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

To: GST who wrote (53982)	2/16/2006 3:11:03 PM
From: shades	Respond to of 110194

As for investment, much of it is to build the infrastructure of modern consumerism -- thousands of miles of interstate highway, entire cities built from scratch, power generation, pipelines -- all the infrastructure needed for a seriously consumer oriented economy. In the 1840's british investors seeking high returns funded the buildout of the US states infrastructure, canals, trains, roads, etc the US states defaulted on the british investments and I suppose a read through history will show it took many decades for this buildout in the USA to become very useful after the civil war. The US interstate system was built many decades ago, but only the past decade have I seen major buildouts of toll roads to bypass interstates because they are at capacity or over their capacity. Now lets look at china, I have a friend that is doing work on thier roads buildout - and he agrees - it will be decades before the capacity is used for domestic purposes that they are building now - many more chinese going to have to own cars and such and want to travel between cities - but the West is funding this buildout - will what happened to british investors 1840 happen here? A total loss of investment? All those emerging market ETF's going broke? Banking and trade was much different in 1840 than today. Lets look to the future - a consumerism/capitalist society for allocating resources and advancing civilization. Is the wisdom of crowds and thier capital allocations the best way to utopia? We have much more efficient data tracking and resource transfer than before. I just heard on fresh air on NPR yesterday that a lot of scientists in the USA want to study stem cell therapies - but the US students/scientists will leave the USA and go to other nations because of bush policies. As hard as Jesus is trying to get Bush to stop or slow the funding of the research for ethical reasons - the market has sidestepped the holy father and going for the Island of Dr. Moreau frankenstein science - chinese people are gonna want what I want, more life, more happiness, more liberty - it can only be good long term. Boone pickens today said oil is not going below 50 ever again - but that we will have alternative technologies once the price gets right. I will reread toffler's future shock and ponder the ever increasing pace of change.