Read them and weep, all ye despairing bears! The chart below shows a wicked “island gap reversal” in the share price of Goldman Sachs, and it is as much proof as anyone should need to infer that yet more weeks or perhaps even months of false spring await U.S. stocks. When Lehman, Bear Stearns and all the rest were in crash-and-burn mode a little more than a year ago, who would have imagined that as early as 2009, banks and securities firms would be paying out a record $140 billion to employees? Major banks, hedge funds and asset managers are on track to do just that, and it would top the previous peak year of 2007, when the impending financial crash was broached as an absolute certainty only by certain fringe characters in the newsletter world.
Concerning Goldman, which lies within pitching-wedge distance of new all time highs, Jim Cramer thinks it’s bound for at least $240. That would represent a 25% rally from yesterday’s settlement price of $193. Cramer is even more bullish than we are, since 205.46, or perhaps 213.62 at the outside, is as high as Rick’s Picks can see for now. Incidentally, when Goldman was trading around $60, we’d projected a bear market low of $29. We promised to don a grass skirt and dance the hula in Times Square if we were wrong, and so we were: The stock went no lower than $47. Live and learn, they say. We’ll let you know when it’s time for our big day in the Big Apple.
Olympia Sleet
For those who have already given up on America, the huge Wall Street payout was not the only reminder of the Republic’s descent into darkness. Pictures of Republican turncoat Olympia Snow graced the front page of nearly every major newspaper. We’ve been hearing for many weeks that her vote in the Senate was the key to getting President Obama’s health care bill passed, but we could never quite believe that such a giant piece of the nation’s future could depend on the vote of one legislative minx. Turns out we were wrong.
We shudder to think of what deal might have caused her to change her mind, but it could not possibly have been mere facts. On that score, we’ll take the insurance companies at their word. They say the legislation will add $5,000 to every household’s annual health insurance bill, and that sounds low to us. Some on the Left will say it’s about time Uncle Sam socked it to the insurers, but it is not the insurers who will pay. Anyone who is for this bill obviously believes someone else will bear its cost. In fact, we all will, and the final tab will be so much higher than Baucus’ estimate that it will dwarf Medicare. We knew the taxpayers were on the ropes when Rep. Joe Wilson called Obama a liar and the news media (other than the Wall Street Journal op-ed page) failed to back him up.
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Gary L:
“Isolationism and creating an excuse for war is not an opposing view. We excluded everyone from any world discussion,”
One can only square your comment if you mean by isolationism, doing what we please without caring what anyone has to say about it (“excluded everyone…”)”. OK, using that definition, then they mey not be opposing views.
However, when you criticise the Republicans, and you do so by decrying their isolationism, then you should use it in the meaning it has had for a very long time, as in Buchanan and isolantionism, or Lindbergh and the America First isolationism.
The latter two are examples of the usual definiton in this context. Making up your own is rather useless.
And to repeat, using the common usage, INTERFERING left and right in the world (ala Bush, Cheney, and the neocon agenda) is clearly in opposition to “”ISOLATING” within the US and letting the rest of the world be.
I did point out that I did not agree using “isolationism” disdainfully in the latter case, but I do agree with yoru disdainful comment in the former, whcih makes sense. Having had to assume that you are also employing common usage, then chiding both approaches makes no sense.
Under this reading, you are really dealing with two Rep. parties, the former being the new, hijacked kind, the latter being the old traditional one. They are opposed to each other, see the recent spat viz. Lindsey Graham, and Ron Paul, so how can you be against both and make sense?
You can teach empathy about as much as ethics or honesty in a school or academic setting. But Democratic empathey consists of enlistin OTHER people’s money to support the poor and downtrodden.
Pelosi, Feinstein, Kennedy, and the list of multi-millionaire Dems in the Congress goes on and on, or take our most famous community activist, who was rich even before the Swedish largesse. These people spend their lives in “public service” , which supposedly is not well paying, yet are millionaires nevertheless.
How come none of them ever FIRST give away all theirs, before asking me to contribute to their pet causes first? Never happens.