How long will it take the economy to recover?

To me, the analysis that rings most true is the one I heard on the Diane Rehm show (WAMU, Washington) last week by Stephen Roach, Chairman, Morgan Stanley Asia. He said what we all instinctively know. The global bubble was driven by the American Consumer, and now, for all intents and purposes, the AC is finished. It'll be a long time before this sorts itself out, says he. You can listen to the broadcast by clicking on his name above.

Vitamin D latest finding- flu and colds

Here is my update of findings on Vitamin D and health.
Latest comes from Massachusetts General Hospital, on protective effect of Vitamin D against colds and flu. Study isn't perfect, and trials are needed, but finding out your Vitamin D status and making sure you're in the comfortable normal range (>40) makes sense in any case.
For background on how Vitamin D works, see Scientific American's great article.
For more sources on Vitamin D against auto-immune diseases and cancer, see my Jan 1, 2009 posting.

Stimulus Watch -- will the projects make sense?

My highschool buddies circulated this great website that lists the projects submitted by Mayors across the country as "shovel ready" projects. Check out your city and state. Click on Stimulus Watch.

Make 2009 the Turnaround year..

No, not another blog about Larry Summers. Instead, today I'm offering a New Year present by sharing what I've learned about a key ingredient of your health.
You (yes, I mean YOU!) are probably deficient in Vitamin D, especially right now at the winter solstice, unless you live in Florida and go out in the sun regularly. (Congratulations on that, despite the decline in your home values. Your life expectancy, controlling for the things that can be controlled for, is a year or two longer than the rest of us.)
Some of you know that I had a not-so-good recovery from a hip replacement, which after much travel to the medical watering spots of the world (Johns Hopkins, Mayo) was found by our guys right here at Georgetown U Hospital to be due to mushy bone growth around the implant into my thigh. Not until about a year after the surgery did I have my vitamin D (25(OH)D) blood level tested, and sure enough, I was deficient enough to be counted as one of Oliver Twist's little workhouse friends. I was put on Rx megadoses of D, with great effect, enough to keep my cane in the back seat of my car, for use only when the ice gets bad..
Here I will not digress about the semi-scandal that is a medical care system which can allow a person's hip to be sawed off (sorry, it's that gruesome) without first checking his or her vitamin D status to see whether good bone re-growth can occur. Barak Obama will surely fix that, as soon as he returns from his Hawaiian sunbath. (Could that be why he's so smart? His mother bathed in the Hawaiian sun during her pregnancy?)
Back to giving you the tools for managing your health in 2009! The list of diseases in which vitamin D deficiency is implicated continues to grow, most of it published in high-quality journals, such as NEJM and JAMA
New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association:

• multiple sclerosis (lots of evidence)
• prostate cancer
• breast cancer
• TB
• influenza
• Type 1 Diabetes

If that list of diseases isn't enough for you, you can read a great review on Vitamin D -- semi understandable for us laymen -- by John Cannell and Bruce Hollis, "Use of Vitamin D in Clinical Practice" , which lays out current knowledge about how Vitamin D works, what's a good level, what kinds of actions can raise your Vitamin D levels, etc.

And, now for the best news! The Vitamin D Council (headed by Dr. Cannell) has announced the availability of an accurate mail-order test, so you don't have to lobby your internist to give you a Vitamin D test. They cost about $65, much cheaper than in doctor's office. Check into How to Find out your Vitamin D status.

Finally, if you want to hear it from a mainstream MD, this You-Tube Video by Joseph Prendergast, M.D. (UCSF) should do it!

And have a happy new year.

Seasonal Gifts from Doctor Bob

My oracle, Bobby P (U Del, Prof of Accting), has been sending me fun reads over the past month, and also fatherly advice.
Here is a fun & clickable viewing/reading list courtesy of Bob:

• The British comedy take on the meltdown -- from Bird and Fortune on YouTube. --really worth it.
• Michael Lewis (author of Liar's Poker) on how the whole CDO & CDS markets worked on the inside, in Politico.com
• Proof that the experts were not experts about the meltdown in USA Today. Bob quotes another Bob, the Marley,... "No experts...no cry."

Bob and other readers have sent additional very funny stuff, but some was dirty or I couldn't verify their sources on the web, & didn't want to inadvertently violate intellectual property rights. (Yes, lawyer Jeff, I DO listen to you!) Well, just one: What's the difference between an investment banker and a pigeon? The pigeon can still make a deposit on a Ferrari. Finally, in this season of peace and good will, I leave you with a few nuggets of fatherly advice delivered unto me by the good sage, Prof Paretta.

• "... avoid individual stock ownership and diversify through a low cost Indexed mutual fund like those offered by Vanguard - (S&P 500 fund, etc.)."
• "...the percentage of equities to fixed income investments should be 100 minus your age."
• "...remember Paretta's rule - In investing and war (and probably love too) the optimists suffer the largest casualties."
• "...be wary of expert opinions on what the market will do next unless they have a crystal ball that is still under a manufacturer's warranty."

So, until the end of the year, when I comment on comments, or until something new sticks in my craw, that's all folks.

The Lazy Girl's Guide to Cash Flow

Lazy about researching stocks you invest in? Me too, only worse. If I like the company name, or the product, or the industry (Yea, Solar!!! Go, baby, go!) I'll buy. I check out the stock's price history on yahoo, and maybe its price-earnings ratio and its dividend yield. If I have a couple of thou available and the stock price is cheap, I'll leap. This, as you can imagine, has led to some big embarassments, but never mind. Now, thanks to Bob Paretta (see previous post), I pledge that I will never ever ever buy a stock again without looking at the last three years' worth of net cash flow from operations (and in these times at the latest quarterly results, too). Turns out it's simple. Here's a step-by-step guide on how to do that.

1. Go to New York Times Business Page. In the right hand column, under the banner ad, is a section called "Markets.
2. In the box under "Get Quotes", enter the name or symbol of the company you want to look at, and press "go." Up comes a Times web page on your company.
3. Scroll down this page, and you will see, in the middle column, a heading called "Filings." Under this heading are the latest reports. 10-K is the most recent annual report. 10-Q is the latest quarterly report.
4. Click on the most recent 10-K report. This will automatically open up the report.
5. Go to Edit/"Find on this page" in the grey task bar on the top of the Internet Explorer window. Type in: "statement of cash flow" The cursor will take you to the first such mention in the document. Keep searching till you reach a table that shows the "consolidated statement of cash flows." Voila'! You've found it.
6. Just look at it -- 3 columns with the ins and outs of cash flows over the past 3 years. Relax, take a deep breath, maybe chant something like, "the 10-K is my friend." I guarantee that just looking at this table will help you make a decision about whether to buy or sell. (Whether it's a better decision is yours to find out. I certainly don't know.)

I'll let you know in an upcoming blog what I find out by doing this for Bank of America (symbol: BAC), and my home-town-upstate-NY love bug, Corning Class Works (GLW). Of course, Prof. Bob will be looking over my shoulder, I hope.

Looking at the Financials of Financial Institutions

I'm still burning over my stupidity in holding Wachovia stock through its long downward slide, while Professor Bob (Paretta, U Del) coulda done his cash flow analysis for me in time to make a difference, if only I'd been nicer to him. (See my post of Nov 3.) Now, P-Bob is playing Santa with backward looks at Lehman Bros and GE, the latter at my request.
For Lehman, the red flags were there for all the world to see in their 10-K filings. The sage Dr P. counsels me that "sometimes regulation is not enough, common sense has to play a role too. Even a Grandmother running a candy store would understand you can't remain in business if your reported income is positive and your cash flow is more than 10x negative." That's my problem! I'm a grandmother without a candy store!
Well, anyway, on to GE. This case, he says, is more complicated, cause it's a mixture of financial and non-financial operations. He says "quality of earnings" dipped but recovered, meaning that cash flow was better, relatively speaking. Dr. Bob told me to check GE's latest quarterly results for '08, (and he gave good directions on how to do this -- which I will share in my very next blog). I can report that for the 9 months ending Sept 08, cash flow was same as previous year's first 9 months, but net earnings dipped. Does that mean GE is just super-honest, letting its earnings fall but continuing to rake in the cash? Or is all this analysis of the distant past (i.e., anything before October '08) completely irrelevant to the future of a given stock? Please, Dr Bob! Help!