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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (430425)	10/27/2008 9:28:27 AM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574098

"Are we going to be living on horse meat before we get to the bottom of this?" I've always felt cannibalism will mark the bottom. When the food quits getting to the cities and the supermarkets have been stripped bare, the last of the hoarded canned food is gone, the pets have been slaughtered and barbecued (even Ten's little gay dog), what's left? People have to eat..

To: Road Walker who wrote (430425)	10/27/2008 11:43:29 AM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574098

Let’s fast-forward a year to October 2009. The U.S. unemployment rate stands at 10 percent. Crime is up across the country. The economy is shrinking. No arm-twisting from the Treasury has managed to restore the broken confidence between borrowers and lenders. Banks, the few still standing, are holding fast to their cash. Property prices are down more than 25 percent from current levels. The Dow is still heading south as people get used to the idea of stocks trading at no more than 10 times earnings, rather than the much higher ratios our former leveraged world delivered. There's a point at which humans get too negative.......and I think we've reached that point with this crisis. Back in 2001, it seemed there was a possibility that the world would come to an end. This time its not whether the world will come to an end but when. We seem to like to scare ourselves into total meltdown. New buildings stand empty all over New York because at the end of a boom — that’s to say right now — a lot of new construction comes to market. Exports, long a bright spot in the economy, have plummeted because of a rising dollar. The deficit and national debt stand at unprecedented levels. The hedge fund industry is decimated — its model of flipping cheap borrowings into leveraged bets around the world has blown up — and one desperate, even contrite, former master of the universe has just sold a Rauschenberg for $9 million less than he paid in 2004. People still have way too much debt, and the collateral for it keeps evaporating. They are angry. Civil unrest is stirring. Huh? What riots have happened? The author is getting carried away with himself. It may not get that bad, of course. On the bright side, gas prices are plunging. There’s a lot of money sitting on the sidelines in places like Dubai. And, as I mentioned, the dollar is up — more than 20 percent against sterling and the euro in the last three months. You can get a plate of pasta in central London now for less than $50. You can even take a short tube ride for less than $6. There must be hope for us all! And STI reduced, not eliminated its dividend and the stock got whacked badly. There is too much fear prevailing in the world....everyone needs to chill a bit.

To: Road Walker who wrote (430425)	10/27/2008 11:53:04 AM
From: tejek	2 Recommendations Respond to of 1574098

The morning after the US election timesonline.typepad.com The Republicans have already begun fighting in advance of their expected defeat next week. One rival is predicting what another rival will say, a third is blaming a fourth. All are expecting to duke it out in the national spotlight the moment CBS calls it for Obama. So allow me to explain to these Republicans, from personal experience, that something altogether more painful is going to happen. I was in Conservative Central Office in May 1997, on the night the Tory Party lost power after 18 years. I saw friends, and people I liked a little less than that, lose their seats or scrape home. And then the Prime Minister, John Major, returned and took his friends and advisers to a private room where he talked to us of his plans to resign as Conservative leader the next morning. As he did. But while we thought this was a central news item, it really wasn't. Because on that first day of Tony Blair's Government it was the new people who were the story. There was a feeling of euphoria in Britain that morning, a feeling of freshness and change. Even people who hadn't voted for Blair were caught up in it. Many of them wished that they had, and his poll rating soared. Much of the good feeling about new Labour was generated in the months after their landslide, oddly, rather than in the months before it. And here's the lesson for Tories. The hardest thing to absorb was this - we didn't matter. For the first time in years the story wasn't about us, and our squabbles and intrigues seemed oddly silly and pointless. And we, especially those of us who had worked on the losing campaign, felt excluded from a great national party. It was a little bit like sitting in the gloomy train Woody Allen films in Stardust Memories, while in the happy train everyone is popping champagne corks. The first step towards recovery for the Conservative party was to stop thinking that we were the centre of the universe and that what we thought mattered more than what others thought. The Republicans are about to go through a period of self absorption and will think it is all that matters. They will only recover when they start to understand that no one is watching and that no one, except them, cares. That realisation will be more painful than the battles themselves.