FAST-FOOD EXPERIMENT IS EASY TO SWALLOW
AT least one person is having fun on Wall Street.
Keith (don’t call him Jarrod) Siegner, a financial analyst at Credit Suisse, is trying to prove that eating fast food for a month can actually be good for you.
To prove his point – and probably to score some brownie points with the companies he tracks – Siegner is dining only at quick service restaurants (as fast food chains are called on highbrow Wall Street) for all of April.
And he’s having Credit Suisse’s biotech team monitor his health.
“I’m not dead yet,” Siegner told me on the phone, a fact that I had already figured out because he was talking to me.
Siegner, who is naturally slim, is halfway through his experiment, hasn’t gained any weight and says his cholesterol, triglycerides and other such things are all still good.
Why’s he doing this?
“We decided to take on a serious research topic, obesity, but we wanted to package it in an interesting way. Research doesn’t have to read like a 10K,” Siegner said.
By the way, a 10K isn’t a new chicken item on the Burger King menu, it’s a filing companies have to make with the Securities & Exchange Commission.
Siegner said his little project – called Super Size Keith – also “improved dialogue with the managements of the companies we follow”
I bet. What fast food joint wouldn’t want a “buy” recommendation for its menu from a genuine 120/80 bp Wall Street guru?
Well, maybe Subway wouldn’t since Super Size Keith is a lot like that chain’s gimmick of fat guy Jarrod improbably losing weight by eating hero sandwiches.
What does Siegner’s typical daily menu look like? Monday, April 7: an Egg McMuffin, no cheese, no margarine; small OJ; half of Domino’s hand-tossed pizza with red peppers; 20 oz. Coke; McDonald’s southwest chicken salad, lite sesame ginger dressing and an apple pie.
What, no jellybeans?
Siegner says he’ll report his findings (or perhaps his next of kin will) even if the experiment goes array.
“I’ll publish (the results) and I’ll say my hypothesis was false,” he promises if things don’t work according to plan.
And Siegner swears he will not cheat – say, by just eating salads the last week if his blood work goes a little screwy.
(Note to readers: I put this item first in today’s column because business news has been so gloomy lately that I thought you and I both needed a break. Read on, and you’ll see that the break is over.)
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There was mostly bad news yesterday – housing starts slid to a 17-year low; JPMorgan profit declined 50 percent, the dollar dropped to a record against the euro, and on and on.
Yet the stock market managed to rise 256 points.
I’m not going to belabor the point, but this is another one of those options expiration weeks when professional traders typically take the Dow Jones industrial average to triple-digit gains.
It is amusing to see other commentators come up with stupid reasons for these unwarranted advances.
But I’d like my readers to know that whenever the market is gamed like this it can lead to bad things in the future.
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Wanna get annoyed?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics says food prices in March were just 4.5 percent higher than last year.
I guess everyone is just imagining these huge increases at the supermarket.
All told, the government thinks consumer prices were higher by a modest 0.3 percent in March over the previous month.
I’d like to know where these government statisticians shop.
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Likely Republican presidential candidate John McCain thinks killing the 18 cent a gallon federal gasoline tax for the summer will give a boost to the economy.
Our leaders – current and potential ones – understand so little.
The prices of gas, oil, eggs, milk, wheat and everything else are going up because of speculation in the financial market, not because of anything happening in the real world – although speculators love to spread fear about possible real world events.
Inventory of gasoline is more than adequate for the summer driving season. And demand for gas is down.
Kill the 18-cent a gallon tax and speculators will drive gasoline prices up by at least that much in no time.
Plus, the federal budget will be that much deeper in the hole.
I’ll say it again – as I have for the past two years – Washington needs to get commodities speculation under control.
Either raise the amount of their own money speculators need to put up, or take actions that cause these gambling SOBs to lose money.
What action? A fresh new energy policy for the US would be a good start.
As I’ve been saying, start by making gas/electric hybrid engines mandatory on a large percentage of new car models.
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Last summer I wrote a column on why the Federal Reserve couldn’t cut interest rates, explaining that such a move would destroy the value of the dollar, boost inflation and might even cause it to be harder to borrow money.
What I should have said was that the Fed shouldn’t cut rates for all those reasons.
Now, more than nine months later, the Central Bank has tried to make borrowing money cheaper and all those problems did ensue.
I hadn’t taken into account one thing when I wrote that column: that political pressure could cause the Fed to make inappropriate moves.
Now comes the backlash.
Famed economist Martin Feldstein said it best in The Wall Street Journal the other day: “It’s time for the Federal Reserve to stop reducing the federal funds rate, because the likely benefit is small compared with the potential damage.
This is not a small thing since Feldstein, a Harvard professor, is also the president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the group that decides whether the country is officially in a recession.
The Fed will meet later this month and the odds of another big rate cut are getting slimmer.