Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (111504)	3/22/2012 7:55:58 AM
From: ChinuSFO	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 149317

Since your post is about kids born into poor families, thr Trayvon case falls in this category. What happened is horrific and the law passed by Florida is uncivilized. Under which civilized society's law should it be OK for a youth to even possess a gun much less use it. That guy was not properly trained on it's use. This is the situation that Obama spoke about when he delivered his famous "race relation in America" speech as candidate Obama where he mentioned about the prejudice his white grandmother had where she would be afraid to see a burly black human being walking across the street. The kind of prejudice the Cambridge policeman displayed when he saw a black man (a famed professor) trying to break open the door of his house. The other day, I was speaking with a Republican friend of mine, who it was obvious is in the "hate email" circuit like that Montana judge who forwarded the crass email about O's mother. He said that "O would not be where he is today if Mike Ditka decided to run against him for the Illinois Senate seat." what a stupid argument and deep is the level of hate for such a stupid argument. And I wonder, how could these bastards who harbor such hatred be destroyed particularly when they profess by day that they have God in their hearts but by night they preach hatred. It is sad that a innocent 17 year was denied the opportunity of life when his Creator willed that that opportunity be given to him. And what is worse is that the perpetrator is still not in jail. Imagine, if he was a police officer, he would have been suspended pending enquiry. But this youth is walking the Earth as if everything is normal. Should he not be at least put away into protective custody?

To: tejek who wrote (111504)	3/22/2012 10:01:40 AM
From: Land Shark	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

And if you're fortunate enough to acheive the "American Dream", you're shunned and persecuted by the "haves", especially if you're African American.

To: tejek who wrote (111504)	3/22/2012 11:32:18 AM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 149317

Ted, forget about all biases for one second...my biases and yours, let's throw them away. Now read the below and tell me what it tells you. ------------------- The One Chart That Says It All Submitted by Charles Hugh Smith of OfTwoMinds, *Depending on debt to fuel nominal growth leads to an economic death spiral.* Sometimes one chart says it all. Here is a chart of the S&P 500 (a broadly based measure of the U.S. stock market) in a ratio with total consumer credit, courtesy of frequent contributor Chartist Friend from Pittsburgh. Charted against consumer credit, the S&P 500 (SPX) collapsed after the 2000 dot-com bubble burst and has been tracing out a descending channel since then. Chartist Friend explains: A funny thing happens when you price the stock market in something other than itself, say gold or the PPI or in this case Total Consumer Credit outstanding. You wind up with a depiction of the market that is sometimes very different from the headline-nominal performance number. The following chart shows that in the 80's and 90's we had a real bull market, one based on production and innovation that was able to outperform the growth of credit in the economy. Excessive borrowing wasn't needed during that time. Now we're borrowing like a drunken shopper, and all we can come up with are centrally planned consumer-oriented bubbles. What we see very clearly in this chart is the dramatic spikes created by credit bubbles--the housing bubble in 2001-2007--and massive Central Planning intervention: The Federal Reserve's expansion of money supply and constant injections of liquidity into markets and the Federal government's $6 trillion bailout/stimulus debt binge since 2008. The critical feature of each credit bubble is that the SPX responds with less vigor to each dose of credit. This is the classic downtrend--lower highs, lower lows. This is the chart of a death spiral. Here is one way to understand the dynamics revealed in this chart: when depreciation of productive assets (factory tools, software, refineries, etc.) outstrips new investment in productive assets, then output, income and profit decline. (Note that building McMansions in the middle of fields and pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into overseas adventures are not productive investments, they are mal-investments.) Once the cost of servicing all that new debt outstrips increases in income, then there is less money available for productive investment. Debt service and mal-investment thus set up a positive feedback loop, a.k.a. a death spiral. The housing bubble created over $5 trillion in new debt to service while it produced effectively zero new productive investment (housing is ultimately a form of consumption). The Fed's injections of liquidity via trillion-dollar purchases of toxic mortgages and Treasury bonds does not funnel money into productive investments--all it accomplished was to further incentivize speculative churning and financialization to enriched the few at the expense of the many. So sit back, tighten your seatbelts and enjoy the death spiral ride, brought to you by the Federal Reserve and your elected servants of the financial Elite. Now that the latest credit bubble is popping, the market will roll over and continue tracing out the down-channel until it hits zero: the next credit bubble won't spark a rally at all, it will simply spark implosion.