Carnivore 69 wrote:
See you at 5500.
...on the way to sub 5000.
Carnivore 69 wrote:
See you at 5500.
...on the way to sub 5000.
Flagpole wrote:
INCORRECT!
Unemployment is at 6.7% and is forecasted to plateau at 7.6% by mid 2009.
Unemployment rate now 8.1 per cent.
651,000 jobs axed in February.
Source: US Labor Department announcement, 8:30am, Friday, March 6, 2009.
duck tape wrote:
Unemployment rate now 8.1 per cent.
651,000 jobs axed in February.
Source: US Labor Department announcement, 8:30am, Friday, March 6, 2009.
Yep. Worst since 1983. Shows what the 'experts' know.
The market will go down another 150 points today. No day trading for me today.
Jim Halpert II wrote:
Sorry Dwight. Last month it stood at 7.6%.
The consensus range for Friday's jobs report is 7.8% to 8.1%.
I'm sure you'll be glued to your radio at 8:30 am.
Dude, I made that post you are referring to in DECEMBER. And in December that was all true. IIIIIIII wasn't predicting a plateau of 7.6%. I was telling that other poster what the 'experts' were saying. I never said I agreed with them.
You're a funny lot here on Letsrun. I'm not sure reading comprehension or even basic understanding of anything is par for the course here.
Flagpole wrote:
You're a funny lot here on Letsrun. I'm not sure reading comprehension or even basic understanding of anything is par for the course here.
Resorting to insults?
Re-arrange these words in to a well-known phrase.
Kettle
Pot
Black
The
Calling
Reality checker wrote:
Perhaps the issue is that you seem to be painting all letsrunners with the same brush.
Dude, can you not be BETTER than par? Maybe you don't know what "par for the course means". Again...reading comprehension and lack of basic understanding. You've just proven my point. You're firmly in the "par" group.
Dow about to hit 12 year low.
80 year trend would suggest we are going to down to 1200.
:)
By the way, Obama's economic naivete problem gets worse with each passing day. Word in Washington is that it is becoming really difficult for Geithner to fill top Treasury positions. Qualified folks that have paid their taxes just are staying away.
Yikes....
By the way, once again this is not a political diatribe. But one can really (if only anecdotally) feel it here on K Street.
duck tape wrote:
80 year trend would suggest we are going to down to 1200.
Yep, 99 percent of people should have all their money in CDs, savings accounts, and in cash.
Not in mutual funds, pension funds, or the market.
Those who are following the trend of the market are shorting the dow. Anyone going long is going down down down, and it's not a fun ride at all.
Do not EVER buy and hold anything. It's a failed gamble that tosses everything you have, down the drain.
mez redux wrote:
By the way, Obama's economic naivete problem gets worse with each passing day.
I don't think it's naivete. I think Obama knows exactly what he is doing. This guy agrees:
March 06, 2009
Deception at Core of Obama Plans
By Charles Krauthammer
WASHINGTON -- Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the "$2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 -- 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.
Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not principle.
All presidents do that. But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama's radically transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed.
The logic of Obama's address to Congress went like this:
"Our economy did not fall into decline overnight," he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care, and education -- importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.
The "day of reckoning" has now arrived. And because "it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament," Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.
Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.
At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the entire banking system. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful homebuyers.
The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.
And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.
What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."
Things. Now we know what they are. The markets' recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions -- the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic -- for enacting his "Big Bang" agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.
Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy -- worthy and weighty as they may be -- are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.
Well, at least he doesn't mention the Illuminati!!
OldXCguy wrote:
I don't think it's naivete. I think Obama knows exactly what he is doing. This guy agrees:
March 06, 2009
Deception at Core of Obama Plans
By Charles Krauthammer
WASHINGTON -- Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the "$2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 -- 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.
Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not principle.
All presidents do that. But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama's radically transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed.
The logic of Obama's address to Congress went like this:
"Our economy did not fall into decline overnight," he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care, and education -- importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.
The "day of reckoning" has now arrived. And because "it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament," Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.
Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.
At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the entire banking system. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful homebuyers.
The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.
And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.
What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."
Things. Now we know what they are. The markets' recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions -- the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic -- for enacting his "Big Bang" agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.
Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy -- worthy and weighty as they may be -- are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.
Of course he does. It's called getting us into a predicament so large, so awful, so unimaginable (all under the political cover that this was never his fault of course), that large-scale panic and vulnerability can be exploited to the core. And that, my friends, is called throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and that is why I am not terribly bullish on the future. The wealthy, the resourceful, and productive will hide and/or flee at the very time that we need their capital base and tax revenue to support the rapidly growing base of citizens sucking on the tit of government (currently the 51% who pay no federal taxes at all when taking refundable credits into account).
Reality checker wrote:
Being "not sure" implies that letsrunners, as a whole, do not possess average reading comprehension skills. You have made this very clear with the statement above. Perhaps it is you who could use a little brushing up on your writing skills, my friend.
No it doesn't! Dude, you're not even in the par group anymore.
Actual unemployment rate 13.9%: Merrill Lynch
Counting the ranks of “underemployed” as a result of cutbacks on hours, the unofficial rate hit the highest level in at least 15 years, according to economist David Rosenberg.
Running out of bullets...
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2009/03/groping-in-dark-with-quantitative.html
Too many people have the same retirement investment strategies. It was great when they were investing their money, but it is disastrous when they all need to live off of the money at the same time. Like now.
Basically, there is a problem with how everyone invests right now. The problem is not that everyone's methodology is wrong. It's that the methodology is popular, which actually makes it wrong. I try to eschew investment strategies that are very common for this reason. If everyone does the same thing, it doesn't work anymore. Right now, you have the entire baby boomer generation investing the same way, as every investment adviser and 401(k) plan out there is telling their clients. "Buy value stocks at low P/Es and buy real estate too. Keep buying." They all learned how to invest based on what happened in the post war world. They all loaded up on stocks and real estate as they hit their prime earning years. Stocks and real estate have done phenomenally well as a result. Now they are all realizing that they all need to sell those same assets at the same time to live in retirement. Well, they all can't sell at once, but I guess they may try. This country is turning into a huge population of stock and real estate sellers. They have to sell. And we know what that means; Prices go down. Prices will get very low as more and more boomers get scared and sell, which creates more selling, etc. You can see how this feedback loop is unstable. Just as the asset bubbles were unstable, so are the pops. Look out below.
Stocks have so much further to fall to hit the target P/E ratios that are normal in times of liquidation. Also, company earnings are still falling which will lower prices as well; another unstable feedback mechanism. While we are at it, add in another feedback mechanism that causes people and businesses to stop spending as the stock market drops, lowering the revenues of companies, and thus the earnings of companies, and thus the stock prices, etc. As Julian Robertson said on October 18th, 2007, "This is going to be a doozy of a recession."
Why Flagpole Was Wrong wrote:
Too many people have the same retirement investment strategies. It was great when they were investing their money, but it is disastrous when they all need to live off of the money at the same time. Like now.
Basically, there is a problem with how everyone invests right now. The problem is not that everyone's methodology is wrong. It's that the methodology is popular, which actually makes it wrong. I try to eschew investment strategies that are very common for this reason. If everyone does the same thing, it doesn't work anymore. Right now, you have the entire baby boomer generation investing the same way, as every investment adviser and 401(k) plan out there is telling their clients. "Buy value stocks at low P/Es and buy real estate too. Keep buying." They all learned how to invest based on what happened in the post war world. They all loaded up on stocks and real estate as they hit their prime earning years. Stocks and real estate have done phenomenally well as a result. Now they are all realizing that they all need to sell those same assets at the same time to live in retirement. Well, they all can't sell at once, but I guess they may try. This country is turning into a huge population of stock and real estate sellers. They have to sell. And we know what that means; Prices go down. Prices will get very low as more and more boomers get scared and sell, which creates more selling, etc. You can see how this feedback loop is unstable. Just as the asset bubbles were unstable, so are the pops. Look out below.
Stocks have so much further to fall to hit the target P/E ratios that are normal in times of liquidation. Also, company earnings are still falling which will lower prices as well; another unstable feedback mechanism. While we are at it, add in another feedback mechanism that causes people and businesses to stop spending as the stock market drops, lowering the revenues of companies, and thus the earnings of companies, and thus the stock prices, etc. As Julian Robertson said on October 18th, 2007, "This is going to be a doozy of a recession."
Overshoots work to the downside as well as the upside. And who can assure that rational asset normalization has even been achieved?
Reality checker wrote:
If that is your only defense, then I rest my case. Your inability to explain why "it doesn't" speaks volumes.
I am quickly growing tired of you, but I will appease you this one last time:
I wrote - "I'm not sure reading comprehension or even basic understanding of anything is par for the course here."
You wrote - "Being 'not sure' implies that letsrunners, as a whole, do not possess average reading comprehension skills."
This is how what you wrote is incorrect -- The "not sure" part of my sentence has do do ONLY with my level of certainty. It says NOTHING about the general population AT ALL. The part that DOES reference the population here is the word "here". But, using the term "par for the course" refers to the AVERAGE letsrun poster. A poster could still be above the average or below it. You have shown to be below it.
You're not interesting enough to continue with. Reply if you like, but I'm only interested in non-boring stuff. Tit for tat based on something as inconsequential as you not knowing what "not sure" means -- just not interesting enough for me. So, waste your typing time if you like. I'm done with you...just too boring.
Sagarin, et al.,
As the world economy delverages, because the leveraging magnified the risk of losses, a risk that we now see vividly, what comes next? With the US government and other governments using state spending as a temporary fix, does the reduced ability for individuals, companies and governments to make quick money or even significant progress to recoup losses over the last 17 months lead to a change in the value of our currency vis a vis basic goods? In other words, is cash king, or would it be better to have one's cash in readily saleable, non perishable, non depreciating goods? Alternatively, would gold or silver bullion be wise?