I still think ridding the world of Saddam Hussein was a good thing, but that wasn’t worth what’s about to happen. You were right, Bush was a complete disaster.
Best of luck. I hope things hold together for you over there.
“what’s about to happen?”
what r u referring to?
Economic collapse. Buy shorts (and a hat).
[quote=“MaPoSquid”]I still think ridding the world of Saddam Hussein was a good thing, but that wasn’t worth what’s about to happen. You were right, Bush was a complete disaster.
Best of luck. I hope things hold together for you over there.[/quote]
What are the chances that you are just an alarmist? What say you? Any chance at all?
marboulette
What’s about to happen?
What’s going to happen?
Most likely there’s going to be an artificial economic revival in the United States for the next two or three years fueled by the U.S. government selling off its seed corn – its “full faith and credit.” That is, if anyone is buying at this point. It will be the third and final attempt to stave off a structural decline in the standard of living in the United States, the first attempt being the dotcom bubble and the second being the real estate bubble.
Each artificial attempt to deal with what is a structural economic problem has left a toxic economic residue and this “dollar bubble” will be the most toxic of the three by far because of the tremendous debt and bad faith in the U.S. government and economy it will leave behind.
The structural problem is relatively simple. The U.S. economy isn’t creating the wealth necessary to shore up its modern-era standard of living because the costs of creating wealth in the United States are too high. A minor reason is high U.S. wages but the real reason is the tremendous overhead of public and private special interests which has been piled on over the years. The reason this third, dollar bubble is going to be so toxic during its hangover phase is because it’s adding tremendously to the public special interests overhead on the U.S. economy which will make it even more difficult for U.S. businesses to compete in the future.
Obama is making the fatal mistake of thinking inside the conventional Democratic box and interpreting the cause of the current economic malaise as a seizing of credit markets and a loss of confidence with the solution being to roll the dice by expanding government and spending money we don’t have to buy our way out. In reality the seizure of credit markets and loss of investor confidence are symptoms of the underlying structural problem, which remains not only untreated but is actually being exacerbated by Obama’s attempts to solve the problem.
You should be in charge, Spook. It’s really nice to see someone who cares as much as you do. Would you consider running for office?
Well said, spook. You should be writing the headlines.
[quote] Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble To Invest In
WASHINGTON—A panel of top business leaders testified before Congress about the worsening recession Monday, demanding the government provide Americans with a new irresponsible and largely illusory economic bubble in which to invest.
“What America needs right now is not more talk and long-term strategy, but a concrete way to create more imaginary wealth in the very immediate future,” said Thomas Jenkins, CFO of the Boston-area Jenkins Financial Group, a bubble-based investment firm. “We are in a crisis, and that crisis demands an unviable short-term solution.”
The current economic woes, brought on by the collapse of the so-called “housing bubble,” are considered the worst to hit investors since the equally untenable dot-com bubble burst in 2001. According to investment experts, now that the option of making millions of dollars in a short time with imaginary profits from bad real-estate deals has disappeared, the need for another spontaneous make-believe source of wealth has never been more urgent. . . [/quote]
theonion.com/content/news/re … on_demands
Go ahead you two. Have your fun while you can. You’ll be apologizing too in two to three years time when Obama’s bubble of last resort bursts too because it’s filled with nothing but debt and wishful thinking. 
And just for the record The Onion and I aren’t the only crackpots who think the mother of all bubbles is in the making:
Buffett says U.S. Treasury bubble one for the ages
[quote]When the financial history of this decade is written, it will surely speak of the Internet bubble of the late 1990s and the housing bubble of the early 2000s. But the U.S. Treasury bond bubble of late 2008 may be regarded as almost equally extraordinary. . . .
Beware the investment activity that produces applause. The great moves are usually greeted by yawns.[/quote]-- Warren Buffet
I smoked the cigar last Sunday morning.
Go ahead…claim another victory.
[quote=“spook”]And just for the record The Onion and I aren’t the only crackpots who think the mother of all bubbles is in the making:
Buffett says U.S. Treasury bubble one for the ages
[quote]When the financial history of this decade is written, it will surely speak of the Internet bubble of the late 1990s and the housing bubble of the early 2000s. But the U.S. Treasury bond bubble of late 2008 may be regarded as almost equally extraordinary. . . .
Beware the investment activity that produces applause. The great moves are usually greeted by yawns.[/quote]-- Warren Buffet[/quote]
Roubini, the man who actualy predicted all this, says “Secretary Timothy Geithner’s new toxic asset plan is a serious step in the right direction”. With plenty of caveats of course.
I don’t pretend to know, but knowing most of you for these many years I can confidently say that neither do you. 
Oh such fine words. I largely agree. I think it makes more sense, though, to take a step back and look at what’s really happening. The first thing you do is sum up the problem with one word. Money. OK, so everyone is broke, people are losing their jobs, foreclosures everywhere. The next thing to do is think… Hmmm… Where the fuck is the MONEY? Well, you are a capitalist, you should fucking know. Someone else has the money, and it aint you because that someone else did something for you and you gave the money to him, that someone else sold something to you and you gave him the money, or, he just robbed you blind.
Somehow, you were outsmarted, and that’s brute capitalism for you. It’s survival of the fittest. Mix power and corruption with that, and you naturally end up with a collapse of this mode of life we call capitalism. It’s not sustainable in the long term. You inevitably end up with a minority of people who own most of everything, meanwhile the majority ends up scrounging for a crumb of existence.
This stimulus package is a joke. No, it’s an abominable scheme. If you can’t make ends meet, sure, you can borrow some cash. But you need to change something in your ways in order to fix the problem that led you to not being able to make ends meet in the first place. But nothing will change anytime soon…
"Oh shit, we “earned” too much money, we favored the rich over the poor, and now they are too broke to buy our “discounted” American Dream."
marboulette
[quote=“spook”]What’s going to happen?
Most likely there’s going to be an artificial economic revival in the United States for the next two or three years fueled by the U.S. government selling off its seed corn – its “full faith and credit.” That is, if anyone is buying at this point. It will be the third and final attempt to stave off a structural decline in the standard of living in the United States, the first attempt being the dotcom bubble and the second being the real estate bubble.
Each artificial attempt to deal with what is a structural economic problem has left a toxic economic residue and this “dollar bubble” will be the most toxic of the three by far because of the tremendous debt and bad faith in the U.S. government and economy it will leave behind.
The structural problem is relatively simple. The U.S. economy isn’t creating the wealth necessary to shore up its modern-era standard of living because the costs of creating wealth in the United States are too high. A minor reason is high U.S. wages but the real reason is the tremendous overhead of public and private special interests which has been piled on over the years. The reason this third, dollar bubble is going to be so toxic during its hangover phase is because it’s adding tremendously to the public special interests overhead on the U.S. economy which will make it even more difficult for U.S. businesses to compete in the future.
Obama is making the fatal mistake of thinking inside the conventional Democratic box and interpreting the cause of the current economic malaise as a seizing of credit markets and a loss of confidence with the solution being to roll the dice by expanding government and spending money we don’t have to buy our way out. In reality the seizure of credit markets and loss of investor confidence are symptoms of the underlying structural problem, which remains not only untreated but is actually being exacerbated by Obama’s attempts to solve the problem.[/quote]