Alas, John, as a lurker most of the time, feeling guilty occasionally at taking advantage of the superb
dialogues on this thread, your hint of true optimism, if I indeed do not misinterpret, is in itself alarming enough to elicit a response, admittedly not nearly as well as informed as many here.
One of the dollarscholars on Bubblevision today actually articulated aloud his concern for a real estate bubble!
I live in the sticks now, far from the madding crowd, raising expensive war horses I don't care if no on buys, but there are in my view several many alarming things going on. As you rightly point out Enron and Argentina HAVE
happened BUT no one seems (at least Joe-6-Pack) to have noticed. Latin America collectively owes USA ~$500
billion, and things are not well there. Inlaws in the other room are watching a football game in Qualcomm stadium (sorry Maurice) and it appears half empty and it is a "bowl game", fans having to come (by air? from Ausitn TX and Seattle WA)...1000 miles away, but an empty stadium??? Alarm bells ring for me. Sixty-five percent of people doing refinances increased!! the amount of their debt in doing so and still people are spending on your street as if no one ever heard of having to pay the piper, is that not the case? Japan is going broke and who is going to keep lending us money to finance our deficit. Our carriers cannot protect our cities in the heartland and our "Homeland Defense Secretary" is an impotent joke who should have kept his job as a governor. We are headed for major deficit spending, etc,. In short I do not see this market behavior as climbing a wall of worry. I see it as crawling
out onto a fragile limb. I think I fit best if put in a catagory, in the camp of Jay, who sees this as exceedingly dangerous and unpredictable territory none of us in this country have ever lived through before, or even
read about in history books. With short term T-bills, a little money in GNMA funds at 7%, quite a bit of cash and a healthy bit of reserves in dividend paying gold stocks I consider myself conservative and yes...scared...and I am an old fart who has seen the 60's the 70's the 90's and read a lot of financial history. And this does not look even vaguely familiar. Good luck in your Weltbild...it is brighter than mine.
Jim Black
could the nutcase muslim with unstable shoes have been noticed?? EVERY single one of the families of friends
we left in Seattle have had their retiremant accounts decimated (poor term, only one in ten, not nearly bad enough a description) because of faith in the likes of MSFT, ORCL, QCOM, DOT***, even AT&T, Winstar, CSCO, etc., etc., etc., and many of them can never make it back...and still there is no realistic alarm on the part of most, rather
a quiet desperation in realizing many of them can never retire. The war is real and most Americans do not know it or recognize its costs. |
