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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (26754)	12/23/2007 10:24:54 AM
From: KyrosL	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217649

That's right. People wrongly associate conventional ARMs with the other disastrous "innovations" of the housing bubble. Greenspan's huge error was not his advocacy of ARMs, but his reluctance to regulate the no-money-down/no-doc/alt-A sub-prime mess.

To: Ilaine who wrote (26754)	12/23/2007 12:58:52 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 217649

The digital divide and the ever increasing gap between the rich and poor cannot close. That's because the poor don't lack money as much as they lack brains and Virtuous Victorian Values. Giving a computer and $1million to a chimp won't close the gap between it and a wealthy person. It will break the computer and if they do figure out what to do with money, will spend it on the first things that are shiny enough to attract their attention. It's true that "the poor" have higher mental function than chimps but they don't have enough to do a lot better. I know enough people to know that certain of them have no use for computers, though watching porn and listening to music would be something they could get into. That's not something that will close the 'digital divide'. I know plenty of people who have not a clue about the Five Financial Factors For Freedom = learn, work, save, invest, spend in the right way. They can't learn much and if they can learn, they find work unpleasant, and even if they battle their way through a job, they can't save, and if they do they don't know how to invest, buying things like Globalstar and if they get all that right, they spend the results on ephemeral expensive things to look good. It only takes one weakness to fail and many if not most people struggle with all of them. You see the results up close and personal. Lawyers are a bit like doctors - you don't go there for fun. You go when all else has failed and you want to avoid dying. So you must have a fairly good idea of human foibles. Our great and estimable, venerable and honoured Uncle Al KBE was right about ARMs as well as about most other things. I did wonder why the heck he delayed cutting interest rates so long in Y2K and thought he wanted George W Bush elected and high interest rates would push people towards a new President who would cut tax rates. Which he did. Good for him. I was very pleased about that = he saved my bacon from IRD by getting QUALCOMM to pay dividends [an essential ingredient of tax law in NZ or capital gains would be deemed to be taxable]. He was also very slow in raising rates after the all-time low interest rates which induced berserk housing loans in huge numbers. It was obviously time to take away the punch bowl 3 or 4 years ago. Mqurice