Maurice,
I truly believe that your USA based holdings are as safe here as such assets could be anywhere in the world. Things are going along just fine and I really believe that the coming "housing recession" might turn out to be a storm over an anthill. I suppose there are plenty of problems here, there always are but I imagine things will work out just fine, like they always have.
There are surely plenty of folks with too much debt but there are a whole lot more folks with little debt or none whatsoever. Most folks I know, both "rich" and "poor" fall into this later category.
The increases in productivity here in recent years are really amazing, and this runs from town dentist and barber shop to the factory floor. And I suppose that there really was a considerable need for more housing, albeit maybe not as much as has been created recently.
On Iraq, the town National Guard unit just returned from a one year tour of duty there and suffered not a single casualty, thank God. And the guys I have talked with about things there are hopeful and say that conditions there are not nearly as dire as the US media pretends. Remember, there was just now a national election and about 90% of the national media types, from camera toters to network heads are Democrats or liberals, this being due to a concerted effort on the part of the left going back to the New Deal. Not that I think that we have any business in Iraq.
And I just don't get the comparisons with the Great Depression, in those days half the folks in the country derived their income from the farm sector in one way or another, and this during a period of very rapid advancements in yield per acre and a world wide glut of agricultural products. This, more than anything related to the stock market or industry was the root cause of the crash.
To make matters worse there was coupled with this increasing profit squeeze in farm operations that had been getting worse for decades, at least from the end of the Civil War, you had an increasing desire of people to remain on the farm and make a go of things there, because life on the farm was simply of much higher quality than city life say 80 years ago. Just the contagious disease issue alone in those days was justification to stay on the farm if at all possible. But anyway, far too many folks stayed on the farm far too long and this was the cause of much trouble in an era of vast overproduction.
Anyway, I just don't think that any collapse is pending. I would wager (and am wagering) that things will muddle along pretty much as they have all my life.
Slagle |
