"relax all you people who are complaining about the OT stuff... nothing is going on here anyway."
There seems to have been a good bit going on here. But I suppose that I should have remembered La Rochefoucauld's observation, that we can forgive those whom we find boring, but are unable to forgive those who are bored with us. I therefore apologize for being bored with a topic about which no one seems to have anything intelligent to say, and I therefore retract anything I might have said about it, including the sentence that is about to end with this period.
As for the Big Kahuna, an editorial appeared in the Sunday edition of our local paper, informing us all blandly that the stock market was the right place for private savings, that it always went up in the end, etc. This strikes me as a pretty powerful contrarian indication that we have a long way to go on the downside.
Many kinds of economic and financial catastrophes are waiting to happen--major international bank failures, currency collapses,a possible increase in oil prices. To say this is not to predict the end of the world, but to argue that the stock market not only rewards risk, it punishes it as well, and that until P/Es and dividend yields are back below their long-term averages, people will be losing money on stocks. |
