem now is more the distrust of the intl banking system that has commodities on ships in harbors around the world Buyers and sellers are wary of letters of credit from various banks, will they  get paid?  This hesitancy in itself has brought on a trade slow down and a commodity price collapse.

No less an observer than Ann Richards said that we would not get rich flipping one another hamburgers and washing one another's hair.  Indeed, consider the difference between say a computer game and an automobile.

Automobiles require design, huge plants to manufacture, spawn lots of sub contractors to supply parts, foster an after market of sales and service, and finally a giant re cycling market in the form of salvage and metal yards. Just this week I purchased a $185 a/c hose for my 2003 escape. My point being, no one buys a $185 hose for their computer game or five year old cell phone, the original product keeps producing economic wealth for all involved. Computer games by contrast provide or have their whole product life cycle exhausted in about a year. not much re cycling there. This is precisely why countries that move from agriculture where the product is quickly consumed to manufacturing grow wealthy. This is what lifted America our of the depression.Since America emerged from the war without invasion, it stood as a manufacturing giant in the world. That started to change in  1970. The Jpanese came to dominate electronics, motorcycles, and later autos. And that is why we study managerial accounting.