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

To: Mike Johnston who wrote (72678)	10/23/2006 5:41:00 PM
From: Perspective	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

<In fact, brains aren't winning at all. Gamblers, speculators, liars and cheats are winners in this environment.> I have to second that motion. This is a real sore spot for me. In the 1990s, the one redeeming thing I found in the bubble was that a good portion of the proceeds flowed to the hard-working intelligent knowledge workers. Even your Intel engineers and software types, those overworked folks who created so much value for society, even they were finally getting some of the benefits. Not so in the latest bubble. The beneficiaries have been the gamblers and cheats, those willing to step up and take foolish risks in ways that created little or no value to society. I guess some of the home remodeling adds a little value, but all the flippers and crooked mortgage brokers and real estate agents - what value are they adding in turning over the housing stock at record rates? What value are they adding by luring the financially illiterate into exotic loans for ridiculously-priced houses that will bankrupt them and the country? And then the PigMen on Wall Street siphon off record amounts of cash as the Fed tries to rescue the middle part of the economy by jacking up asset pricing. What a sham. All so that my son can inherit a hollowed-out shell of an economy, after the PigMen have exported all the productive capacity to China and run away with the profits. Here I am now, working on a PhD in Neuroscience so that I can help improve quality of life for society, watching PigMen rake in billions running hedge funds that are designed to fail. Maybe I'm just not that smart after all. Actually, I would have seriously considered trying to run a hedge fund, except that by the time I realized the bubble was underway in 1998, I seriously thought it would burst before I could have possibly cashed in my first fat check. Given that it's now eight years later and the Boyz are running away with the wealth of the planet, I guess I underestimated things. Grrrrrrrrrrrr..... <RANT OFF> BC