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

To: tejek who wrote (435933)	11/20/2008 10:10:26 AM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574574

No picture???

To: tejek who wrote (435933)	11/20/2008 11:42:52 AM
From: bentway	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574574

A Bull Vanishes norris.blogs.nytimes.com The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index is at its 2002 lows. (A friend of mine versed in technical analysis tells me that is an indication we had a double top, which he says means we are in deep trouble. I’ll stick to the fundamentals.) The 2002 closing low was 776.76, with an intraday low of 768.63. As I was about to file this, the index hit 776.76. At that price, it was down 47.10 percent since the end of last year. The worst calendar year performance ever for the index was in 1931, when it fell 47.07 percent. Other major indexes are not that close to giving up all of the gains of the 2002-2007 bull market, but everything is down a lot. In fact, the most remarkable thing about the crash of 2008 has been its ubiquity. As I noted before, there are only a handful of stocks that are up this year. I just checked the Russell 3,000, which now has 2,938 stocks in it. There are more stocks in it (218) that are down more than 85 percent this year than there are stocks (179) that are up for the year. In Europe, the Bloomberg Europe 500 has 11 stocks that are up, when measured in euros, and 8 of them are losers when measured in dollars. In Britain, of the 663 shares in the FTSE all-shares index, 23 are up for the year when measured in pounds. Measured in dollars, 5 are up. In Japan, 123 of the 1,710 stocks in the Topix index are up in yen, but with the yen rising this year, there are 299 that have made money for a dollar-based investor. In China, the CSE300 has no stocks that are up this year. Nor is there one in India’s Bombay Stock Exchange 500. There are three reasons that come to mind as possible explanations for such an overwhelming bear market. 1. The world financial system is in deep trouble, and it is integrated, so that the credit crunch is virtually universal. 2. The world recession is hitting everywhere. Even China is now worried, and with good reason, as unemployment rises. 3. In an integrated global financial system, all asset prices were pumped up by excessive leverage, and all are now falling amid urgent deleveraging. The widely feared selling by over-indebted hedge funds is part of this, but not all of it. I think all of them help to explain what is happening. If you believe the third one is important, and that we are not entering into Great Depression II, then that should be creating bargains for wide investors who can wait out the recovery without worrying about margin calls. P.S. I am following the suggestion of several commentators on this blog. I am giving up on trying to identify a market bottom.