What Has To Be True?

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Watching the stock market 'rebound' in the face of what seems to be consistent bad economic news, I'm forced to contemplate the why of it.

After the 1929 Crash, unemployment for 1930 was 8.7%, and for 2009 its expected to reach 10% or so. Not good.

Manufacturing is down.

USPS volume is down 15%. Ditto for FED-EX.

The county where I live is short 30 MILLION Dollars, the state is short 6 BILLION.

The state pension fund lost 1/2 its value.

So why is Wall Street so fucking happy?

The answer is: Washington is looting America.

What this means for you is, you wont have a job or retirement, you'll be out on the street because you lost your house, and the Chinks & Arabs will be living there (because they used their American Dollars to buy your house and to buy your job and ship it back to China). You'll be sleeping in a refrigerator box like the average gook and wog.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Apparently Obama plans to buy up a ton of Social Security IOUs the Chinese are holding. Obama will trade freshly printed American currency for the notes. The Chinks cant spend Dollars in China, so they'll spend them here buying American companies (jobs) and technology to ship back to China. They can crate jobs and machines!

The Social Security IOUs are worth shit, so Obama will likely use them in place of firewood or coal. STELLA will be orgasmic about this.

The Dollars go to the banks, who loan them back to you so you can run up more debt and inflate the hell out of the economy. Remember! We aint producing shit, so what we do sell will cost a lot more and increase sales taxes and income taxes.

We're fucked by the Magic Negro and his Prosperity Wand.

 

[JackLuis]

To be fair JB, the past administrations contributed to the mess.
The so called "Magic Negro" is trying to fix the mess with out letting the Banks and AIG types fail and take down the economy.

Congress is the blame for our problems, really. Tax cuts for a slender minority and cleaning out the Social Security trust fund to put more into Defense spending have more to do with the mess than Obama's projected spending.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

JACKLUIS

You betcha Dubya was up to his elbows in it. But it really started back in 1978 when Carter and the Democrats amended the usery laws to make it more profitable for companies to lend money to the Rubes, than make stuff to sell.

A fanatic Democrat pointed this out in the newspaper yesterday.

I've said all along that Bush is a perfumed prince like Kennedy and Kerry and Pelosi and the others.

But regardless of Bush's culpability, Obama knows whats up, and he's selling us down the ribber.

I suspect the Chinese threatened to make trouble for us everywhere if we didnt buy the worthless bonds back.

 

[amicus]

17 if the 20 'G-20' nations have imposed 'protectionist' policies to preserve jobs in their nations and urging citizens to 'buy' only from from their own people.

I too, with the continuation of bad economic news and the knowledge that nothing is being done to address the root of the problems, lack understanding as to why the market is rising. Early this morning before the NYSE opened, the Japanese market was up over three percent and I expected the American market to follow suit.

It did.

Amicus...

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

AMICUS

You know, as I know, that you cant believe a word coming from Washington, so we have to do the math and solve for all the unknowns.

And the only good news is coming from Washington. Everywhere else on the planet things are shit.

It doesnt matter if Bush set the house on fire or who lit the match, the goddamned place is on fire and Obama be the new fire chief. He wanted the job, he got the job.

The head of the IMF is now talking about war breaking out across the 3rd world because of the poverty the financial mess is causing.

Dont sound wunnerful to me.

 

[WRJames]

What has to be true is such a complicated question -- but one thing you can be sure of is that we are very far from seeing a "true" picture of the information.

Here are a just a few factors to consider:

housing prices are down -- but they are down from unrealistic bubble levels. Real estate was never worth those prices.

Changes in accounting rules have made financial institutions take huge paper losses because they have to value assets very conservatively. The timing of these changes was just right to make the bad news of the housing crisis look even worse than it was. If you can make you books look really bad, the feds might give you a few billion with no strings attached.

Companies wait for someone to declare a recession to clean house. That means that they clean up their accounts receivable, their inventory, and do layoffs that they may have planned all along, but refrained from during good times -- all things that might make the company look bad and drive down the stock price.

Now, you take these relatively innocuous things and you have the chattering class talking up how terrible things are -- are you wind up convicing people there is an awful economic downturn in progress. And pretty soon, you really have one.

Basically, we have talked ourselves into this recession, and it remains to be seen if we can talk ourselves back out of it.

 

[amicus]

I suggest, WR, that the economic problems are not just 'perception', as you seem to indicate, but are deep rooted in government interference in the market place in an attempt to deny the competitive nature of the market and replace it with a 'fair and equal', dispensation of the fruits of labor.

Redistributing wealth is what Marx and Keynes called it, disregarding both market mechanics and individual rights and liberties.

Amicus..

 

[WRJames]

I suggest, WR, that the economic problems are not just 'perception', as you seem to indicate, but are deep rooted in government interference in the market place in an attempt to deny the competitive nature of the market and replace it with a 'fair and equal', dispensation of the fruits of labor.

Redistributing wealth is what Marx and Keynes called it, disregarding both market mechanics and individual rights and liberties.

Amicus..

Well even the die hard free market types are realizing they were wrong

Most of of them are saying the markets did themselves in, despite the theory that markets were rational and self correcting. The reality is that they got highjacked by scoundrels.

 

[amicus]

Not arguing just for the sense of arguing, but I see it differently than 'scoundrels', as the market place has handled that type before.

I suggest that the bankers, financiers, all involved, became so at the behest of government with Fannie and Freddie. When the only game in town or the biggest one, is through the facade of the Feds, I suppose the imperative was to get their share while they could?

dunno...not an expert in this field but that is how it seems to me?

amicus...

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

WR

One of the most liberal people I know of wrote in the paper yesterday that we're fucked. She's a Democrat. Jew, ACLU member, etc. We're fucked.

This is no economic correction. USPS is trying to dump 150,000 people.

 

[amicus]

That is the United States Postal Service, the Post Office, that wants early retirement for that number of employees.

Think about that. With a declining volume of mail and packages brought about because the market has made the heavily unionized, old fashioned postal service obsolete, they finally act to cut costs?

Wow, such a revelation!

amicus...

 

[Dragonlipz]

We may be well and truly fucked:

but not until we've all been fucked by the bikini barista at the expresso stand.......she is a vision and a treat.....not necessarily in that order......I always order a triple expresso.......she delivers.....