Glance at the chart below and you might think it was a hot new IPO on the Dubai stock exchange, or perhaps a coffee drinker’s EKG after he’s downed a triple espresso. But both guesses would be wrong, for it is in fact a bar chart of yesterday’s price action in the 30-Year T-Bond future. Some old timers may remember the T-Bond contract as one of the deepest and most liquid securities in the world. But that was before U.S. Treasury debt became mere side-action for what has grown into a $210 trillion global derivatives market. For comparison, consider that in 2005 the world produced real goods and services valued at just 25 percent of that amount, or $54 trillion. Clearly, making money the old-fashioned way has gone out of style.

If the chart were an EKG, a diagnosis of atrial fibrillation would send the patient to the hospital pronto. But in the ethereal world of debt and derivatives, it is just a gratuitous blip signifying nothing more than that investors were agitated yesterday when the Fed announced it would raise administered rates to 5%. A moment’s reflection tells us that a little atrial fibrillation in the T-bond market is not such a bad thing, considering that the primary source of the world’s economic growth is now, indisputably, volatility.

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Avoid MyInks.Com

Canon, HP, Brother and other printer manufacturers recommend OEM replacement ink cartridges because, they say,  third-party products contain inferior ink that will clog the print head. I’ve found this to be true, at least for my Canon, although I was able to revive my printer by repeatedly soaking the print head in denatured alcohol and running it through the deep-clean cycle a zillion times.  

Whatever you decide, I would strongly advise you to steer clear of one vendor in particular, MyInks.Com, one of the largest cartridge sellers on the Web. If you order just once from them, you will get on the mailing list of their marketing director, the overbearing, loathsome “Jodie.” Jodie is as aggressive a mailer as I have ever experienced, as tenacious as a leech. Customer service is absolutely unreachable, as is a human being at MyInks headquarters in Glendale, CA. An alternative supplier, if you are not concerned about using non-OEM ink cartridges and prefer good service to bad, is Boulder-based CartridgeWorldUSA, the biggest in the business