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The Shallowest Generation

check out the movie idiocracy. on the surface, it is annoying, offensive, and slapstick; but deeper and the day after you watch it, you will tell yourself, "oh my, we are already there."

i hope there is room in the life raft for people that are ambitious and hungry enough to push the dead weight that caused this issue into the water to meet the fate they deserve.

A Nation of Debtors

interesting perspective, it is unusual to get such a philosopically thought provoking article. debt is out of control. it would be nice if this credit crisis acted as a catalyst that dragged people from a debtor mindset to a savings mindset, but habits are hard to change. interest rates have to go up - a lot to make people save. if the dillema is to save 20,000 at 2% interest or spend in advance of inflation at 4%, the losing solution is to save. policy must reflect an advantage to change habits, but perhaps the weaning of credit below 8% is incentive enough to halt borrowing as a first step to encouraging savings?

16 Stocks That Are Paying My College Tuition

you must be underpaid, the going rate for engineers is 1.5-3x your total invested capital. If you're making 200% gains in this market to beat that, then you should work on wall street. I'm a PE and only beat the S&P by 2% generally. I'll keep my day job rather than hope to find close to the $1M invested at historic S&P returns to pay my salary.

The US Dollar Elevator is Going Up!

Our saving grace is that our debts are denominated in US dollars.

I fail to understand your hypothesis regarding the money spent by consumers not exceeding the money spent by businesses. are you saying consumer spending cannot exceed earned wages? I would say the net negative savings rate of americans disagrees with you.

Have you observed those financial sector write-downs? These businesses (banks) are acknowledging their assets are worth less than what they paid for them. For material assets this would be deflation, but it's monetary assets. That X dollar value loss in value was real money borrowed and spent by consumers, but not being repaid in full. That is real consumer spending, but it will not re-emerge in the real economy to be spent by businesses because it was an asset. The businesses that held these written down assets, are (gasp) banks and they make money through loans that cannot be made because that money is gone. The money the banks must hold in reserve to take these losses came from somewhere right? That money was for future loans.

We are going to accomplish through exports a return to the top? I guess we better learn from the chinese, they are the king of exports. How do they do it? Labor costs, its a race to the bottom if we compete on that level. Kiss your wealth goodbye if you want to play that game.