John T. Reed’s news blog

I also keep hearing that G.H.W Bush was a great father, the world’s best father.   Bull! And I said the same about Romney.   How so? How would I know better than their own children?   If you pay close attention to the children of G.H.W. Bush or Romney, you will hear the profound contradiction. To be a good father, you must be present—duh Their fathers were often absent—REAL often and REAL absent. 100 hours a week and travel Romney and I are Harvard MBAs. After graduation in 1975, the year I entered, he worked for Boston Consulting Group,...

A reader below said NPV is the way to evaluate a stock, not P/E ratio..I will let my other readers decide—after I translate the terms into Plain english..NPV means net present value. I learned that in the CCIM course before I went to Harvard Business. We needed to understand it at Harvard to analyze some of our cases there. I felt sorry for my Harvard classmates who had no clue about time value of money (of which NPV is a subset—new MBA students there with no financial background have to attend a sort of pre-school on financial math and such...

In an 8-0 decision (before Kavanaugh was on the Court), the Supreme Court said Weyerhauser could provide additional information about why they should be allowed to harvest timber they own in Louisiana. Why is there any question about that?.Environmentalists claim such harvesting might call the extinction of the dusky gopher frog..The Endangered Species Act is one of the dumbest laws ever passed. It should be repealed. The environmentalists do not give a damn and about the environment or the dusky gopher frog. They are watermelons: green on the outside and red on the inside. All they care about is stopping big...

Rush is ecstatic that Trump is going to cut subsidies to GM to punish them for closing plants. Is he correct? 1. All government subsidies, mandates, tariffs, and sales taxes should be ended tomorrow by Constitutional amendment. 2. All taxes other than a head tax on each resident of the U.S. should be ended by Constitutional amendment, in other words, no corporation or other entity should have to pay taxes or even file tax returns. 3. Cutting subsidies to GM because they closed plants is likely to cause them to have to lay off additional people. 4. GM closing plants...

What do I think about the recent drops in the S&P 500 and the FAANG stocks?.I know nothing about short-term stock price movements. Neither does anyone else. Those who say they do are lying or, if they are sincere, mistaken..I like the logic of Ben Graham’s value approach based on fundamentals like return on equity and price/earnings ratio. But I hasten to add that Graham himself lost something like 60% of his stock equity during the Great Depression when he was investing according to his fundamental value theory..My belief is that sometimes the market is in a period of irrational exuberance,...