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That longtime “perma-bear” Jim Grant had turned bull late this summer was one of the year’s big surprises.

He wasn’t early to the rally by any means, but his public conversion didn’t “ring the bell at the top” as some had assumed.

In the latest NYMag, Hugo Lindgren has a nice profile of the newsletter author and economic philosopher. In it Grant reiterates his belief that the economy is basically a bouncing ball, which flies of the cement at roughly the same velocity it hit.

What makes Grant refreshing is his unwillingness to say how the recovery will work. Take, for example, the unemployment situation:

In a worrying climate of dying professions, it’s hard to get a grip on what takes their place. “Though we humans do our best,” he wrote, “we usually underestimate the capacity of market economies to reinvent the nature of work.” How exactly it will work this time, says Grant, we don’t know. We never know until after the fact.

Lindgren also captures another sub-story playing out, which is Grant’s failure to account for the big rally in the 80s, right after the economy was mired in a deep recession.

Over a quarter-century in which the economy mostly boomed, Grant stayed mostly gloomy. His view has been that the economy is a Frankenstein creation of cheap credit that drove up prices and instilled a false sense of prosperous stability.

At critical moments, such as the great collapse of the eighties boom, this analysis proved brave and useful, swelling Grant’s subscriber rolls and turning him into a star of sorts. But it also led to him advising caution and restraint as some of the most vigorous bull markets in history commenced. Indeed, the nineties was not kind to pessimists. “In this business,” he says, “everything is cyclical, including one’s evident IQ. One goes from genius to moron all too quickly. And so I went from being regarded as one of the brighter people on Wall Street to being, let’s see, a perma-bear, and there was truth in that. I wasn’t supple enough, wasn’t flexible enough. I was in love with our story, which had been so successful, and didn’t see the world change.”

Having made this mistake more than once, Grant is determined never to make it again.

Read more at New York Magazine  — >

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See Also:

• Jim Grant: Ben Bernanke Is Lucky He Hasn’t Been Hanged
• Jim Grant: Here Comes A ‘Zippy’ Recovery That Will Blow Away Expectations
• Jim Grant: It Will Be A V-Shaped Recovery

When you manufacture the best impact sockets in the industry, you also want full control over all critical production steps. Swedish Momento needed greater capacity and wanted to prepare production for future products. The first step toward a successful future included bigger facilities and a new press cell with an AP&T press.

The impact sockets used in the assembly industry, power industry or by your car mechanic are in all likelihood manufactured in Momento’s factory in Flen. The company was established in the early 1950s and manufactures impact sockets with a width across flats ranging from 3 to 300 millimeters. Memento knows what pros expect from a socket.
“When an assembly line in the automotive industry has to stop because a socket in a robot spindle is broken, it doesn’t take long to understand that product quality is a deciding factor for our customers,” says Momento production manager Torbjörn Lund.

Great demand
With increased demand for Momento sockets, production capacity soon reached its limits – even though production continued around the clock. Capacity had to increase for the company to be able to offer fast and reliable deliveries.
“In addition to standard sockets, we also manufacture special sockets with just a few weeks of lead time. That’s why we need security in the form of a little overcapacity,” explains Torbjörn Lund.
Momento also wanted the ability to form even larger impact sockets with the help of the heat pressing method the company uses for smaller sockets.

Heat pressing vital
An important benefit of the heat pressing, a type of forging method, is that the structure of the metal is maintained, which in turn generates a more durable socket. The solution was a completely new automated press cell with a hydraulic press from AP&T that is served by a six-axis robot with gripper. The blanks are heated in an induction oven and are fed into the press tool by a robot that also picks the hot socket out after forming.
“Heat pressing is the heart of socket production since this step is vital to the properties of the end product,” says Torbjörn Lund.

Power with precision
Heat pressing requires high press forces in combination with fine tolerances. The AP&T press has 630 tons of press force. Its combination of load-sensing hydraulics with servo hydraulics together with the other three hydraulic cylinders gives Momento the ability to achieve fine tolerances without complicated press tool solutions.

It is hard to believe that this time next week I’ll be on the way to Sin City to attend the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) 2010. It’s hard to guess what attendance will be like this year given the economy, but one thing for certain there will be gadgets everywhere. I believe there will be several hot mobile tech areas this year, and I note them here in no particular order.

Smartbooks. We saw a few smartbooks at the show last year, but it was clear they were not ready to take center stage. That will not be the case this year as I believe the smartbook will be the big mobile gadget at the show. We will see major OEMs launching smartbooks, and it is the space to keep an eye on while wandering the show aisles. We will likely see smartbooks of all shapes and sizes, and many will be ready for immediate sale. I expect to see at least 20 different models at the show, with each vying for attention. Smartbooks will be the netbook of 2010.

Phones. Android will be the focus in the phone world, which is not surprising. We should see Android phones with 2.x everywhere, and Android apps will be well represented at the show, too. We will see Android begin to spill over into other gadget forms, like tablets and notebooks. The processors that will drive the smartbook into the mainstream will be used to turn smartphones into little powerhouses, and we will see quite a few phones with sizzling capability at the show.

Netbooks. There will certainly be netbooks at the CES, but they will largely be more of the same as we’ve seen before. We will see some with better graphic-handling ability, but that will come at a price. I do believe we will see a few convertible netbooks with multitouch screens. Even the major OEMs are going to get into the swivel screen game, in an attempt to kindle excitement in this now old-school genre. I’m not sure if consumers will be willing to pay the extra price for touch on the otherwise cheap netbook.

e-Book Readers. This will be the second big area at the show. We will see readers all over the place, with single screens, double screens, e-Ink, Pixel QI, and other features I can only guess. They will be accompanied by announcements for content deals, as readers without books are just dead weight. We may see some readers announced by players that are surprising, as e-books are now hot items and this attracts new blood to the table.

Handheld Computers. I think we will see quite a few little computers of all shapes and sizes. There will be clamshell forms as small as 5-inches, and slates as large as 9 or 10. There will be gadgets that are Windows-based, and Android will be onboard others. Linux will be well represented on some of the gadgets, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see someone who has shoe-horned the developer version of the Google Chrome OS on one or two of them.

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Peace Adapts

By Mr. Fish

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Jay Leno recently got behind the much-anticipated 2011 Chevrolet Volt extended range electric vehicle and has now posted a video of his take on the upcoming vehicle that has everyone at GM so excited.

The best thing about Leno’s 13 minute video is that he asks Andrew Farah, Chief Engineer on the vehicle, almost every question that would concern an everyday Volt driver. Want to know whether your overall range will drop if you’re driving the Volt with the AC and radio on? Find out in the video posted after the jump.

Click here for more news on the Chevrolet Volt.

Hit the jump for the video.

2011 Chevrolet Volt:

2011 Chevrolet Volt:

– By: Kap Shah

Source: Jay Leno’s Garage

That was quick. We’re back in panic mode, according to Citi’s Panic Euphoria model.

Citi: Our Panic/Euphoria model declined into Panic territory last week after revising the data and remained in Panic this week. This week’s Panic/Euphoria reading was -0.28; last week’s number was revised to -0.24.

Whatever the term one wants to use for the current level of sentiment, if we compare the model to itself, then on a relative basis it remains far weaker than 2007. Weak readings are meant to be positive for stocks from a contrarian perspective and given this plus other factors Citi remains cautiously bullish.

Citi: Markets should benefit from a backdrop of earnings recovery first determined by the moderation of inventory de-stocking leading to some inventory re-stocking, a better (though still subdued) employment environment, and the consumption benefits of some restored wealth via higher financial markets. All of these dynamics should bolster equities initially, especially if money flows begin to chase returns as has often been the case in the past. We believe gains in 2010 are likely to be uneven and the S&P 500 could spike above 1,200 during earlier parts of the year and then back off.

(Via Citi Investment Research, ‘The Pulse Monitor’, Tobias Levkovich, 28 December 2009)

Join the conversation about this story »

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Right Wing Renews Calls For Profiling: ?There Should Be A Separate Line To Scrutinize Anybody With The Name Abdul?
The right wing’s predictable policy prescription in the aftermath of any terror incident is to impose greater ethnic profiling of Muslims. For instance, following the Ft. Hood shooting, Sarah Palin said, “profile away.” After six imams were removed from a plane in Minnesota in 2006, Ann Coulter justified profiling Muslims by arguing that it’s just […]

The right wing’s predictable policy prescription in the aftermath of any terror incident is to impose greater ethnic profiling of Muslims. For instance, following the Ft. Hood shooting, Sarah Palin said, “profile away.” After six imams were removed from a plane in Minnesota in 2006, Ann Coulter justified profiling Muslims by arguing that it’s just like “profiling the Klan.” That same year, after British authorities revealed a terrorist plot to blow up planes headed to the U.S., right-wing radio host Mike Gallagher said, “It’s time to have a Muslims check-point line” at airports.

They’re at it again. In the wake of the failed terrorist attempt aboard a Northwest airlines flight on Christmas Day, the right wing is renewing its pleas for more profiling of Muslims:

Radio host Mike Gallagher: “There should be a separate line to scrutinize anybody with the name Abdul or Ahmed or Mohammed.” (Note: Those are some of the most common names in the world.)

Rep. Peter King (R-NY): “100 percent of the Islamic terrorists are Muslim, and that is our main enemy today. So why we should not be profiling people because of their religion?”

Terrorism pundit Steven Emerson: “Remember, there have been so many complaints about quote, profiling, by the quote, Islamic civil rights groups, that they stopped basically profiling. And that basically led to not putting this guy onto the terrorist watch list.“

Unsurprisingly, Fox News has served as the platform for right-wing voices calling for more profiling. Watch a compilation:

Broad-based ethnic profiling is counterproductive for a host of reasons. It creates a false sense of security and causes law enforcement resources to be wasted in chasing the wrong targets. Terrorists come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. John Walker Lindh was white, while Richard Reid was Jamaican and British. As the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights has reported:

Terrorism profiling is a crude substitute for behavior-based enforcement. It violates core American values, including the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. It also hinders anti-terrorism efforts because it alienates people and communities that are critical to the success of the anti-terrorism effort.

Non-specific profiling of certain religions or races amounts to a witch-hunt against a class of people, creating the perception among the larger society that those individuals containing certain suspect features (skin color, foreign-sounding names, foreign-language skills, etc) are to be feared.

Yesterday, two Middle Eastern men were pulled off a flight heading to Phoenix because passengers reported they were engaging in suspicious behavior. The men were speaking in a Middle Eastern language. And on a Detroit-bound flight yesterday, a Nigerian businessman was taken off an airplane because passengers became suspicious that he was lingering in the bathroom for too long. The FBI confirmed that the individual’s behavior was due to a legitimate illness.

This past year I’ve had the chance to explore some exciting new territory. I’ve taken creative risks inside and outside the kitchen with some admittedly mixed – but rewarding – results. So, in choosing my favorite posts for 2009 at The Kitchn, I found myself drawn to those with an adventurous, expansive spirit. Here are 15 that have had a special resonance for me:

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