Last night my wife and I went out to a movie for the first time in a long time.  We brought Grandma over to look over little Squeebles, and mom and dad went out on town.

We went to see The Blind Side, which I highly recommend.  The underlying story is of a well-off couple with two kids who take “Big Mike” (a teenage kid from the “other side of town” with only the clothes on his body) under their wing, buy him clothes, send them to school, and he ends up getting a scholarship to play football at Old Miss.

I’m not much of a movie critic, and the the previous paragraph doesn’t do the storyline justice.  I recommend seeing it for yourself.

A long time ago I wrote about how I paid good money (and a lot of it) for a bottle of water, when there was a water fountain right next to the concession counter.

Well, I failed in frugality once again.

Last night I paid $8 for a “large” bag of popcorn.  I admit it, guilty.

I can’t believe I did that, but popcorn sounded really good at the time, and I figured we’d split it, which we did.

There’s no way that bag of popcorn was worth $8.  But I paid for it anyway, and apparently by the looks of the line at the counter, other people did too.  I suppose a product is worth what people will pay for it, but for something as cheap and easy as popcorn, it strikes me that so many people are willing to pay for it.

I was only slightly vindicated by putting $4 worth of free fake butter and salt on the popcorn.  If I’m gonna overpay for popcorn, I’m gonna load it up with all the free stuff I can.  Arteries be damned.

Finance, Life frugality, popcorn, theater prices

This is just the beginning I suspect.  The rate for emergency loans from the Fed went up to 0.75% today, up from 0.5%.  It’s really a trivial move, but it signals far much more than just a quarter point increase in rates.

This is the beginning.

Readers of this space know that I feel interest rates will go up.  They have to.

You can’t spend money like our Government has been printing it and expect any semblance of balance to be maintained.

If the economy were going great gangbusters right now it would be a different story.  In general, debt is not necessarily bad.  But like many households in the last several years, our Country can no longer service it’s debt without taking on even more debt…

So interest rates (and I’m certain, taxes too) are going up so we can get some cash out of the economy.

Finance

An interesting article in this weeks BusinessWeek.  I’ve always liked the Facetime section of the magazine, and since Maria Bartiromo quite writing the column, I’ve wondered who will fill her shoes.

This week, Diane Brady chats with Pay Czar Ken Feinberg on the TARP program and its effectiveness.

Naturally, Feinberg is elated that the big banks are in a proverbial race to pay back the TARP money they borrowed from the government to help keep them out of Chapter 11. To hold any contempt would come off as sinister and socialistic.

The article speculates that it was the pay cap of $500,000 that really persuaded companies to pay back the money at such a rapid pace.  Feinberg does a great job of trying to spin the results into a “yeah, we knew it would happen this way”.  He goes on to say that the Government has no business regulating pay for companies that haven’t, or don’t, take tax payer money.  While I hope he and his compatriots in Washington actually believe that, unfortunately, I’m not buying it.

Lately my mantra has become, as the late Bob Novak put it: “Always love your Country, but never trust your Government”.

I believe the Government never wanted the banks to repay the money, at least not this quickly.  The fact that they want to turn around and hand the returned TARP money out for a second round of stimulus should be evidence enough.

In the end, the Government will end up getting most of the TARP money back, but not because companies suddenly became healthy enough to do so.  They got the money back because the banks found out how terrible it is to sleep with the Government, and wanted out ASAP.

Economics, Finance BusinessWeek, Facetime, government, Ken Feinberg, TARP