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This Bailout’s Not For You
A few months ago we considered telling readers to skip a mortgage payment or two, just in case the government decided to bail out hardship cases. We scrapped the idea, though, out of concern that some of you might take us seriously and risk jeopardizing your credit scores. In retrospect, we can now confess that we were serious – or at least half-serious, since it seemed likely at the time that homeowners who had gotten in way over their heads would be the first to receive special treatment after the government figured out that “rescuing” multinational banks would do nothing to staunch the tide of foreclosures.
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Affluence Ebbs as Retailers Die
My wife does most of the grocery shopping, but on my last few visits to Whole Foods and Safeway, I was dismayed to find that some of the things she had sent me to buy were unavailable. The shelves where I might have expected to find these items, including fruit juices, canned soup and crock mustard, were bare. I assumed that there had been a run on them, perhaps because they had been heavily discounted. However, now comes word on the evening news that some major purveyors, including Kraft and Sarah Lee, are cutting back on selection by focusing on the brands that sell best. Signs of scarcity are not confined to branded products, either, since both stores have noticeably thinned their usually burgeoning produce bins so that they are less cornucopian. The grocer told my wife that this greatly reduces waste, and that every penny counts because profit margins in the produce aisle are so thin.
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Dollar, Gold Rise Sharply: A Disaster Ahead?
We were quite bullish on gold as a new trading week began yesterday, but is there perhaps more to it than merely bullish charts would have us infer? Here’s the message that went out the night before to Rick’s Picks subscribers who may have been disappointed by gold’s quiet finish last week: “Anyone who thinks gold is about to stall out without taking on $1000 should read today’s tout for Comex April. Although the futures have hesitated within 1.70 of our longstanding target [a hula number!] at 952.30, the shallow pullback so far suggests the pivot will not prove to be a serious impediment.” When the dust had settled yesterday, 952.30 proved to have been no serious obstacle at all. In fact, April Gold shot up $28 to $971, and the futures were giving up almost none of the gain as the evening session got under way.
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$787 Billion Mistake Was Politically Unavoidable
“They know that this bill is not stimulus. They know that this bill will not do anything to create long-term, sustained economic growth.” Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Illinois), quoted in the New York Times, referring to his constituents.
Is this so? Do voters in fact “know” what many politicians are evidently afraid to admit – that the nation is about to squander $800 billion of precious capital on the biggest piece of pork ever to work its way through Congress’s perennially irritable bowel? Our guess is that, yes, the average voter – even the voter who fervently supported Obama in the November election – is skeptical that the stimulus bill will put the economy back on track. But if Americans appear to have suspended their disbelief about this for the time being, it is only because the news media have set aside the legislation’s many unsettling details so that they might trumpet the President’s recklessly unrealistic goals with the same unquestioning zeal that they brought to his message of “change” and “hope” during the campaign.
Traders have been subject to the same hardships as everyone else in America. These hardships have been brought about by the incompetence and corruption in our financial sytems . Go after the criminals that created this mess and recover some of the money they swindled in the process of destroying our banking system ( and the worlds ). Traders are not the problem, the problem is corruption and incompetence thoughout the system. The money spent on all the bailouts would have gone a long way towards cleaning things up, as it stands now we can’t even get an explanation as to where all the money went. Paulson knows where it went, does anybody think it is a coincidence that the big bank stocks “held up” until the day he left office?