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Damn, darrin -- how can you even walk upright with that little brain capacity? I'm sorry your metaphor sucked in the first place, now you are compounding your stupidity.
You've got that right, but we're only buying the homes for those people too irresponsible to pay their own notes.
Damn, darrin -- how can you even walk upright with that little brain capacity? I'm sorry your metaphor sucked in the first place, now you are compounding your stupidity.
I'm not going to go find an article about Obama's mortgage rescue plan, but do you seriously not understand that those who irresponsibly got into mortgages they couldn't afford, specifically will not be helped? The housing plan is all about saving the responsible mortgage holders who got ed over by the irresponsible dead-weight (who again, will not be helped).
Your embrace of mis-information is shocking.
That is one of the risks of a (relatively) free market.
You really suck at reading then. And you didn't post them to back up your OP, you posted them to back up your argument that everyone expected stocks to rise in the 1Q of this year.
It will probably just be a matter of months before stocks fall from their [COLOR=#008000 ! important]new[COLOR=#008000 ! important] highs[/COLOR][/COLOR] — and fall hard.Those are from the first 2 articles. They were talkinga bout year end rallys and giving credit for them to the election of Obama. You are talking about 2009 stocks while they are talking about end year 2008 stocks."If history holds we should expect at least a modest rise in equity prices between election day and year-end."
And then your last article is about a rally THAT HAD ALREADY OCCURRED.
The Dow has rallied 17% during its current five-session win streak — its best five-session run since 1932. The rallies coincided with Obama-related news and public appearances where he introduced his economic dream team and sent a clear message that he'll do whatever it takes to repair the economy.
good find, DarrinS
Its both partys fault to allow this crap to have happened all these years. Its truly stupid to blame one party or just say "Bush" But thats politics.
For Obama and the Democrats writing and spending a bill that has $600 million to buy more and newer cars for government bureaucrats,$50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts, along with $44 million to refurbish the Department of Agriculture, and $150 million to spruce up the Smithsonian buildings makes this Obamas problem now. Many many more dollars being spent to "stimulate" the economy that even democrats are turning thier heads.
But when you point out Barack said "no ear marks" when there is over 8,000 in this bill you have to hear "BUSH". I'm glad I am not a Democrat or a Republican but a free thinking man who does not choose sides because of my party loyality. Some of you should do the same.
Slash and burn
Mar 5th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Stockmarkets grapple with savage reductions in companies’ dividends
...That banks and insurance companies will chop their payments is now understood, but the pain has spread. General Electric (GE) has cut its dividend for the first time in 71 years, Dow Chemical for the first time since 1912. In Europe previously reliable payers like Telecom Italia and Anglo-American, a mining firm, have reduced their payouts, and even BP has said it cannot increase its dividend at today’s oil prices. Income investors were left to ponder Eurotunnel, the operator of the rail link between France and Britain, which will pay the first dividend since its creation in 1986. Its $9m may buy a few tissues for those mourning the loss of $9 billion of annual payouts from GE alone.
http://www.economist.com/finance/dis...ry_id=13240730A share’s value must be the present value of all future dividends—otherwise stockmarkets would be a giant Ponzi scheme. But in theory shareholders should not care whether dividends are paid out today or later. Just as taking money out of a cash machine does not make you richer, nor does extracting cash from a firm you own. Investors who need income to meet pension payments, for example, can raise it just as well by selling a small part of their holdings instead of receiving dividends. It is true that dividends, rather than capital appreciation, have provided a big chunk of long-term equity returns. But this partly reflects the choice of firms to pay out a big chunk of their earnings. Had they paid out less, capital appreciation would, in theory, have been commensurately higher.
Yikes.
My gut has been saying that it was going to get very bad for a couple of years, and that instinct that it would get worse than a lot of economists were predicting even 6 months ago seems to have panned out.
We just simply spent too much, and saved too little.
We are reversing that, which is better in the long term, but the adjustment will be painful.
Since I brought up efficient markets:
The grand illusion
Mar 5th 2009
From The Economist print edition
How efficient-market theory has been proved both wrong and right
THE past ten years have dealt a series of blows to efficient-market theory, the idea that asset prices accurately reflect all available information. In the late 1990s dotcom companies with no profits and barely any earnings were valued in billions of dollars; and in 2006 investors massively underestimated the risks in bundling together portfolios of American subprime mortgages.
There is now widespread acceptance that investors can behave irrationally, creating very large anomalies. Take the momentum effect, the practice of buying the stockmarket’s best performers over the previous time period. A study by the London Business School found that, since 1900, buying British stocks with the best momentum would have turned £1 into £1.95m (before costs and tax) by the end of last year; the same sum invested in the worst performers would have grown to just £31. In efficient markets, such an anomaly should be arbitraged away.
Belief in efficient-market theory made the authorities reluctant to restrain either the dotcom or the housing and credit bubbles. Perversely, the result has been much greater state interference in the markets than was dreamed of ten years ago, with commercial banks being nationalised or subsidised, and central banks acting as a buyer of last resort for financial assets.
But it is important not to throw out all the insights of efficient-market enthusiasts. Although it is theoretically possible to make money by outperforming the markets, it is extremely difficult in practice. That ought to have made investors su ious of the smoothness of the returns of Bernard Madoff, who has been accused of a vast fraud. His strategy, as advertised, might have produced less volatile returns than the index, but the absence of negative months suggested almost perfect market timing.
Some fund managers have beaten the markets over long periods. The problem is to identify them in advance. Picking them after they have outperformed may be too late, as those who backed Legg Mason’s Bill Miller have recently discovered. Why is this? Fund managers are human too and subject to behavioural biases. In addition, the larger their funds become (as their reputation spreads), the more difficult it is to outperform.
The temptation has also been to assume that fees are positively correlated with performance—that if mutual fund managers charging 1.5% are good, hedge-fund managers charging 2% (and 20% of performance) are even better. Because investors cannot beat the market in aggregate, all this means is that money is transferred from investors to fund managers. Even David Swensen, the man who led the drive into alternative assets at Yale University, thinks most investors should rely on low-cost index-tracking funds.
But perhaps the area where the efficient-market hypothesis should have had greater weight is at banks. Many lament the demise of old-style banking, the “three-six-three” model where bankers borrowed money at 3%, lent it at 6% and were on the golf course at 3pm. That model broke down because markets were fairly efficient; the margins on lending to corporations became too low.
So banks were attracted to the higher-margin business of investment banking. Commercial banks could use their capital to back up their advisory operations and outmuscle old-style investment banks. The latter duly abandoned the partnership structure and raised money on the stockmarket, or were bought by commercial banks. The same logic required new trading desks to handle the banks’ positions, and those desks quickly became profit centres of their own.
But how were those trading desks making money? Perhaps they were exploiting information gathered by the rest of the group, a tactic that, if not illegal, put them in conflict with their clients. Or they were taking advantage of an artificially low cost of capital. With commercial banks, that cost was low because of the implicit public subsidy provided by deposit guarantees. Without such guarantees, savers would have wanted higher interest rates from banks with trading arms to reflect the risk of a market-related loss. In the good years, when they randomly beat the market, the traders earned bonuses. In the bad years, the taxpayers have picked up the bill.
And that raises a fundamental question. If regulators thought markets were too efficient to interfere with, how come they allowed banks to get involved in an activity which, after bonuses, was a game they collectively could not win?
That was hurtful -- and unnethethary.
God I love the Economist. Those guys rock.
For what it is worth, I think you are asking a fairly valid question that should be asked, and are getting a bit ganged up on.That was hurtful -- and unnethethary.
I also disagree somewhat with the premise of the OP, as I have made clear.
I would ask simply:
What if he isn't really doing anything wrong, but that bad events have simply moved past his ability to really effect and THAT is what the market is really reacting to?
That is what I think has happened.
I think that no matter what he did or does in the next few months, the markets would be doing the same thing, because the problem has gotten that bad.
I loved it when Mike Meyers was still funny.
Or maybe its just time to get a government job?
People may have Government jobs already but don't know it.
Actually, around Christmas, I lost about 40% of my hours a draftsman. I recently applied and took a test to be a census worker.
What's that like?
The test? Insultingly simple.
edit: let's just hope the feds aren't into drug testing lowly census workers. Because that would be significantly harder for me to pass.
The DOW knows all...
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/in...-dow-knows-all
rofl at the DOW plummetting after Truman announces victory in WWII
Last edited by PixelPusher; 03-06-2009 at 07:25 PM.
companies and there lobbyists are nervous because they are losing clout by the minute......that's all this is.
Along with the right to fail. The assholes in congress need to stop bailing out their elitist friends. They are making our economy worse.
This is your best post in quite sometime, WC. You might even be right.
Hey, I have no argument there. I didn't have anything in 401Ks, so I was all about letting the banking system tank.
However, I also knew there was no way the boomers were letting that outcome happen.
Wow, excellent source. And the rest of us neanderthals are stuck using the wiki.
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