For our Clients, Colleagues, and Friends,
This table isn’t all that revealing, but it shows the percentage of residential loans going back to 1990 that were refinances. We selected a few to show what you already know, that you can live by the refi sword but also die by the refi sword. And by the way, even in the best year ever for the industry, 2020, only 55% of all loans were refinances:
How are foreign stocks doing so far this year? As of September 22nd, stocks in Spain are up 31.6%, up 32.3% in Hong Kong, up 38.2% in Greece, and up 43.6% in South Korea.
NBA great Luka Doncic speaks four languages: Spanish, English, Slovenian, and Serbian. And although you might suspect that Slovenian and Serbian are similar, both being in the Balkans, they’re almost completely different. A bonus question: Which prominent American speaks perfect Slovenian? Answer: It’s Melania Trump, who was born and raised there. Slovenia is a beautiful country, well worth a visit if you're traveling to nearby Germany and Austria.
The A’s (who don’t allow themselves to be called the Sacramento A’s, despite playing their home ganes there) have three players with 30 or more home runs, and with a little luck, a fourth one who could also get to 30. If you get four guys hittiing 30 home runs each, that’s like having two guys hit 60 each… and the team would seem to be unbeatable. In recent years, we saw the 2023 Atlanta Braves have five guys hit 30 or more home runs, and they had a win-loss record of 104-58 and won their division. As we write this, the A’s are hitting a lot of home runs but are nine games below .500. As Earl Weaver said, the key to winning baseball games is great pitching and three-run homers.… and the A‘s pitchers are pretty awful.
There used to be a time when boxers spent the first round kind of dancing around to feel each other out, throwing very few punches. This was especially true among the heavyweights. This 1985 fight between Tommy Hearns and Marvin Hagler was the opposite, where they came out and spent every second of the first round hammering away at each other non-stop, in an all-out brawl. Someone once described it as the best first round in boxing history, and if you like boxing, you’ll love this clip: Marvin Hagler vs. Tommy Hearns.
One of the biggest wastes of time is arguing who was the best or worst President. Who was great and who was near-great? Even worse is the "Best Former President." How about we switch to significant versus not significant? That could remove policy bias from the debate.
There’s a move in the Trump administration to require public companies to issue 10-Qs (financial information) every six months instead of the current every quarter. My view? Too much bad stuff (or good stuff) can happen in a six-month period, and it’s absurd to hear big companies complain about the cost of issuing financials four times a year. Investors should have more frequent discloures, not fewer.
We spend almost a trillion dollars a year just paying interest on the national debt, and one way to lower that cost, which never seems to get mentioned, is partial or full call protection. Maybe investors would accept a slightly lower yield in return for some sort of call protection. Give them the option.
Movie star Robert Redford died last week at 89. Someone once wrote that movie stars pretty much always play themselves, while actors always play different characters. Think about every movie Redford ever starred in. Can you name one in which he didn’t play some version of himself? His greatest roles were in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, and they were great movies, but my personal favorite was The Candidate, where he plays a reluctant campaigner for the U.S. Senate.
I just looked up the cast of The Candidate, and here’s a partial list of people who played themselves in the movie: Broderick Crawford, Howard K. Smith, George McGovern, Hubert Humphrey, Alan Cranston, John Tunney, Jesse Unruh, Natalie Wood, and Sam Yorty.
It's interesting how many young political science majors and lawyers saw The Candidate and were inspired to get into politics. Why? Because the production team intended the movie to be a cautionary tale about an idealistic son of a master politician selling out his principles as a public interest lawyer to claim the office of U.S. Senator from California. The last thing they wanted was to hold Bill McKay up as a paragon of public service.
With baseball season almost over, once again we’d like to write about the world’s fastest pitcher, Steve Dalkowski. People started noticing him in 1952 in high school when he struck out 24 of 27 batters in a single game. When he moved up to the minors, his fastball was said to be 111 miles per hour, and Cal Ripken’s dad, who was his catcher one minor league season, insisted his fastball came in at 115 mph.
In this photo, Dalkowski signed it “Fastest ever.”
Sadly, he had horrible control. In his first season, he struck out 21 batters in one game but also walked 22. In a 1957 game, he struck out 24, but lost the game because he walked 18, hit four batters, and threw six wild pitches. That year he averaged 18 strikeouts per nine innings. But he also walked an average of 17. The next year, playing for in a single-A league in South Dakota, he averaged 20 walks and 15 strikeouts per nine innings.
He once threw a one-hitter but lost because of seventeen walks. When he was pitching for Earl Weaver in Aberdeen, he pitched his only no-hitter. He struck out 20 and walked 18. And he was not just fast, but he was also powerful. On a $5 bet, he stood 15 feet from the outfield fence and threw a baseball through the wooden boards. On another bet he threw a baseball from the backstop over the center field fence, 440 feet away. In an extra-inning game playing for Elmira, New York in the Eastern League, he struck out 27, walked 16, and threw an astounding 283 pitches. Another time he was pulled from the game after throwing 120 pitches. It was still the second inning.
Before managing the Baltimore Orioles, Earl Weaver coached Dalkowski in their minor league system. He could tell that Dalkowski wasn’t very intelligent, and his theory was that Dalko got confused trying to deal with all the different pitches the catcher was calling. Weaver had Dalkowski take an IQ test, and the very low score confirmed his theory.
Weaver told him to only throw one pitch, a fastball, and just aim it right down the middle. Weaver knew that Dalkowski’s fastball was unhittable, even when batters knew it was coming. Not having to worry about a curve low and away, a slider high and inside, change-ups, two-seam fastballs, sliders, and guys on first who try to steal, Dalkowski flourished. In a 52-inning span, he struck out 104 batters with only 10 walks and a single earned run.
He struck out the great Ted Williams on three pitches in Spring training, and Williams said he never even saw the ball.
The morning of the last day of Spring training in 1962, the Orioles told Dalkowski that he had made the team. He got fitted for his Major League Orioles uniform, but while pitching that very afternoon, something popped in his elbow and his baseball career was over. Eight years in the minors but not one Major League game. Read it and weep.
Dalkowski always had problems with liquor, and once he was out of baseball, his alcoholism caused him to lose one job after another. He moved to California where he worked as a migrant farm worker. His arrest record in one Central Valley town was said to be 30 pages long, all for barroom fights and public drunkenness.
The heavy drinking brought on alcohol-induced dementia, and Johnny Altobelli wrote, “Playing baseball in Stockton and Bakersfield several years behind Dalko, but aware of the legend, I would see a figure standing in the dark down the right-field line at old Sam Lynn Park in Oildale, a paper bag in hand. Sometimes he'd come to the clubhouse to beg for money.”
The dementia got worse, and in 1992 he was living on the streets of Los Angeles. His sister tracked him down and put him in a dementia facility in New Britain, Connecticut, the town where he was born and where he eventually died. The dementia was so bad he had no memory of ever having played baseball. He was the fastest pitcher ever to throw a strike, but he never pitched a single game in the Majors.
To end on a little less somber note, the Orioles invited Dalkowski to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at Camden Yards in September 2003. Getting out of his wheelchair, he bounced the pitch, not even making it to home plate. But as a friend of his said, “He was back on the pitching mound. Back where he belonged.
Weakened by his dementia, Dalkowski died in April 2020, just as the baseball season was starting.
Quote of the week, on tough times: “When you’re going through Hell, keep going.” -Winston Churchill.