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

To: TH who wrote (105193)	9/17/2009 6:40:36 PM
From: GST	2 Recommendations Respond to of 110194

The length of time it takes for America to bounce back is in large part a function of whose voices hold our attention. We are doomed by our political culture as much as our economics - perhaps more so. That sleaze ball who heckled Obama is the guy most likely to help push the old clunker of an American economy off the cliff. If every American stopped for a minute to spit on the ground in demonstration of their disgust with the political culture of America -- as represented by Wilson and his kind -- then I would say we can bounce back as quickly as we want to. I would then suggest sending out pink slips to a few thousand bank executives and preparing prison cells for a few of them, and getting on with a real overhaul of our economy, our social system and our educational system. You must take note -- it is entirely possible that America will never bounce back -- it simply does not have the political culture of an advanced industrial nation. This is tragic, as we once had a political culture that we could be proud of -- well maybe not proud, but not so ashamed. We are truly a nation divided against itself, egged on by idiots who want nothing more than to frighten people into embracing the status quo. If we continue as we are, there might be no bouncing back.

To: TH who wrote (105193)	9/17/2009 8:32:19 PM
From: GST	6 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

"Everybody in town is watching him, waiting to see what he'll do next, who he'll take down next." news.yahoo.com Choose your favorite idiot -- and then pause for a moment and reflect on why it is that we, as a people, have blown it again and again and again -- consider for a moment how we as a once-upon-a-time rich and industrially advanced nation have sunk so low. And then ponder the future -- think about where we are headed -- think about how we will endure listening to the screech of the idiots and how we will bend over backwards to give the idiots a 'voice'. I am sick of it -- truly and completely sick of it. It is a free country, but when idiots speak it should not be mistaken as communication from an intelligent life form -- it is no more intelligent than burping or farting, and for the most part we don't lean in to listen to people fart.

To: TH who wrote (105193)	9/18/2009 8:35:11 AM
From: fred woodall	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

DJ INVESTMENT LETTERS: Fund Flows Show Bonds Overheating -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fri Sep 18 08:09:09 2009 EDT By Mark Hulbert A DOW JONES COLUMN If you think the stock market is getting ahead of itself, take a look at bonds. Bond market sentiment is a lot more exuberant than in the stock market - so much so that contrarians are far more worried about bonds than stocks. Earlier this week, as evidence of that exuberance, I reported that bond-market timing newsletters are more bullish right now than they've been in eight and a half years. Since I wrote that column I have come across more evidence of bond exuberance that, if anything, is even more worrisome. This other evidence is based on net flows into open-end mutual funds - how much new money investors are putting into various of those funds, less how much they are taking out. Believe it or not, the lion's share of net flows over the last six months has been into the fixed-income arena. That's amazing, given the stock market's impressive rally since the March lows - one in which the S&P 500 index has risen by 57% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average has done almost as well, gaining 49%. But, whatever else we might say about that rally, it has not lured mutual-fund investors into allocating much new cash to the equity market, according to data supplied by TrimTabs Investment Research. From the beginning of this past March, the firm calculates, bond mutual funds have received a net inflow of $214 billion. The comparable total for U.S. equity mutual funds is "just" $10.5 billion, or less than 5% as much. To put this recent experience into context, consider the four calendar years of 2003 through 2006, all of which fell within the bull market that began in October 2002. According to TrimTabs, investors ploughed $283 billion of new money over these four years into U.S. equal mutual funds, in contrast to $113 billion in bond funds. At least as judged by mutual fund flows, therefore, it's hard to conclude that stock market investors are overly exuberant. Bond market investors are another story, however, who in the last six months have allocated twice as much new money to bond mutual funds as they did, on a net basis, over the entire four years from 2003 through 2006. To appreciate why contrarians are worried about what these trends mean for the bond market, consider an academic study that appeared in the September 2007 issue of the Journal of Banking and Finance, entitled "Mutual Fund Flows and Investor Returns: An Empirical Examination of Fund Investor Timing Ability." Its authors were Geoffrey Friesen, a finance professor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and Travis Sapp, a professor of accounting and finance at Iowa State University. The professors found that poor market timing decisions are the rule rather than the exception among fund investors. They typically invest lots of new money in funds after the market has gone way up, and pull money out after it has gone way down. On average, therefore, they tend to buy high and sell low. This is why it's not good news for bonds that mutual-fund investors are allocating almost all of their new money to the bond market.