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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 (73853)	11/8/2006 11:34:18 AM
From: ild	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 110194

@democratic victory -- trotsky, 11:03:30 11/08/06 Wed naturally, this means that nothing will change w.r.t. the topic that actually brought them the victory: namely Iraq. the democrats are not an anti-empire party. it's not the invasion and occupation as such that they oppose, they only want it 'done right' (expect the neo-cons to suck up to them forthwith, since they want exactly the same thing). 'doing it right' means that more US soldiers will likely be served up as target practice for the insurgency. one area worth watching is international trade. some of the worst protectionists are members of the democratic party, such as senator Schumer (sp?). if they go ahead and try to impose what's euphemistically called 'fair trade' (the translation of 'fair trade' is 'we shall pick the consumer's pockets') on e.g. China, this would be an enormously bearish event for the stock market and could prove the coup-de-grace for the economy as well (everything will become more expensive in the name of protecting domestic producers). as can be shown via overlay charts, a rising trade deficit goes hand in hand with a rising stock market and vice versa. the only time that the trade deficit actually contracted since 1990 was the 2001-2002 period when the stock market was in free-fall. as i have often pointed out here, trade issues are widely misunderstood, mostly on account of economic illiteracy. in short, the populist stance on trade, as personified in Schumer et al., actually harms consumers. it is surprising that it IS the populist stance, and the only explanation is that people don't understand it (after all, who would vote for having to pay MORE for goods and services forthwith? but tell them that it's only going to hurt the foreigners in far-away lands, and they'll all be for it). what other opportunities to f*ck up won't they be able to pass up? one area is clearly taxes. the mantra of the socialists is certainly not that the state should spend less in order to lower budget deficits - instead it is tax more. no sacred spending cows will be sacrificed, so it seems likely that they will try to roll back tax cuts (this might run into presidential vetos however). Ms. Pelosi has already uttered the words 'fair' and 'economy' in the same sentence, so hold on to your wallets.

To: ild who wrote (73853)	11/8/2006 11:44:59 AM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

for anyone interested in string theory, Lee Smolin just wrote an interesting critique of it: The Trouble With Physics. amazon.com basically, Smolin argues that a lot of string theory is ad hoc and not really science. Heinz said there were "several" string theories. in fact there are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of theories. string theory relies on Calabi-Yau manifolds, and Yau himself estimated their number at more than 100,000. Smolin critiques the ad hoc and arbitrary manner in which parameters are assigned values (set them to match the data, as opposed to coming up with a theory that predict what the data will be like Einstin did with Special Relativity). science has advanced over the centuries through establishing falsifiable hypotheses which make predictions about the world, then conducting experiments to see if the predictions come true. that's not what string theory does. Smolin also criticizes modern academic theoretical physics for what he sees as a conformist, groupthink approach. another book criticizing string theory humorously sums it up in its title: Not Even Wrong amazon.com