Update: Monday’s brought the DOW near 6800. Could I have been too optimistic?
Sure it’s presumptuous for me to think I can call the DOW low at 7000 even though I said so back in November, and sure you’d be foolish to believe me more than you believe anybody else or any other source. But you’d also be foolish to believe that *anybody* can call these shots. Even the market makers fail *routinely* to offer much insight into the process and the CNBC pundits and analysts have a very consistent pattern of performance = market averages.
Many people use a backtracking analysis or cherry picking to “prove” they or others have insights you can’t get otherwise, but this is meaningless, in some ways analogous to “predicting” I can toss a coin 10 heads in a row, then videotaping myself tossing the coin 1000 times during which I’ll have some 10 heads runs, and then showing people only the 10 heads segment. Although my prediction power in this case is *random* and can be duplicated by anybody, a gullible person would watch my videotape and think I’ve got insight I don’t have.
So, is it impossible to predict the future? Certainly we can predict many things with some accuracy. Bank accounts and certificate of deposit returns are predictable, solid, safe (and thus tend to be lower than riskier investments) and there are obviously “good deals” in real estate and business, esp. when you are looking at local circumstances with which you are familiar.
Yet like most people I flatter myself and think I as Joe Duck have better insights than that foolish old “Joe Sixpack”. However even if that is true those insights do not necessarily translate into stock or other profits, and as I become more experiences watching the world and watching markets I’m increasingly convinced that the best way to make money is to avoid individual stock picking or even stay away from the stock market altogether, choosing to invest in “close to home” projects such as local real estate and perhaps friends who you know and trust (unless of course the conversation goes along these lines: Bernie! How are you doing? What, you need me to loan you money and order you a plane ticket online?
Of course if I’m right that we are now pretty much at the lows for most of the three major indexes, and that the market is correctly assuming that the stimulus spending will be kicking in after a few months to stabilize the economy, then it’s probably a good time to take a stake in America with some form of index investing. A lot of folks seem to be advising this is a fine time to “get into” this market though of course these are the same folks who failed to call the huge declines. I wish I had time to create a “hall of shame” for any financial pundit who did not scream out “irrational exhuberance” at least a dozen times in the last decade. Oh, wait, that’s easy – put *every financial pundit in the USA* in the hall of shame.
Joe Duck 
Joe-
Great post – yet of all the perverse twists, your pessimism on stocks gives me hope 🙂
Pundits indeed – in nearly 30 years as an investment professional I’ve never found a single pundit who was not – at some critical inflection point in the market – bearish when he should be bullish, or bullish when he should be bearish. Often the bad calls are directly proportional to the fame and coverage said pundit has acquired (anybody remember Joe Granville?)…the bigger they are, the harder they fall, and the more innocent worshipers at the altar of market timing they take with them.
I don’t profess to know the bottom on this market. Valuation metrics suggest the stock market is at a multi-generational low, yet it keeps going lower. Markets go to extremes – the present ridiculously low valuations are the flip side of technology stocks that traded at triple digit p/e multiples in the late 90s, yet went higher still – before the roof caved in.
I do believe the markets will recover and that we are suffering through a severe recession, NOT the second coming of the Great Depression as many have recklessly suggested. I also know I can’t time the moment when it will recover – though there are thousands of pundits out there who claim they absolutely can and will sell me that precious information for a few hundred sheckles a year. The reality is that one of the most recent academic studies, vast in its scope in that it researched over 15 major stock markets and not just the U.S., found this: “missing the 10 best days in 160,000 trading days researched resulted in Portfolios 50.8% less valuable than a passive investment; and avoiding the worst 10 days resulted in a portfolio 150.4% more valuable than a passive investment. Given that 10 days represents less than 0.1% of the days considered…the odds of successful market timing are STAGGERING.” (my emphasis in caps added).
To Buffett’s – “beware of geeks bearing formulas” should be added – “beware of pundits bearing forecasts”.
Joe this is just the beginning. 7000 was a major line of resistance. Who knows where the bottom is? Even Buffet is finally speaking straight.
I figured in the 6000’s by December but unfortunately we kept artificially keeping this fake market alive and then I thought it would be by March. This isn’t a prediction of mine…it is just reading and extrapolating the trend lines.
I think the market will continue to move lower for the foreseeable future. It is no longer out of bounds to think we could see another couple thousands points drop off.
The markets absolutely do NOT believe the stimulus is going to do anything.
Just look at AIG…what a disaster…several more to follow regardless of how much we pump into them. It is a complete waste.
Paul are you finally ready to declare TARP a failure yet?
PS – You should see where the trend lines are heading for the housing market. We are no where near the bottom on any of this.
Glenn I’m also less optimistic than before, though I remain convinced we won’t go all that much lower before the substantial amount of cash out there comes back into the market. I do wonder how the following will shake out:
* People fueled a lot of the bubble buying with home equity borrowing.
* That equity value is gone as are their investment gains.
* Assuming housing prices go lower or even just stabilizes, now, how will the broad markets respond to the fact the number of active traders will have gone down by a huge percentage. Have they incorporated this into pricing yet? I think yes.
(3) Basically 30%+ of the market value has evaporated since Obama was elected. This is not a coincidence. The markets do not have confidence in the stimulus plans of this Congress/Administration. PERIOD.
That is fueling instability along with Obama’s fear based speeches are driving insecurity within the market. This is not like a 1987 correction…this is getting more and more like 1929 complete meltdown of our economic system in this country.
Before this meltdown…you could pretty much bet on Buffet making money…not anymore…the entire game has changed. We can either really fix the problems we face or continue to patch them and line the pockets of our elected official’s friends. If we continue to patch we could be in this instability for the next 20 years or so…just like the last time this happened.
It is strange that our government is making the same exact mistakes again…
…the odds of successful market timing are STAGGERING
To Buffett’s – “beware of geeks bearing formulas” should be added – “beware of pundits bearing forecasts”.
Paul I think this is great advice (or “non advice?). I think that investing has some of the appeal of other gambling type things where the illusion of control/success/predictability makes “playing the game” irresistable. In up markets the rewards are substantial and people are quick to think they are clever, fueling the power of ‘intermittent reinforcement” which is a very powerful conditioner of primate behavior.
Anybody got a bunch o bananas? I’m all out.
http://www.finfacts.ie/irishfinancenews/article_1016076.shtml
Also Peter was on CBS early show today discussing this in more detail…no links on youtube yet…
Trendlines…yup, those are right up there with Ouija boards for predictive reliability. “Black Swans & Market Timing: How Not To Generate Alpha” – Javier Estrada, November 2007.
(7) Paul you don’t make decisions solely based on a trend line but it does give you an indication of the general direction.
It is ironic that FDR’s massive spending and social programs only delayed the inevitable and extended the time of pain by over a decade and for some reason the sheeple want to follow this same path once again.
This is only the beginning Paul and we will shed a couple more thousand points before we see the bottom. As some of us had said back in September until the bad mortgages are eliminated from the system we will never see a bottom. The housing decline is still in its early stages…all the government had to do was insure the losses and we could have actually gotten to the bottom a lot faster. They choose not to do it and now look at AIG still infected with massive losses primarily because of the toxic mortgage debt.
Yes, eliminate the bad mortgages. Simple as pie. They are being eliminated at a fantastic rate. How fast do you want it? 1 million a quarter? 2,3,4?
Did you think that AIG was going to pull out of a tailspin in just a few months? Of the 60 billion the lost, a significant percentage is from the write down of their extensive commercial real estate holdings. They own some really nice properties.
The United States of America will probably end up owning most of them. Socialism is gonna rock, baby. Take the civil service exam to become a real estate agent. Pay – $7.92 an hour – same as mortgage broker and stock broker.
(9) We are not eliminating the bad mortgages…we are propping them up. We are putting 10’s of billions of dollars into AIG for what? Nothing. Who knows how much in bad or shaky mortgages there are…and that number is going to rise because of the after-effect of all this ill-responsibility is going to force people that could have previously paid for mortgages to not be able to pay them.
This cascading snow ball effect is just starting.
Wait until hyper-inflation hits…
Hyperinflation is a devastating phenomenon. It wipes out the middle class by destroying the value of cash, savings, bonds and other paper instruments. But, how does it affect stock markets?
With the Federal government just having added $5.2 trillion in Fannie/Freddie liabilities of which about $600 billion will likely default, the Federal Reserve having now polluted its balance sheet by some $700 billion worth of toxic mortgage bonds with a 41.6% default rate ($291 billion in likely defaults), an $85 billion bailout for AIG, and, now, the Administration asking for some $700 billion more to bail out financial firms, it seems clear that the winds of hyperinflation are upon us.
What will be the comparative effect of hyperinflation upon index funds, like DIA, QQQ, and SPY, versus bonds and cash?
Listen to half the equation that you all voted for to save our country…LOL.
Listen to Joe Biden explain how porkulis is going to help small biz…I am sure after listening to Joe Biden is feeling much better about laying off half her staff last year.
OMG!!!
In 2008 there were 2,000,000 (two million) foreclosures. In 2007 there were 1.3 million foreclosures.
Very few, by percentage, are being “propped up”.
You supported the morons who caused this. Now you want them back. Lol.
717,000 in 2006.
So eliminating 4 million toxic mortgages has worked wonders.
Another prime example of liberal stupidity!!!
Remember all the outrage about oil drilling off Florida…well Obama and the raging left loon’s have pretty much killed any opportunity for us to reach significant oil deposits.
Soon we will hear about how Cuba has just created a deal with China to allow them to start drilling! Brilliant.
So we have the same ecological risk, etc…yet we lose all this money, and we think the Chinese will do as good of a job with oil drilling as we would.
We have a bunch of idiots running our country and they are going to destroy us.
This election and agenda is only about a massive power grab by the far left…they have no plan to help America or Americans…they want to shift our existence into a government controlled country where we have very little rights.
Barney Frank empowered the corrupt organizations to continue unchecked.
Glenn you sure pin a lot of this on Barney! Given that the European and Asian banks appear to be in as much trouble or more than ours, I think we need to chalk most of this up to defects in Capitalism rather than defects in politics.
But I’m not even sure this is best called “defects”. Some of this reminds me of people wondering why Hurricanes hit their city. It’s not that they did anything wrong – we get Hurricanes as a by product of what is normally fine weather. We get economic deleveraging as part of what was exhuberant capitalism.
Capitalists do things to make a profit. This should be obvious. There is no profit in providing mortgage financing to around 10 million families who had no capacity to repay it, and they knew that. Nothing even remotely like this has ever happened before. The S&L crisis was driven by greed. This crisis clearly was not.
So why did they do it?
At some point people are going to have to come to grips with the motivation for this crime.
(16) Defects in capitalism? This is all about bad policy across the globe that either enabled corrupt activities or turned a cheek to corrupt activities.
There are riots happening across the globe now and they will be starting here by June.
Barney Frank did his part in ignoring many attempts to rein in this out of control housing lending situation.
The core of our financial issues are the toxic mortgages…period. If the case of liberal characters had allowed for proper oversight and auditing of Fannie and Freddie we would have understood this problem years ago and probably would have had a chance to do something about it. That is most definitely the fault of Frank, Dodd, Schumer, etc.
Now Clinton says a Palestine state is the only way to peace…WFH???? This is totally caving in to the enemies of Israel and the US. She is already a massive failure on foreign policy. The fact now that the Chinese will build oil platforms off Cuba is another dismal failure based on bad left wing extremists policies. The Chinese will use those oil platforms not only for drilling but for military purposes as well. This will make the Cuban missile crisis look like a small protest.
Obama and crew are going to destroy this country.
(16) Joe Japan is clearly the worst off…and guess what they did…when they starting having their problems they followed the FDR path and only made their situation worse – JUST LIKE WE ARE DOING NOW.
This has nothing to do with stimulus, etc…it is 100% a power grab to permanently change our country into a socialist giant. Socialism does NOT scale.
Economy: Barack Obama won the presidency by vowing to bring “hope and change” to America. We’ve seen the change as the economy’s deterioration accelerated. Now where’s the hope?
In the three months since the election, the broadest measure of the stock market’s value, the Wilshire 5000 Index, has plunged more than 30%, slicing over $3 trillion from Americans’ wealth. Investors have walked away from investing, while businesses shut down factories and offices and slash jobs.
This is both highly significant and dangerous. Capital, bluntly put, has gone on strike. Those who own wealth are pushing it to the sidelines, as a young and inexperienced president tries to jam through the most sweeping economic changes in over 70 years.
The prospect of these changes becoming law has already radically altered our nation’s economy. Entrepreneurs and CEOs who once created new products, new services, jobs and trillions in wealth for America’s workers and retirees now find themselves vilified and punished for their success.
ABC News reported this week that many upper-income taxpayers already are planning to cut back on work and investments to stay under $250,000 in income — the point where Obama’s punitive taxes kick in. No one wins from this, yet Obama seems oblivious.
This isn’t the only warning sign. A new study asserts that some 100,000 highly educated, well-trained Indians now living in the U.S. will return home in the next few years. Ditto China.
Immigrant entrepreneurs are highly sensitive bellwethers of economic and social conditions. They know where the opportunities are — and where they aren’t. They’re voting with their feet.
The economy shrank 6.2% in the fourth quarter, worse than first expected. Home sales continue to fall, unemployment is rising sharply, and business investment is prostrate. Such an economy cries out for tax cuts, but we get none. Just punishment of those with wealth who might be able to pull us out of the slump.
An estimated $1.4 trillion in new taxes planned by the new administration over the next decade explicitly target the people President Teddy Roosevelt once derided as the “malefactors of great wealth” — those in the top 5% of the income spectrum. Yet, they’re the ones who’ve made our economy the envy of the world.
By the way, under Obama’s plan the rich won’t pick up the whole tab. New energy taxes of $646 billion will hit the middle-class hard. Meanwhile, in just eight years, our national debt will double to $20 trillion, as nondefense federal spending jumps from the long-term average of 16.5% of GDP to above 23%.
You — or your children — face higher taxes for decades to come.
As our stock markets melt under a barrage of new taxes on incomes, estates, capital gains, dividends and energy, it’s good to recall that more than 100 million people own stocks or mutual funds. And that the stock market is the main wealth- and growth-creating mechanism in our capitalist society.
But when taxes go up, regulations proliferate and the rule of law and private property protections are weakened, the economy will invariably suffer. This is a universal lesson of economic history, one we ignore at our peril. And yes, this is what’s happening now.
No, we don’t blame all our current ills on President Obama. He came in at a tough time, when many bad decisions had already been made. But he is responsible for what he’s done since.
His stimulus package is little more than a down payment on a socialist economy. It raises taxes on the successful, brings back the welfare state, hands out favors and cash to friends of one political party, while imposing government control over the entire free market in ways that just a year ago would have seemed unimaginable.
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=320892987513114
Tax hikes on the rich…fact is they will figure out a way around it. All this Obama crap is going to do is further stagnate our growth, reduce our GDP and keep us pinned down economically so he can pursue his radical leftist agenda to strip us all of our rights.
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Economy/Story?id=6975547
http://www.stimuluswatch.org/project/by_state
Insane…
Obama/Clinton…fools…
“This is not productive,” said Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday, talking about US President Barack Obama’s secret proposition to halt the US missile shield programme in Europe in exchange for help on the Iran nuclear issue.
Just how stupid is this? Naive, reckless and dangerous. They do not understand how the world works and we are going to pay dearly for it.
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/warner-todd-huston/2009/03/03/newsweek-map-labels-israel-palestinian-territory
Newsweek Map Labels Israel as ‘Palestinian Territory’
Of course since Palestinians were dancing in the streets on 9/11 of course Newsweek is going to support them.
Enjoy your kool-aid sheeple…
Anybody who scales back their annual family income back to $250,000 is an idiot.
Point blank – a moron. Saving 39 cents would cost them 61 cents – forever.
Your people, Glenn, are sheep. They are scared to death of the sky falling. The run around like panicked morons.
How does the world work, Glenn?
“Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the Russians last year that the United States didn’t need missiles in eastern Europe if there wasn’t an Iranian threat because the missiles are designed to deal with that type of threat or launch, a senior administration official said. …”
So your guys told the Russians the same exact thing last year.
(26) JCH – Russia is not interested in slowing down Iran…that’s the point you just don’t get. Iran is a proxy and Russia is not interested in any form of friendly relationship with us.
(25) That’s your response?…LOL..that is exactly what tax havens do. Scale back your taxable income.
The rich ultimately go unaffected and the less fortunate end up taking the brunt of this crap. Fools…
yo zo hits a home run with this one!!!
youtube.com/watch?v=SwOE8K8CH-8
The anti-tax fanatics might recall BushCo’s slash of estate/inheritance taxes for very wealthy circa 2003 or so (also supported by a few DINOcrats, like Dame Feinstein), and the lowering of capital gains taxes. The very wealthy are not being “punished”: BO’s econ-people appear to be returning to the older brackets.
Really, given the bullish Bush war-economy (at least until last year or so), wealthy investors–at least smart ones– have little to complain about. Grand fortunes were made during the Bush years: not only in stocks and finance, but at the commodities casino (like at the Big boys table–Crude oil. Gold action also quite massive). Folks out in Consumerland have no idea how much cash a big move in oil or gold returns to the shekelmeisters.
The anti-tax fanatics might also remember that the Founding Fathers favored inheritance taxes, and their justification for inheritance taxes rather political: they wanted to prevent a return to aristocratic, familial dynasties and wealth centralized in a few hands.
That said, some of the Obama budget proposals seem a bit excessive–the bailout perhaps the most egregious, yet the Bailout a bipartisan affair all the way. In econ-terms, BO’s arguably a centrist, like his mentor Billy Bob Clinton.
Russia is very interested in having friendly relationships with the United States. We had a bunch of Cold War morons in the White House who were interested in preserving unfriendly relationships with Russia, They pushed it, and Russia kicked their heads in.
Fortunately, they’re not in the White House anymore.
As for tax havens, they cannot protected your earned income. So a lawyer who says she only wants to make 250,000 of lawyer income so she won’t have to pay 39 cents is an idiot. If she’s also insane enough to put all of her savings in the Stanford Bank of Belize, I’ll buy the postage for the ignoramus.
This is a fact: very few Americans are going to do risky things with their savings to avoid paying 4 cents in taxes.
(30) Risky?…let’s listen to our messiah who today saying buying stock right now is a good move…ROFL.
Obama doesn’t even understand the market – he even admitted he doesn’t understand the market because he is not an investor – just a community organizer.
Russia is absolutely not interested in a friendly relationship – you have to be smoking crack to believe that.
Even China hates us but they tolerate because of the deep economic ties.
But it may all change since we are heading for Communism at warp speed with Obama…that may be what you are referring to…friendly relations with another communist country.
But hey isn’t that what you want JCH…to live under communist rule?
The Democrats have more in common with the Nazi party than any other party that has existed in America.
Obama’s approval rating speaks volume on this mounting failure of a presidency…Bush didn’t hit this low of an approval rating until 2006. Obama is within a couple of points of Pelosi’s rating. This is after one month. People that strongly disapprove of Obama’s performance has nearly doubled in the same time frame.
The stock market is displaying a strong disapproval for everything Obama is doing.
At this rate he will have more people disapproving of his job performance than approve in the next 30 days.
Amazing how bad a party could be to lose the biggest opportunity in 40 years…
Pretty soon he won’t have anyone else to blame for the problems.
The people in America are waking up and realizing Obama is nothing more than a fraud.
Just watch all the companies getting a hand in these bail-outs…the vast majority if not all will end up total and utter failures. The backlash from consumers is mounting.
GM and Ford dropping like a rock with sales…massive hemorrhaging. They need to fail.
Did you see Jeff Immelt’s shareholder letter from yesterday? The commie pinko brings it all home that the government is going to save them…of course his reckless course of action as CEO has nothing to do with their current predicament. He is also stating the government will now be a new partner with GE…gee they did a similar thing with Nazi Germany…aye yi yi.
Let these companies fail and good will ultimately come out from all of this.
Perfect example of a raging left loon’s sick mind. When the country is in trouble, when we need to come to the middle of the road to save our skins…this idiot has this to say about the census:
Democrats Must Keep Politics in 2010 Census; Gerrymander–and Gender-mander–Away!
By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
Get a good laugh out of the lead paragraph in an article in today’s Washington Post:
House Democrats will unveil a measure today that would separate the U.S. Census Bureau from the Commerce Department and make it an independent government agency similar in design to the National Institutes of Health or NASA.
Depoliticize the Census? Surely they jest! Taking politics out of the Census is like taking milk out of the cow or coal out of Newcastle or diamonds out of Tiffany. Politics is the lifeblood of the Census—without politics, there is no Census.
The Census is part of the spoils of victory for whichever party controls the White House at the turn of each decade. Gerrymandering—using Census data to create voting districts that artificially lean toward one end of the political spectrum or the other—is as uniquely an American tradition as Thanksgiving. The thought of trying to depoliticize the census is, well, decidedly un-American.
Every political interest group wants a piece of Census action. Hispanics and Latinos want to make sure immigrants aren’t under-counted. Religious groups want to make sure their members aren’t under-counted. I’ve even heard feminist leaders talking, since the November elections, about using the Census to gender-mander: to create voting districts with large percentages of poor, single and widowed women, who tend to skew Democratic.
So gerrymander away with the 2010 Census and spare us the theatrics of trying to look nonpartisan.
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/erbe/2009/3/3/democrats-must-keep-politics-in-2010-census-gerrymander–and-gender-mander–away.html
It is this crap that ruins our country.
Funny how this stuff is just too tempting for the raging left within the Democratic party. I am amazed when Rangel disagrees with Obama on taxes…just how far left is Obama really?
Lest you start drinking the raging left’s kool-aid … this link is a little reminder.
http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911
Crazy we are not drilling right now…
North Dakota and Montana have an estimated 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in an area known as the Bakken Formation.
A U.S. Geological Survey assessment, released April 10, shows a 25-fold increase in the amount of oil that can be recovered compared to the agency’s 1995 estimate of 151 million barrels of oil.
Technically recoverable oil resources are those producible using currently available technology and industry practices. USGS is the only provider of publicly available estimates of undiscovered technically recoverable oil and gas resources.
New geologic models applied to the Bakken Formation, advances in drilling and production technologies, and recent oil discoveries have resulted in these substantially larger technically recoverable oil volumes. About 105 million barrels of oil were produced from the Bakken Formation by the end of 2007.
Oh wait let me guess…this doesn’t fit into the raging left loon environmental goals…
Tell you what…let’s stop funding the middle east and fighting wars there and let’s take care of our own oil needs NOW.
Going back to the first commie talk show host in this country…great to listen to Milton Friedman on Phil Donahue in 1979. We all need to remember these great words from Friedman…
http://www.nmatv.com/video/1115/Milton-Friedman-and-Phil-Donahue–1979
His words really ring true today!!!
Lol. I drill holes you freakin’ goofball.
The Bakken formation was tapped during the oil boom of the early 1980s. It’s expensive oil. When barrel prices crashed later in the 1980s, they plugged holes up there like it was going out of style. When barrel prices went sky high over the last few years, the rigs rolled out again. Now they’re shutting down.
Enhanced extraction techniques cost a great deal of money. $45 a barrel means nothing significant will happen there. There are several other similar formations. It’s a whole bunch cheaper to buy from Canada, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, etc.
But yeah, the trillion dollars you luny boys peed away in the mideast would have drilled a lot of holes.
Hilarious moment – stock market futures are up this morning because they think the Chinese are about to initiate additional government SPENDING: also known as ECONOMIC STIMULUS.
Of course, the brain-dead right wingers on Wall Street think commie spending is stimulative, but not American spending. Oh no, money flowing through our system is the kiss of death. People paying their rent. People buying groceries. People making their mortgage payments. People spending their money. Yeah, that will destroy the economy. Best to just let her bleed out. Don’t save the patient; let the patient die. That’s the ticket. Once it’s dead, things will pick up.
Yeah part of China’s stimulus is a 15% increase in their military spending.
We have Clinton criticizing Israel this morning but there is no mention of the hundreds of rockets that have still been hitting Israel since the last offensive was halted.
We have the Supreme leader of Iran today calling Israel a cancer that must be eliminated.
You have Obama wanting to put Charles Freeman in as the top intelligence analyst who in the past stated that China did not act fast enough to crack down on the protesters in Tiananmen Square and that the US is wrong in supporting Israel.
You have Geithner who evades taxes himself yet states the US gov’t is going to go after tax evaders – he should start with himself. He also doesn’t have a clue on how to save the banking system.
All we have here is a bunch of socialists trying to take over our country and they have NO INTEREST whatsoever in saving the economy and making things better for Americans. They just want to control the population and force their doctrine onto the people.
Funny how one day you state the change in the market for one day doesn’t matter but now you make some wild reference about market futures today. We cut 700k jobs in Feb… It is a natural trend for the futures to move higher after 5 consecutive days of selling – it is part of the normal ebb and flow of the markets. It is the bargain hunters that are driving the futures uptick. China hasn’t even announced their stimulus package yet. Any analysis stating the futures market is rebounding because of the hope of China doing something is purely propaganda to prop up socialism and communism.
The key to any gain in the market above the bargain hunters will be solid economic news…the purchasing report just came out and manufacturing shrank for the 13th straight month. The purchasing report is always a good indicator of what is happening with hard goods in this country.
The analysts are now grasping at anything that could be spun as positive…builder’s losses are narrowing but that has more to do with cost cutting measures and yet they seem to forget that most builders revenues have been cut by more than 50%…
The overseas markets bounced a little on the hope that China’s stimulus will happen but I would place the bet on US futures bouncing because of the natural effect that happens after 5 straight days of losses.
JCH you truly are clueless and you are a communist.
(39) JCH any gain you might see today will be demolished on Friday when the jobs reports are released.
They will probably be the worst we have seen in the last 50 years.
Our stimulus is nothing about job creation or turning the economy around is about taking a crisis and forcing an agenda down the throats of the American people that they would otherwise NEVER accept. Nice party the Democrats…never miss an opportunity to take advantage of the hard working Americans and totally screw them over.
You guys actually think you will get away with it. The backlash is coming.
Unbelievable…CNN keeps upping the quality of their news reporting.
You had never heard of the Bakken formation; I’ve known about it for 40 years.
The commie spending is a stimulus, but our American spending is not. I’m self-employed in oil investing, and I’m a communist.
Somebody is definitely clueless, and it ain’t me.
(42) I have never heard of the Bakken formation?…yeah good one. You know nothing about what I know.
“The commie spending is a stimulus, but our American spending is not.”
That says it all.
You should review the Nazi party tenants and their propaganda and see just how much in common you and the other raging left liberals have in common with it. If you open your eyes you will see the path that Obama and the raging left are taking us on will NOT work and is not sustainable and quite frankly most of it is anti-American.
The only winners in this fiasco will be Russia and China, according to our brilliant Clinton on foreign affairs we have already caved into Russia, Iran, Cuba, China and the terrorists…naive. I remember what happened after the last time the Clinton’s tried to destroy our country with their naive foreign policy.
Oh wait…that’s right the UN is going to save us all.
JCH think about what will happen if global stimulus is tried…who do you think is going to pay for that?
The poorest people in America are still in the top 5% of the richest people in the world…the globe will look at it…let’s tax the top 5% of the worlds richest to pay for it. You guys are setting us up for total failure and the complete erasure of what America is all about.
You have top white house officials targeting a private citizen now…Rush Limbaugh.
Nice administration Comrade Obama. We have a bunch of thugs trying to use Chicago style politics to run our country.
Unbelievable hope and change that the sheeple of this country have voted for.
Hopefully conservatives will target all those liberals in the future…this is such a nice recipe for this country.
Obama the administration of fear, intimidation, racism and no tolerance.
Yeah another great example of the progress the liberals are making in this country. This is exactly the kind of thing that Obama wants to enable…disgusting.
MIAMI – An abortion clinic owner is accused of delivering a live baby during a botched procedure and then throwing the infant away.
Belkis Gonzalez, 42, was arrested Tuesday and charged with practicing medicine without a license and tampering with evidence, both felonies, said Ed Griffith, a spokesman for the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s office. If found guilty, Gonzalez would face at least a year in prison and up to 15 years.
The teenage mother, Sycloria Williams, has filed a lawsuit alleging that Gonzalez knocked the infant off the chair where she had given birth, and then scooped the baby, placenta and afterbirth into a red plastic biohazard bag, and threw it out.
This is exactly what wealthy people will continue to do now.
http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20090304/ARTICLE/903040345/2055/NEWS?Title=Tax-aversion-leads-man-to-invest-in-the-future
Listen to John Bolton who continue to be right on with these issues.
http://www.foxnews.com/video/index.html?playerId=videolandingpage&streamingFormat=FLASH&referralObject=3761645&referralPlaylistId=a438e1cadef5a5c9211932781b14d6587b08d851
Glenn the Sarasota small biz incubator sounds like a great idea.
In terms of blaming Obama and liberals for what looks like a horrible and tragic case – nope, I don’t think that is reasonable.
(48) Joe I was being a little extreme with post (45) however he did vote multiple times to fully legalize exactly what that idiot did to that innocent baby. That is a FACT. Obama believes that should be the protocol if an abortion is botched and the baby is born alive…just throw it away so it will die.
Funny how liberals want to do everything they can to stop a serial killer from death row but they have no problem executing innocent babies who have done nothing wrong. Seems hypocritical to me.
Now in other news…the cap and trade is coming together…which is just another form of eco-terrorism.
Dems’ Energy Tax: The Administration’s Budget Hikes Taxes on Every Single American Presidential Candidate Obama Admits: “Under My Plan of a Cap-and-Trade System, Electricity Rates Would Necessarily Skyrocket”
So much for not raising taxes on people that make under 250k. In fact the lower income households are going to be hurt the most by this…unbelievable.
Obama has killed any opportunity for Nuclear or Clean Coal in this country – he is going to cause electricity to go through the roof…how many more stupid things can one person do when the economy is in such bad shape?
Watch how Obama taps his buddy from Chicago on the shoulder to run the Cap and Trade exchange that will be run out of Chicago. This will be the biggest trading scam ever to hit the country…how much you want to bet Al Gore makes many 10’s of millions more just on this one piece of very bad legislation that will do NOTHING to help the environment.
Within 3 months Obama’s disapproval rating will eclipse his approval rating and he will go down in history as the worst President this country has ever seen. 1 term and then things will be fixed…the raging left is going for broke now…its all or nothing and thank god it will end up being nothing.
ok…nothing to see here…just move along.
Franklin Raines, the former chief executive of Fannie Mae, benefited from special perks given by the head of besmirched mortgage lender Countrywide Financial, the top Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform said on Wednesday.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said documents received by his staff contradict testimony Raines gave to the committee in December when he denied receiving any special benefits from Countrywide.
Shocker…of course Frank and Dodd have nothing to do with this either…oh yeah…Dodd got the same kind of thing…I wonder what Frank got except getting his unqualified boyfriend a 6 figure job over there…hmmmm….this isn’t corrupt…these guys are great…they are telling us the truth…
Every person who uses energy should pay for the damages it does. That is not a tax; it is simply moral.
The cost of environmental damage always should have been in the price of energy. When they put catalytic converters on cars, everybody had to pay for them. That was the fee to stop spewing CO, NOX, and unburned hydrocarbons into the atmosphere. Life went on.
Which idiot?
She alleges in her suit that “she witnessed the murder of her daughter” and said she “sustained severe emotional distress, shock and psychic trauma which have resulted in discernible bodily injury.”
“This is not about a pot of gold,” said Tom Pennekamp, her attorney. “What this is about is right and wrong and making a statement, making sure it doesn’t happen to other young women.”
Okay, a girl who had decided to abort her baby … is not looking for huge payday. LMAO.
The doctor is accused of malpractice (obviously the case), which is what, Glenn, a frivolous lawsuit? You guys want to stop malpractice lawsuits.
(51) So breathing should be taxed? What difference is CO2 from a human than other sources? CO2 is CO2…
When are you going to learn that CO2 is not a pollutant.
Let’s review the stupidity of the left…
Stop offshore drilling…but nominate someone who has made money helping China get drilling rights from Cuba to access the same oil we could of…that is stupidity.
(52) I am not worried about the lawsuit – it’s definitely stupid…I only care that a human being born alive was thrown in the trash. That is BS, immoral, unbelievable and something that Obama directly supports (his voting record is proof of it – he even introduced the specifics for this in IL) – it’s disgusting.
A Dangerous Game of Chicken: The President vs. the Market…
My stockbroker finally convinced me to get out of the market. I was hanging on to the old adage that what does down must eventually come up. I still agree with that, but I think it could be a decade or more before recovery happens. Why? Because, stock novice that I am, it seems to me that Obama and the markets are playing a game of chicken.
How low must our passive-aggressive money men and women drive the market before our president gets the message?
In our passive-aggressive culture, few in finance seem to want to be straight with our new president like CNBC host Jim Cramer was the other day. Instead of telling him to his face that he is offering the wrong medicine to the patient, the markets have decided to send a passive-aggressive message to the President by pounding him day after day with a plunging stock market, hoping that he’ll get the message and change course.
The only question now is how low will the markets have go before Obama gets the message they are trying to send him? 5,000? 4,000? 3,500? My bet is the latter. At some point a rational person would think that the president would realize what’s going on and concede that this is not the time to increase the tax burden on anybody–rich or poor. How low must our passive-aggressive money men and women drive the market before our president gets the message?
Mark Joseph is a producer, author and the editor of Bullypulpit.com.
” So breathing should be taxed? What difference is CO2 from a human than other sources? CO2 is CO2…
When are you going to learn that CO2 is not a pollutant. …”
This amply demonstrates your abject illiteracy on the subject. Exhalation from human beings will never be taxed. Were you lobotomized?
In a submarine, what happens if CO2 is allowed to collect in the air without mitigation? By your argument, submariners should do nothing as CO2 is not a pollutant.
(56) What do plants breathe? What do trees breathe?
So what you are advocating..let’s restrict the oxygen equivalent for plants?
Thought you wanted to protect the environment?
There is NO SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE that CO2 is harmful to our environment. This is just another scam to force an extreme agenda and ultimately tax everyday folk and line the pockets of the friends of the administration.
The government will abuse this and we will all pay.
This has nothing to do with literacy of the subject this is purely whether someone decides to the drink the raging left loon’s kool-aid. The CO2 argument is a scam to support the left.
Glenn, obviously you do not understand how stupid it is to ask what plants or trees breathe.
To find the loon, look to the far right. You have been seriously lied to by somebody.
(58) What is stupid is that you cannot understand that the classification of CO2 as a pollutant is a political move not scientific?
People are the biggest contributors of CO2 on this planet…how can you tax one form of CO2 production and not another – especially the largest contributor?
Why don’t we tax countries and/or states that have active volcanoes?
CO2 harms our environment as much as O2 does…so should we tax O2?
The arguments are ridiculous from the far left.
If the CO2 claim is real then people should be outfitted with a re-breather to capture the CO2…that will NEVER happen because CO2 is not a pollutant.
Wake up and try drinking some coffee instead of kool-aid.
Actually, the move to prevent CO2 from being named as a pollutant was political, entirely.
How can I tax one form of CO2 production and not another? Easy as pie. Some forms have a scientific rational; others, like breathing, have none.
Volcanos? Are you on LSD?
Your re-breather argument is preposterous. While it is not impossible in isolation to get CO2 in the atmosphere to a concentration where breathing it would kill a human being (natural events have killed all animals in a small range), in the broader sense it is impossible. Even if it were possible to gradually build to that concentration in the atmosphere, which it is not, it would not kill human beings by CO2 toxicity. Why? Human beings would already have long ago been extinct. Why? Because CO2 is a pollutant.
I think these issues are too complex for you to grasp.
http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2006/10/co2_acquittal.html
I fully understand the issue right down to the science and the mathematics behind ALL the facts.
Why don’t you take some time to really understand why CO2 is not a problem?
Your argument about taxing one form and not another regarding CO2 is irrational. How does breathing not count as production behind CO2? Maybe if we were able to contain all the CO2 produced directly by humans we wouldn’t have to tax business so much in this time of economic challenge…isn’t that what personal sacrifice is all about?
Literally the entire Obama/Pelosi agenda is about control and forcing an agenda which American will summarily reject and we will have squandered the best opportunity to actually fix some things in this country…all in the name of supporting an extreme and irrational ideology. It is interesting how the liberal process works…first you try the normal path (i.e. like amending the constitution) then when the people speak and reject it you guys run and try to get is forced on everyone through the courts and then when that doesn’t work you get corrupted politicians to try to make it happen and then you resort to violence…it is just bizarre. You guys just never give up and your ideology has nothing to do with what is right or fair it is all about control and money.
The DC voting bill is a perfect example. Travesty in regard to our Constitution. For the record I have no problem with people in DC to vote…but it needed to ratified through the states as the Constitution dictates. This was a very sleazy move.
Look at our borders…now we have 100’s of cities in this country where the Mexican cartel’s are wholesaling drugs and causing violence and oppression all because for some reason it is a bad idea to protect our borders. For the record I have no problem coming to America to immigrate but they need to do it legally just like everyone else has to. Being illegal in our country is no excuse…it’s ridiculous and the liberals allow it because once again it is about control and trapping their votes.
Obama’s brownshirts might actually end up in trouble here…well we will see maybe Obama & crew will squash it all.
http://www.capitalresearch.org/blog/2009/03/05/acorn-whistleblowers-complaint-available-here/
You link to some crackpot idiot moron. Lol. Send that guy a DeLorean. I need to go back in time and finish my homework.
(63) That’s your response. His math is solid. Somehow you immediately determine he is some crackpot idiot moron and yet he could probably tie half his brain behind his back and still have more brain horsepower than you on your best day.
The old demonize your enemy when they expose the truth…so liberal…so wrong…so left…
Now we see Senator Crook Dodd wants to pass a bill that would allow the FDIC to borrow $500 freakin billion dollars…WTH is another half trillion for this group…chump change.
Putting money in your mattresses sounds like good advice except Obama has that covered too…if you do that expect ACORN to break in and “recover” your money.
President Barack Obama now has the distinction of presiding over his own bear market.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 20 percent since Inauguration Day, the fastest drop under a new president in at least 90 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The gauge has lost 53 percent from its October 2007 record of 14,164.53, slipping 4.1 percent to 6,594.44 yesterday.
More than $1.6 trillion has been erased from U.S. equities since Jan. 20 as mounting bank losses and rising unemployment convinced investors the recession is getting worse. The president is in danger of breaking a pattern in which the Dow rallied 9.8 percent on average in the 12 months after a Democrat captured the White House, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
“People thought there would be a brief Obama rally, and that hasn’t happened,” said Uri Landesman, who oversees about $2.5 billion at ING Groep NV’s asset management unit in New York. “It speaks to the carnage that’s in the economy and the lack of confidence in the measures that have been announced.”
A bear market is defined as a decline of 20 percent or more.
Yeah his message of hope is doing so well…lol.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&sid=aGJ_.gr_awkY
Krauthammer is brilliant and he nails Obama in the most direct and concise way I have read yet. Charles gets it and pretty soon most of America will to.
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 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 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.
http://www.gazettextra.com/news/2009/mar/06/obamas-big-bang-agenda/
Obama’s Radicalism Is Killing the Dow
A financial crisis is the worst time to change the foundations of American capitalism.
Shocker…d’uh…all of you that thought Obama was going to govern from the center were clearly wrong.
The Pelosi/Reid/Obama hat trick is coming to fruition and it is a disaster for our country.
It’s hard not to see the continued sell-off on Wall Street and the growing fear on Main Street as a product, at least in part, of the realization that our new president’s policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy, not just mitigate the recession and financial crisis.
The illusion that Barack Obama will lead from the economic center has quickly come to an end. Instead of combining the best policies of past Democratic presidents — John Kennedy on taxes, Bill Clinton on welfare reform and a balanced budget, for instance — President Obama is returning to Jimmy Carter’s higher taxes and Mr. Clinton’s draconian defense drawdown.
Mr. Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget blueprint, by his own admission, redefines the role of government in our economy and society. The budget more than doubles the national debt held by the public, adding more to the debt than all previous presidents — from George Washington to George W. Bush — combined. It reduces defense spending to a level not sustained since the dangerous days before World War II, while increasing nondefense spending (relative to GDP) to the highest level in U.S. history. And it would raise taxes to historically high levels (again, relative to GDP). And all of this before addressing the impending explosion in Social Security and Medicare costs.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123629969453946717.html
If Michael Jackon’s comeback isn’t enough proof of how screwed up this country is…we now get more proof of Chicago style of politics is proliferating our government.
First we have Geithner pledging to go after those that don’t pay taxes even though he made an honest mistake about not paying taxes…
Now the ultimate in leftist hypocrisy is displayed…
Barney Frank Seeks Prosecutions for Those Involved in Downturn
House Financial Services Committee chairman to push for civil, criminal statutes to make bad practices illegal, but avoids addressing his own role in downturn.
Could it soon be criminal to lose money for taking on too much risk? If Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., has his way, it might. Just don’t expect him to talk to the media about his role in the crisis.
This is par for the course for this administration and the crooks in congress…I actually would have been surprised is Barney Frank didn’t try this…that is exactly how absurd this has gotten…America is just not going to stand for very much more of this.
http://businessandmedia.org/articles/2009/20090305230445.aspx
You know Joe Biden said it won’t look like we know what we are doing during the first 6 months…boy he wasn’t kidding but by the end of 6 months they are most assured going to secure the title of Worst President Ever!!!
Medical use: Based on the compilation of researches performed by various institutes, it’s
known that the vapor produced in the balloons consisted of lower concentration of harmful toxics as opposed to other vaporizers.
Caution should also be executed and exercised whenever you already have a vaporizer in your house, especially when time children is around.
However, I both couldn’t find the vaporizer right now we own and wasn’t completely sure it even still worked (we haven’t used it within three years) so I made a decision to just cost the store and purchase a new one.
This will give you relief in labour for pregnancy is chinese
culture very similar. So, you are at in your belly button and sternum.
The paper also laid out the possibility of chinese culture a
pumpkin, has been used successfully and easily handled at home.