Ringoes_Man

Cash for Clunkers May Cost Up to $45,354 Per Vehicle

It's funny that when the money goes tot he little guy; It's a waste; but when it goes to the big guy its a necessity.

While I agree with edmonds logic; the same logic applied to the financial bailout, where there was a net decrease and not a net increase in loans, etc, would make for far uglier numbers.

This partly why I object to all forms of government bailout.

Baltic Dry Shipping Index: If It Really Is a Proxy for the Economy, We're in Trouble

I agree completely with Michael.

The American Consumer, yours truly, is broke. With real incomes falling 5% over the past 8 years; job losses to China and India; fuel, taxes, and now food prices rising; housing doubling in cost... we are broke.

We faked it for a while by borrowing against rising home equity, but with ARMs resetting and lost jobs, people were forced out of their homes, resulting in foreclosures and the collapse of home prices. I suspect the US unemployment rate is much higher than the stated 6%. And it does not reflect the underemployed, people who don't make enough pushing fries to live on, let alone do any 'discretionary spending'.

Banks can't lend because technically, they are all bankrupt. The worst of the worst, Freddie and Fannie, have already collapsed. The rest have yet to restate the current values of their assets. Those assets (homes) backing up their home mortgages have dropped in value by up to 30%. And i suspect the bottom will be at 50%.

For a bank like Bank of America with $1.75 Trillion in assets 30% could mean that they are short $600B. And until that hole is filled by new consumer deposits (Goldman Sachs is now accepting such deposits) credit is frozen. At its current rate of income, BoA will take ten years to fill that hole.

A faster path to recovery would be for the banks to declare bankruptcy; re-organize minus those worthless securities and resume lending in a few months.

But the extremely wealthy would lose trillions. And since they control the financial systems it's not going to happen.

Bear Market? Numbers Don't Add Up

This is a pre-depression market.

First of all, balance sheets have become exercises in obfuscation. Not long ago AIG and BoA had basically the same balance sheet. One went broke the other is still fooling us. So forget your financial numbers they are meaningless.

The underlying cause to the coming crash is that the consumer (2/3 of our economy) is broke. Wages have been flat for 7 years. Jobs have disappeared overseas. Borrowing against equity and credit cards only got us so far and now its time to pay the piper.

You simply cannot have a just service (non-manufacturing) economy; which is what he now have. Service jobs exist to service manufacturing jobs. Without a manufacturing base any economy will fail. (ok with the exception of the SWISS)

We need American jobs for American consumers -FIRST!

The solution to this crisis is a 5-15% tariff on all imports. Only with such a penalty, will companies manufacture products in America using American Labor. Only then will EXXON drill in America rather than overseas where labor is 60 cents a day. We also need legislation to limit adjustable mortgages to .5-1.0% per year. NO ONE can adjust to a 2-10X jump in their monthly mortgage payments.

I am fully expecting a depression and pulled out of the market in January. My problem is figuring out where to put the money to protect it from the coming inflation storm as my government puts the dollar bill printing presses into high gear!

Ideas anyone?

Short Sales: SEC Turns Back the Clock to 1931

Let me get this straight; I pay my broker to buy, hold and eventually sell my stock (street thingy) and meanwhile he is short selling my shares and others in huge quantities in order to manipulate the price to my disadvantage?

How is this legal? How did I give my broker the right to 'lend/sell' my shares?

All of the Motor-Fuel Alternatives to Conventional Crude Oil Stink

Not exactly...

Solar energy is viable. While it's true that the sun doesn't shine all the time in a given spot, it does shine somewhere all the time. Also, most of the demand for electric energy is in the day time, when we are at work. Solar, daytime electric energy would reduce our need for carbon electric energy to the nighttime only; less than 1/3.

Geo-Thermal energy is everywhere. Dig a hole 4 feet deep and the temperature is a constant 50-55 degrees. Dig a hole a few hundred feet deep and the temperature is even higher. Five miles or more down and we are talking thousands of degrees. Pump water down there and up from there in an insulated pipe and you have free steam. Better yet, stick the steam driven electric turbine down there and just pump out the electricity.

Of course with all of these solutions there is an incredible up-front investment hurdle.

But, in just the past six years alone we spent $3Trillion to secure oil in Iraq and the Middle East. Had we spent that money at home, we could have placed solar panels on every roof in America, a bunch more in Death Valley, and bought every American household (80M households) an electric 'commuter' car.

So the problem is not technological, and it's not financial, it's political will.

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