fahrender

President Obama's Effect on the Market

"there's a difference between buying a house and buying a house on fire." - Jamie Dimond

The American economy was already "on fire" long before Obama was elected.
Wall Street and big corporations begged the government to do something.
The American voters emphatically rejected Republican policies in November 2008.
Barack Obama has been in office less than two months.

Am I happy with what Obama has done to date?

No. But,I do not blame him for the way things are on March 11, 2009.

I'm not a big fan of socialism either, but slash-and-burn-neocon-... got us where we are today and it sucks. lost %50 of the value of your portfolio or house? tough. you live in a capitalist country where all of the safeguards which would have at least minimized this mess were hacked away due to the bullying influence of corporate lobbyists.

unfettered capitalism has done this to America more than once, but the greedy and the powerful don't really care because they'll get by no matter what.

Obama will probably stumble through this mess one way or another. It will not be pretty. The Republicans and their leaders Mitch McConnell, Richard Shelby and Rush Limbaugh and John Boehner are doing everything they can to poison the waters. Their patriotism is very suspect.

The Rally, When It Comes, Will Be a Doozy

lefties have.... little aptitude for math, like Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman you mean? or John Kenneth Galbraith?
the neo-conservatives lead us right into this mess. what was with their math skills? they were all for tax cuts and going to war. doesn't work, guns and butter, for Lyndon Johnson or George W. Bush.

as for being liars, it's a common trait of both lefties and righties. few people of any political persuasion are bigger liars than Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Tom DeLay, Phil Gramm, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld or Sarah Palin. These people are world class expert liars. they have lied even in the face of video tapes proving their lies. that is the true test of an olympic class liar. all of them passed this test with flying colors. most of them more than once.

as for the poor capitalist business owner who "loses everything" while the (greedy? selfish?) workers get to "keep" what they made. what. total. hog. wash.
the capitalist business owner has his stashed away in an offshore bank. the worker (real wages have fallen considerably over the past 30 years) has scraped by until he got "down-sized" by the capitalist business owner long before the business went under.
as for your math, i was one of those people earning the average wage of $3,855.80 a year in 1959. i'm 72 now and after fifty years on the job i'm pulling right at $50,000. $50,000 today buys very little more than $4,000 did in 1959. i know. i was there and i've got the bills to prove it.
in the intervening years i've improved my skills, gotten a master's degree and done additional professional training and my life style is now pretty much the same as it was then. that's o.k. with me. i'm doing what i want to do. but, there are a lot of Americans who have gotten screwed, repeatedly, and the American worker is at the top of the list.
you used the term "the masses"! uh oh, that socialist lingo is even creeping into your vocabulary. as for keeping them poor and stupid, BillO, Fox News and Oxycontin Rush are the premier snake oil salesmen for the poor and stupid.
you need to study your heroes a bit more closely, but of course they make their pronouncements on TV, not in writing where the lack of logic or reason can be covered up by their pomposity and thuggishness.



On Mar 07 09:39 AM milkchaser wrote:

> I prefer the "twisted logic of capitalism" to your faulty statistics
> (the source of which you do not cite). The levels of wage growth
> are way off. I computed them using the "national average wage indexing
> series, 1951-2007" which comes from the Social Security administration
> (which is required by law to compute an accurate accounting of wages).
>
> www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/...
>
> Average American wage:
> 1959: $3,855.80
> 1973 $7,580.16
> 1999 $30,469.84
>
> To compute average annual wage growth from 1973 to 1999 (a span of
> 26 years), we must answer the question "what number to the 26th power
> turns 1973 wages into 1999 wages?"
>
> x^26 * 7580.16 = 30469.84
> x^26 = 30469.84/7580.16
> x = (30469.84/7580.16)^(1/...
> x = 1.0549
>
> This is an annual wage growth rate of 5.49%, not 1.7%. Do the same
> calculation from 1959 to 1973 and you will find an annual wage growth
> rate of 4.94%, not 2.9%. Notice this is a slightly lower rate of
> growth than the later period -- the opposite of what you claimed.
>
>
> Somebody fooled you with bad statistics -- a typical leftie trick.
> Leftists have no compunction about lying, little aptitude for math
> and a hefty incentive to make things up, because the truth does not
> support their ridiculous economics. Socialism has always been the
> best way to keep the masses poor and stupid.
>
> I did not check your statistics about profit growth, but let us assume
> they are accurate for the sake of argument. I suspect that it is
> true that profits increased at a greater annual rate during the later
> period owing to various productivity boosters (computers, cheaper
> computers, faster computers, better medicine and chemistry, better
> agriculture = cheaper food, cheaper goods = more disposable income,
> internet, LANs, etc). In 1959, the boss had his secretary type a
> letter and snail mail it to his client, whose secretary opened the
> letter and presented it to him). In 2009, the boss sends and receives
> her own email -- enchanced productivity (capitalism even empowered
> women in the process).
>
> No wonder that companies are more profitable. And why shouldn't
> the bulk of the profit go to those who risked their capital rather
> than the workers? Without the initial capital, the workers would
> have no job. When companies fail, does the capitalist ask the workers
> to refund their wages? No, he or she loses the entire investment,
> the workers keep what they earned.

The Rally, When It Comes, Will Be a Doozy

does anybody know why Autozone (AZO) is one stock that has been rising right through all of the past four months of bloodshed? i have never owned this stock but anybody that does must be smiling big time.

as for all of the yeas and nays about money-on-the-sideline, good luck with whatever you've "predicted". i'm 95% in cash with one short ETF (the Euro) and i'm not at all sure of that one.

The Bubble of Uncertainty Is About to Burst

some people around here evidently have very short memories or, conveniently selective memories. the financial chaos we're struggling with didn't suddenly spring up like a bouncing betty on January 20th or even November 5th. George Bush and his boys (Greenspan, Bernanke, Paulson) created and encouraged the momentum that took us off the cliff. After a couple of flips and bounces W handed the keys to the car to Obama. how much more we get bounced and continue to fall is a true unknown.
i'm not that big an Obama fan and history may not be kind but i don't know who would've gotten more done in less than two months. i know that i don't even want to contemplate what John McCain and Sarah Palin might have done.
My biggest criticism of Obama is his decision to put Summers and Geithner in their positions. It will be interesting to see how long they last.

Bust, Bail, Repeat: The U.S. Enters into an Ever-Worsening Cycle

So I read here that the American people are just as much at fault as the politicians and financial wheelers and dealers. What a sick joke. Congressional flim flam artists such Phil Gramm managed to get regulations tossed that paved the way for this mess.
Wall Street saw a window of opportunity and was perfectly willing to pile on and then drive off with truck loads of money. The hyenas in the "loan industry" enticed the gullible public in to signing on the dotted line and Alan Greenspan piously blessed the whole travesty. Now that he's comfortably behind the theater curtain along with those former CEO's and their golden parachutes Greenspan can take a different perspective, evidently imagining that no one will remember the part he played in letting any semblance of financial stability crash to the ground.
The general public, the average person, will rarely fail to be gullible in the kind of atmosphere that prevailed over the past ten years. When there is no sensible regulatory framework in place and virtually nobody in a position of responsibility publicly questions what is going on how are they to know? Why do you think this kind of thing happens again and again?
The unfettered "free market" has once again lead us to disaster because Congress repealed laws and shredded regulations which would have prevented this farce. Yes, they're to blame, along with all of the corporate owned K Street prostitutes that beguilingly turn their heads.
As for Larry Kudlow and his sophomoric cheerleading, he symbolizes the dismal mess. What a maroon.