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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ild who wrote (42326)	9/26/2005 2:25:56 PM
From: ild	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 110194

Date: Mon Sep 26 2005 13:03 trotsky (P. Yorkie@housing) ID#248269: Copyright © 2002 trotsky/Kitco Inc. All rights reserved "Incidentally I notice that according to Bloomberg the lastest ( out today ) US housing numbers show the medium price up a bit and sales booming." it's in many ways reminiscent of the tech bubble. the stock market has already begun to kill the financiers of the housing bubble ( FNM's stock recently fell to fresh multi-year lows ) , the real estate holding companies ( see JOE ) , the mortgage REITS ( see NLY ) , and begun to move in on the homebuilders ( their charts look wobbly, although their major uptrends haven't been violated yet, contrary to the examples above ) . meanwhile the government's data still look rosy. i generally prefer to listen to the market's assessment, since it works as a discounting mechanism reflecting expectations of FUTURE fundamental developments. it seems there's something that the market doesn't like. the tech bubble also went down in stages. for instance, the stocks of the telecom companies peaked 3 years before the stocks of their major equipment suppliers peaked. i also remember distinctly how a 'shortage of DRAMs and other memory chips' that reportedly held sway during the second half of '99 and early '00 was used as a rationalization to drive the SOX index to nearly 1,400 points at the height of the frenzy. it subsequently took only about 2 1/2 years to shave off 1,200 of those 1,400 points , and the famed 'DRAM shortage' was never heard of again. my guess is that a similar fate awaits the alleged shortage of houses and condominiums ( e.g. over the past year alone, more condo developments have been set into motion in Miami than in the entire previous decade ) . admittedly the timing remain an open question - the only thing that can be stated with absolute certainty is that the longer the bubble continues, the more severe the consequences of its eventual demise will be. since 63% of all US bank assets are now tied to real estate ( up from 10% in the late 1950s ) , the end of the bubble can be expected to severely impair the banking system , and with it, the entire economy ( similar to the Japanese experience, only worse, since US households have no savings to fall back on in order to weather hard times ) . Date: Mon Sep 26 2005 12:36 trotsky (@Marc Faber) ID#248269: Copyright © 2002 trotsky/Kitco Inc. All rights reserved from a recent interview with 'Dr. Doom', Marc Faber. he succinctly characterizes the CiC. "LINDSAY WILLIAMS: You said a few things about George W Bush yesterday - your opinion of him as a US president? MARC FABER: My opinion of him as a president is that he makes everybody else in the world look like a genius!" Date: Mon Sep 26 2005 12:32 trotsky (heavy metal, 11:17) ID#248269: Copyright © 2002 trotsky/Kitco Inc. All rights reserved Hillary - what an insufferable b*tch. "We are all going to have to rethink how we deal with this, because there are all these competing values ... Without any kind of editing function or gatekeeping function, what does it mean to have the right to defend your reputation?" she said." newsflash to Hillary: politicians are fair game. and usually, they have no reputation worth defending anyway. " "I don't have any clue about what we're going to do legally, regulatorily, technologically -- I don't have a clue." thanks for reminding us twice in the same sentence that you really don't have a clue. "But I do think we always have to keep competing interests in balance. I'm a big pro-balance person. That's why I love the founders -- checks and balances; accountable power. Anytime an individual or an institution or an invention leaps so far out ahead of that balance and throws a system, whatever it might be -- political, economic, technological --out of balance, you've got a problem, because then it can lead to the oppression people's rights, it can lead to the manipulation of information, it can lead to all kinds of bad outcomes which we have seen historically. So we're going to have to deal with that. And I hope a lot of smart people are going to --"" translation: if it were up to you, you'd do like the Chinese government does and let your inner censor hang out with full force. you're only afraid to say so publicly. and no, 'we' don't have to 'deal with that'. all 'we' have to do is see to it that you never attain a political position powerful enough to allow you to implement your mad communist-inspired censorship schemes.