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Strategies & Market Trends : Ride the Tiger with CD -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SwampDogg who wrote (143413)	1/25/2009 11:49:55 AM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 314365

"When gold topped in mid July '08 and snapped it was a signal of deflation and a warning to the market. It is now telling us the opposite for those that care to listen." That sounded like careless recovery talk. It seemed like you were saying deflation was one of the opposites. If gold were a topping/deflation signal and now is the opposite, it would be a reflation signal, i.e. recovery. No? Wages may be high, but we cannot get by on less. Fine to say we are uncompetitive with lean and mean cherry picking, dumping economies such as China and Japan, but how do you even things out. You cannot employ vast herds of 14 dollar an hour labour who can only afford to live in one room flats. Society won't work that way. In the 1950's wages didn't crack $7,000 a year for a good job. Yet people could buy homes, food, cars, and save. Today some of the poorest countries in South America have comparable wages and they cannot afford squat because of the globalization of prices. I think part of that is inefficiency. Some of them would be better off with horse/bullock and plow agriculture. Fuel/fertilizer is killing them. I don't think we can pay our workers less than we do now in straight wages. We have to pay a lot less in benefits and pensions, as that is what is killing industries. Job security and pensions. Factor all this in, and the $28.00 of starting GM workers becomes $70 an hour. Personally I don't think the job is worth more than $20.00 an hour all up. But you don't save one dime even as a single man on $20.00 an hour. Our economies started to get out of whack in the late 60's when governments started to expand beyond reason. then oil soared and food prices rose in the early 70's. By the 80's inflation was out of control. All of our power generation and machinery was based on stupidly cheap fossil fuel and had disguised inefficiencies. This has been brutally exposed once the true cost of energy became known. Technically optimal steam engines at 48% efficiency are twice as energy saving as fossil fuel air expansion engines, i.e. Internal Combustion engines. The age of steam was a great expander of industry in part because of its great natural efficiency. I realize that only became paramount in the later years of steam when engineering progressed. Watt increased the efficiency of steam early on and the industrial revolution took off. If we could do the same with Stirling Engines, reforming of hydrogen, catalytic hybrid electrics, and compound steam/combustion engines to use energy more efficiently society would start to make ends meet much more effectively. It is clear too that with the complexity of our rolling stock and high cost of maintenance we have lost efficiency in that department too. It would be far cheaper even given high fuel prices to drive a 1964 6-cylinder carbureted vehicle than one of our computerized monsters today. The maintenance/depreciation today is more than equal to the fuel cost, which is some rich. I could build a 64 Chevrolet Belair today for about $8,000.00 and sell it for $12,000. The $30,000 you would save would buy 240,000 miles of travel. Of course I could not pay $70 an hour to workers to build it and do that. Unless I only had to hire enough of them to watch the computers and robots build it. EC<:-}