Oh yea after bailout down jones is down - again ...

[The Buddha]

Ha ha ... its 500 pts down ... wasn't the bail out going to fix all that ...
Wonder if we can repeal it, or is our money like ... gone.
Morons ... too bad no one in the house, the senate, the white house ... has any freaking sense, or even a spine. Or atleast the freaking thought that ... didn't you want the freedoms of doing whatever a few years ago ... you made your bed. Sleep in it ... we dont care.
BTW If you have hurricane katrina comming in the next 1-2 days, and you call an insurance company to buy storm insurance ... you know what you'd hear ... They say OK, we'll send an appraiser out to your place, we'll get a value appraisal done in the next 2-3 weeks, then we'll give you what your options are ... we should approve a bail out based on the full evaluvation and it needs to take 90-120 days ... not write it in the middle of the night and cram it down everyones throat the next morning.
A$$holes.
Cool.
Buddha.

[ohgood]

sometimes , i really like your logic man.

mr. mad money was on one of the morning shows saying in plain english "Pull your money out of stocks if you THINK you'll need it in the next 5-10 years. This is your only warning!"

ya, when cramer tells you to pull out money, shaZam! is just beginning to be bad. if you can afford some losses, ya, buy up those bargains and HOPE you're right. we little people are running from it. RUNNING !


your rants are getting easier to understand though, it's weird, and shouldn't be that way.

[The Buddha]

Naaaa not a problem ... all my $$ is invested well ... mostly in big 4 ... you know ... kawasaki, hinda, suzuki and yamaha's best products. I plan on making a killing ... sheesh ... if aluminum goes up any more I could scrap the sheite for much more than I paid for some of it. Aluminum wheels especially ...
Cool.
Buddha.

[frankieG]

recession or depression, pick one...it is coming.

[The Buddha]

Without idiotic governmental intervention depression will be fast and sharp and last 6-9 months. Meddle in it and it will last 3 years, and worse, the recovery will be weaker till a useless bubble forms and then it will just blow up again leading to another depresson.
This one was triggered by the knee jerk reaction to the 01 recesson. They never let it get depressed then and just made a larger problem.
BTW let there be a depression,. atleast it will kill prices on the market ... and we can make stuff here cheaper than china.
Let there be a depression and at the tail end of it, the governments can hire the work force they need to replace the retirement wave ... without it, wages gonna be far too inflated to have any real hiring by government.
Cool.
Buddha.

[The Buddha]

OK its down 607 points ... we have to see how much its down by and that's how many billion we have to give for it.
Cool.
Buddha.

[ohgood]

i just watched a skype session (recorded) from two really smart money guys i know. they are quickly and quietly moving money to places that won't be effected. stocks of any type are definitely not where you want to be. some of the shaZam! they're saying (speculation) is pretty scary.

riots in the streets stuff.

can't afford to buy bread stuff.

your car doesn't matter anymore, cause no one can afford to SHIP gas to your station, let alone you actually buy it, if it were there.

depression, i'll take that one please. let's just take the stab and get it over with.

[yamahonkawazuki]

down over 800 points but up a few. before too long this will be blamed on ( insert name here)

[mkrasavin]

if you have money laying around...
invest in silver. its at $11 an oz, ill post on this thread again when its at 40 an oz

[yamahonkawazuki]

ive already got 20 plus pounds of it. from my time as a jeweler, (in 1 gal. buckets)

[The Buddha]

OK another 350 points ... gone. Down jones belongs at 8,000 or so, no bailing nothing is gonna help that.
Houses belong @2.5 average income. No bailout is gonna change that and worse ... they are working on "how to keep homowners in their home" ... is going to fail, miserably after the intervention wrires off trillions in capital to these wanna be billionaires with no education, no talent and no work ethic ... and they still walk cos now the house is still over valued.
Can you say repetetive bail out loop ... The goal has to be to get them out of the house as quickly as possible, 15 days after they miss ... sudden death, like texas.
Cool.
Buddha.

[Cal Price]

Ah! is this the end of capitalism? probably not but it might be the end of capitalism as we know it. Like it or not the US, Britain, Germany, France, Italy and others just about all the G7 and Asian "tigers" have nationalised banks, they may not call it that but they have taken control and are bankrolling them so it's hard to see it any other way.
We may not like it but we are where we are and stuck with it, the point now is what will government do to protect itself (they will say protect us) in the future, a lot more regulation I guess.
What really gets to be is the bankers and financial "experts" that got us here are the ones pontificating about what we all and our respective governments should be doing to help them. The taxpayer is being asked, as ever, to cough up and solve the problem. past experience is that it takes 13% of GDP in any given country to bail out a banking crisis but this one seems potentially deeper. 13% of GDP is a hell of a lot of bread. I recall when Tony Blair said that the carbon emission issue could be tackled at a cost of 1% GDP over 20 years big biz went into apoplexy now they are looking for anything from 13% to a possible 20% but  apparently that's OK and the annoying thing is that the bastards have us by the balls and for mutual benefit we probably will have to cough up.
A lot of them seem not to realise that government does not have unlimited money, in fact government has no money at all, they use mine and yours. they can only raise money in limited ways, taxation which would work against things in present situation, they can sell things but when the family silver has gone it's gone forever, they can print it which in closed economies can work for a while but on a global scale it's a no-no raising the spectre of hyper inflation and the rise of extremism like the 1930s in Germany, lastly they can borrow but who from? and at what cost?
Clearly government can't protect everyone and where do you stop? There is a theory that the banks don't actually have a problem with lack of money but with lack of confidence, perhaps the answer is to keep a tight arse on and wait a few months.

When I "retired" three years ago I reduced the spread of risk I carried and went for "safe as houses" options like errrrr bank stocks and big retailers so I'm well and truly shot in the foot - such is life huh.

maybe the bankers, or should that start with a "W" need to take a breath and count to ten, if their maths are good enough.

[Cal Price]

Cor, when i asked "Is this the end of capitalism?" I expected an avalanche but nothing came. 24 hours on and you could argue that it is the end of Anglo-Saxon style capitalism with the woprld moving to the Franco-German model that looks a lot like capitalism but has much more state intervention and control. The UK prime minister said "We are bailing out the banks not to help the bankers but everyone else" which just about sums up the situation here at least.
The world has changed for good or ill now we will have to live with the ramifications for quite a while.

[The Buddha]

Sometimes when you or kerry or some other people post ... we just read and think ... and think and think ...
Cool.
Buddha.

[mkrasavin]

+1 On the lack of confidence.

But as much of there being an economic crisis, there is a great opportunity to make a good amount of money off of it.
Diversifying outside of the US stock market would be a great idea right now...

Even though I think more and more banks are going to fail over the next couple of weeks... eventually the interest rate is expected to drop further within the next few months, meaning it will be easier for companies to borrow money, meaning they should have a higher return (and the recession may be shorter lived than not). On the other hand more people will be further likely to invest outside of their savings accounts.

[The Buddha]

The problem isn't lack of investment ... the problem is that loose money has resulted in a lot of bad and worthless investments.

Also the tendency of tearing down perfectly good buildings to put up worthless new ones in its place is an added side effect ... calling it "urban renewal" dont mean crap, its still a lifeless and soul less building in an already crowded down town area and heck a parking lot will have more use and more personality.

If money is thrown about with abandon, people will borrow recklessly and spend it needlessly ...

Dont loosen the strings, dont lower interests, dont bail out investors (OK suspend the mark to market rule till the market returns) and just let the excesses flush themselves out. A new developemnt of a 1000 houses in a city with 40,000 foreclosures and several more short sales makes no sense ... let market rates determine what sells and where ...

If you keep meddling on the demand side, maybe you should meddle on the supply side and burn down most of the foreclosures ...

Instead of building these 40,000 houses, imagine if we had built 1 windmill in the place of each of those houses.

We have become experts at wanting "new" everything ... unfortunatley ... all the new is made in china.
Cool.
Buddha.

[The Buddha]

Another 500 points down, and that means another 500 billion for them.
Cool.
Buddha.

[jserio]

 

[Cal Price]

This whole sorry saga is at least a perfect example of how none of the countries, continents, business sectors etc are totally independent any more. The growing interdependence may have a beneficial effect once this current problem is overcome.

Oil and house prices have fallen, if the price of bread, furniture and whisky had fallen this would be a "good" thing but when house prices fall it is a "bad" thing. This has nothing to do with somewhere to live but because people consider their houses as an investment rather than a home and have over-borrowed on it and the lenders have let them on the assumption that the value will keep increasing. Something like that happened in the late 1980s but the bankers conveniently forgot that.

In UK the fall in house prices is more puzzling as we have an underlying shortage of homes, normally the golden rule of supply and demand would keep them up. We have the spectacle of banks in Iceland crashing and this affecting several other European economies (so far) and Internet depositors and public bodies having their deposits "frozen" (no pun intended) Iceland is a country of 300,000 people, not even a decent sized provincial city, but the banking sector has become massive and out of proportion to the size of it's economy, almost certainly bigger than its own govt and regulating authority. The big G7/G8 countries and some others, particularly the oil producers and manufacturers are capable and will be able to prop up their systems and we await the result with some trepidation but small economies may not be able to support sectors that are out of proportion and that in turn will have a knock-on effect to other economies.

When all this is over we will have to recognise that no single economy can stand or act alone and the world bank needs to become more pro-active with real powers acting more like the fed / boe / ecb. Can you imagine a world bank setting your local interest rates? it might come to that. Getting agreement on something like this has to be a nightmare, the last thing we need is a toothless tiger gravy train like the U.N.

The other historical solution is a world war but I don't think we can afford one of those.