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You have to admire the front
Jan. 9th, 2009 07:43 amAn absolute top-notch piece of disingenuity from Alistair Darling yesterday. On Wednesday he had told the FT that a policy of "quantitative easing" was being considered. Unfortunately the whistle has been blown on this, and even the popular press has sussed that this means cranking up the printing presses. So, young Master Alistair hastened yesterday to say that the Treasury was looking at "a range of measures," but "nobody is talking about printing money".
Well, no, you aren't talking about it, you're talking about quantitative easing. That the latter is synonymous with the former means that you can do it without talking about it. The BBc, unfortunately, is not up to such subtleties of terminology, and fell for the government line, printing the headline "No plan to print money". Sorry, but that wasn't what Darling said at all.
Those of us stuck on long-term fixed rate mortgages might be temporarily spitting feathers, but there are a large number of people out there on trackers. Add that to the 25% cut in fuel prices in the past few months, and a hell of a lot of money has been pumped into the economy in the past few months (making, btw, the 2.5% cut in VAT even more laughable in its irrelevance). While those of us on fixed rates rein in our spending and wait for inflation to eliminate our debt (net result, one free house), those on interest-only trackers are better off today.
The first pushes of inflation look to me to be likely to appear around about August, when importers' hedges against currency movements will start to expire. Small-margin players such as Primark and other companies that import most of their products will have little choice but to raise prices. Areas where there is a shortage of labour and where the employees are being impacted by such rising prices, will see increases in wages far above "official" inflation.
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Played 90 minutes of three-tabling $400 buy-in last night and survived a pre-flop all-in where my Aces ran into Jacks (Flop 8J3, natch, with no escape on turn or river) without much emotional impact. Having more than $6K in the account certainly helps here. I then went more than $500 down after shortish-stack blind called my pre-flop raise. I had AK and he had K9o. Flop came K9x and he played it well to take me for a little more than $100. I will have to look at this not-uncommon situation. One could argue that he has made his mistake by putting in 10% of his money pre-flop, but this is closer than one might think. The obvious answer is to raise more pre-flop, but I'm fighting against this wimp-out tendency. As the saying goes, you can always avoid letting opponents in when you have AA by raising all-in. But you don't. However, if opponents are declining to make their mistakes post-flop, then you have to force them to make their mistake pre-flop.
Fortunately, most opponents, even at this level, seemed quite capable of making some poor post-flop plays. I also spotted some errors of my own that I tucked away for future reference, but the key takeaways for me are that stack sizes and "do I want my opponent to make a mistake now or later?" are the important factors. In addition (and this somewhat states the obvious), there are two extremes in games. If no hands ever reach a showdown, then hand strength is irrelevant. If all hands reach a showdown, then hand strength is all. All games fall between these two extremes, and the importance that you allocate to hand strength (rather than position, etc) depends on where between these two extremes the game is situated.
Note that, because short-stacks are more likely to result in showdowns, this increases the importance of hand strrength. By logical progression, this decreases the importance of position. As we already know, position becomes more important as stacks get deeper.
Anyhoo, I turned things around and got out for break-even. And it's always nicer to recover from a loss than to lose back your winnings!
________________
Well, no, you aren't talking about it, you're talking about quantitative easing. That the latter is synonymous with the former means that you can do it without talking about it. The BBc, unfortunately, is not up to such subtleties of terminology, and fell for the government line, printing the headline "No plan to print money". Sorry, but that wasn't what Darling said at all.
Those of us stuck on long-term fixed rate mortgages might be temporarily spitting feathers, but there are a large number of people out there on trackers. Add that to the 25% cut in fuel prices in the past few months, and a hell of a lot of money has been pumped into the economy in the past few months (making, btw, the 2.5% cut in VAT even more laughable in its irrelevance). While those of us on fixed rates rein in our spending and wait for inflation to eliminate our debt (net result, one free house), those on interest-only trackers are better off today.
The first pushes of inflation look to me to be likely to appear around about August, when importers' hedges against currency movements will start to expire. Small-margin players such as Primark and other companies that import most of their products will have little choice but to raise prices. Areas where there is a shortage of labour and where the employees are being impacted by such rising prices, will see increases in wages far above "official" inflation.
+++++++++
Played 90 minutes of three-tabling $400 buy-in last night and survived a pre-flop all-in where my Aces ran into Jacks (Flop 8J3, natch, with no escape on turn or river) without much emotional impact. Having more than $6K in the account certainly helps here. I then went more than $500 down after shortish-stack blind called my pre-flop raise. I had AK and he had K9o. Flop came K9x and he played it well to take me for a little more than $100. I will have to look at this not-uncommon situation. One could argue that he has made his mistake by putting in 10% of his money pre-flop, but this is closer than one might think. The obvious answer is to raise more pre-flop, but I'm fighting against this wimp-out tendency. As the saying goes, you can always avoid letting opponents in when you have AA by raising all-in. But you don't. However, if opponents are declining to make their mistakes post-flop, then you have to force them to make their mistake pre-flop.
Fortunately, most opponents, even at this level, seemed quite capable of making some poor post-flop plays. I also spotted some errors of my own that I tucked away for future reference, but the key takeaways for me are that stack sizes and "do I want my opponent to make a mistake now or later?" are the important factors. In addition (and this somewhat states the obvious), there are two extremes in games. If no hands ever reach a showdown, then hand strength is irrelevant. If all hands reach a showdown, then hand strength is all. All games fall between these two extremes, and the importance that you allocate to hand strength (rather than position, etc) depends on where between these two extremes the game is situated.
Note that, because short-stacks are more likely to result in showdowns, this increases the importance of hand strrength. By logical progression, this decreases the importance of position. As we already know, position becomes more important as stacks get deeper.
Anyhoo, I turned things around and got out for break-even. And it's always nicer to recover from a loss than to lose back your winnings!
________________
