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

To: Wyätt Gwyön who wrote (76772)	12/28/2006 2:01:34 AM
From: pogohere	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

Wasn't the US protectionist in the 19th and 20th centuries? Didn't it grow phenomenally during this period? Weren't a significant part of federal revenues derived from tariffs on imports? Isn't an understanding of the issue of protectionism a function of the economic circumstances of the era under examination? The documented disparities in income and assets we are seeing now in the US is concomitant with "free trade" in goods from Asia that provide consumers with lower prices that they increasingly can't afford without subsidized loans from the vendors at the cost of consumers own creditworthiness and jobs and dramatic loss of purchasing power. This "free trade" stinks. NAFTA, CAFTA impoverish the overwhelming majority of Mexicans and Latin Americans and result in a flood of free traders into this country. Something is dreadfully wrong with this picture of freedom. It strikes me as totally devoid of substance.

To: Wyätt Gwyön who wrote (76772)	12/28/2006 8:25:31 AM
From: GST	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 110194

America is a 'cash flow' society. 'Asia' is a balance sheet economy. 'Asia' has a memory of extreme poverty. People who have experienced extreme poverty tend to save more money -- they never want to repeat the experience. They minimize their liabilities and maximize their assets. We had a generation that had a similar experience in the 1930's -- and they have now mostly passed away. The population today knows little of the experience of poverty -- except of course for the chronically poor that America has mostly discarded, jailed or sent to war. We are now a 'cash flow' society -- a car does not cost $25,000, it costs $300 a month. A house does not cost $400,000, it costs $3,000 a month. Despite protests to the contrary, we trust our government -- we trust it to manage social programs like social security, medicare and of course the dollar itself. Asians by and large do not trust their governments. They know them to be corrupt and self-serving. Instead, they trust their savings and their families. We don't have savings and we send our families to institutions to be housed and fed when they get older -- of course this depends on our cash flow and theirs as well.