ATHELSTAN

Obama Is Bad for the Economy - Barron's

I have the utmost confidence in President Obama taking us back to the good old days of Jimmy Carter. Sell your stocks, buy gold, ,but dollar cost average into real estate. Because Ben Bernanke is putting the Fed's feet into cement. To solidify a Fortress Fed to withstand the buffetings of inflation.
Bernanke won't increase interest rates this year or anytime soon in the new year. He's prepared to permit Obama to spend lavishly on a scale we haven't seen since the 1970s. It may be the only way to keep his job too.

Don’t Worry About a Return to ‘70s Stagflation

The worse it gets the more I dollar cost average into financials, especially regional banks and S&Ls. What we are all witnessing now is the demise of New York City and Charlotte NC as financial centers.
If the stand alone investment bank is history, and it may be, then the world will be looking for new financial money centers. London? Shanghai? Abu Dhabi?
The short-sigtedness and stupidity of Greenspan and Bernanke are hastening that demise. The latter is now out of control of events and world markets sense it too. The former is left to collect $70,000 a speech talking about the past. What a pathetic sight.
Poor John McCain has been dealt a terrible hand and he's going to take the Republican Party down to the worst defeat since 1932.

While it's great to have more service sector jobs, you can't export them. Most high tech within 15 years will come from India, eastern europe, Israel, and the middle east . Our high tech centers, Raleigh-Durham, northern Virginia, Boston area, the west coast, are living on borrowed time. They are not price competitive and never were.
Like Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz" ,we'll all wake up from our dream to discover our real roots as an economy now lie in Kansas, or some other agricultural setting.

Financial Fears Sweeping the Globe

Perhaps, the time has come for Bush to seize all national banks and their assets , in effect making the Fed our National Bank. Next, Bush needs to close the gold window, and for the Treasury Dept. to start selling gold.
Could the Federal Reserve or the Paulson gang be any worse than the clowns in the private banking universe who endangered the economies of the planet with their willingness to play monkey see, monkey do? And their allies in the U.S. financial media acting as if they too are monkeys. I see no evil. I hear no evil. I speak no evil.
Thanks to the failings of our private institutions, Bush and Bernanke will have no choice but to literally throw money at America's home owners in the form of a housing stimulus package, or see family wealth continue to erode. Thus igniting deflation on top of slowing demand.
Raising interest rates in Europe, or in the US is an act of suicide!!

Best to initiated this stimulus package before the depression starts and not during the early stages of it.

High Likelihood of a Market Crash

The real crash coming isn't in the stock market, but the drip, drip, drip downward in housing values. That process is irreversible. Bernanke, Paulson and company were too slow and too late to prevent this inevitable slide into chaos. Republicans have a long history of being too slow. Coming to the banquet or funeral with inappropriate dress and no flowers.
Now investors and the general public sense Bush is out of touch with reality, and McCain is taking the GOP down to defeat in November. What looms in the distance is the Obama Express speeding down the track at an awesome and a terrible pace to Carterville. That is to say the town named for the former president.
Where inflation, high interest rates , "touchy feely", feel good politics , with protectionism added to it, and the prosecution of countless investment bankers and hedge fund managers will lead to financial panic. This means the real plunge comes later and after the elections.

Bring on the Alt-A Downgrades

This is a bad omen making fools of everyone from the rating agencies, the financial press which keeps giving us happy talk about the crisis being over and done with, to the Bush Treasury Department which continues to give the American people Chamber of Commerce style booster talk and beautiful scenarios about how well everything is going. The entire administration should resign today. From Bush on down.

It's Tough To Bank On the Financial Stocks

All this hand wringing concerning the credit crisis tells me those who tell us NOT to invest in financials, especially banks, are doing just that. If you look at CEFs such as First Financial (FF), or ETFs tracing the financials, you will see they have been steadily rising as the moaning and groaning continues. Expect a major bull market move anytime now.