I think things are still pretty bad despite what CNBC and the other publicly traded companies news services say. I think the government stepped in and mandated a "green shoots" only policy for any news organization owned and operated by a U.S. company. The propaganda machine is in overdrive. That being said, I still don't know anyone who has lost their job, and it seems (at least around my area) that things have returned to "almost normal" with regards to people spending money. Restaurants, bars, clubs, beaches, casino's, malls, etc. are all pretty crowded. I am closing on my first home purchase too. I was calling for a crash since 2005 and like you, I waited patiently. I don't know if we are near the RE bottom, but I know we are far off the top. Also, I think massive inflation is almost a forgone conclusion at this point and it should start within the next two years. The market could crash to new lows and it wouldn't surprise me. Likewise, the S&P could print 2000 by 2011 and it wouldn't surprise me (although at that point we would probably be paying $11 for a gallon of milk---Thanks FED dipshits!)
I know I may sound like a kook (won't be the first time ), but I truly believe this crisis was engineered and it is just beginning. Things will stay inflated for the next 3 or 4 years as the government keeps printing money, but the world economy falls off the cliff sometime after that. The end result will be a depression unlike anybody has ever seen and will give rise to what has been planned all along, a world government and a world currency.
With $1100 Trillion Derivatives, the next meltdown can happen today or tommorrow or any day now. So the revolution can happen today or tommorrow or any day now. Barack Obama should voluntarily step down before a revolution overthrows Obama and his team. http://elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=173335
Yeah, up until now they have moved sort of slowly with their plans but with the derivatives that are out there it's like they turned the world into a giant LTCM and the next thing to do is to call in everybody's markers or something... And otoh the business cycle is tied to the sunspots. I doubt that anybody believes me on this but any idiot that actually wants to do their own due diligence can Excel up and overlay sunspot cycles on business cycles and see the correlation.. I've looked at this for decades... from there it's hard to conclude that our business cycles affect the sunspots but it's documented that solar energy bursts affect the mood and activities of some people [schizos in mental hospitals, they are captive and easy to observe and quite likely more sensitive to the energies since they have little else going on in the heads...] so to an extent they agitate us and also change the negative to positive ion ratio in the atmosphere [the sunspots, not the schizos]... we are at an extreme low in sunspots and have been since 2004.. this happened in the fifties and the sunspots then went to an all time maximum but it happened centuries ago and we went into the Maunder Minimum.. the earth's temperature fell and some areas had food shortages because they never had the growing season, they had years without summer... I'm hoping for the sunspots to fire up again and send us right back to the normal energetic business cycle we are used to... I like that better than this current doldrum with overwhelming negativity we are in... once that cycle starts up, if it does this time, the derivative thingy will just be forgotton, it will work itself out over time and few will feel it... The jobless recoveries are a separate thing from the business cycle however... that is caused by technology replacing jobs.. it's going on all over the world... Marx warned about this but he was a joke because his answers to the problem were [and still are] ludicrous.. and the new technologies actually created jobs for awhile but for about the last forty years it's gone the other way, technology is killing off jobs and we have these jobless recoveries as companies lay off workers and never have to rehire them... I always think of the movie Terminator's scenes of the machines making war on people... If the sunspots just don't start up we are going to be wallowing in this negativity for decades.. I have a salt lamp in the office here that generates negative ions and I take a lot of supplements and drugs to feel good but shit.. there is so much negativity nowadays... the news people and the liberal rags were always spewing negativity at us, I learned to shun that garbage but now... it's the norm for the entire world!! I'm thinking that we really are standing at a precipice and we could indeed fall into a Grand Canyon of unbelievable economic misery.. we really could... and the super rich and their minions on the left are ever ready to step in and take charge too... it could really, really suck for a few decades..
Hard to believe that "they" are really all that stupid... to allow this thing to sneak up on us. OTOH.... (1) GREEDY enough to do all of this on purpose while hoping to insulate themselves from the consequences, or (2) it was all a "grand plan" to form the New World Order? Conceivable.
I wonder where where all that money that used to belong to the middle class went? Perhaps we should look for it in the killing fields of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, in 6000 nuclear warheads, in military bases around the world, in the Hamptons and in your cardiologists garage. We are faced with many choices as we go through life. Sometimes we make poor choices, and sometimes others make them on our behalf. Either way, we suffer the consequences. Our circumstances are a product of our decisions.
I wonder where where all that money that used to belong to the middle class went? Perhaps we should look for it in the killing fields of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, in 6000 nuclear warheads, in military bases around the world, in the Hamptons and in your cardiologists garage. We are faced with many choices as we go through life. Sometimes we make poor choices, and sometimes others make them on our behalf. Either way, we suffer the consequences. Our circumstances are a product of our decisions. --------------------------------- YOU GOT THAT RIGHT
In our earlier history, Federal Government politicos felt it was their DUTY to "safeguard the public purse"... we lost that along the way.
I'll somewhat agree for a different reason - PEAK OIL. Look at oil production the past 5 years. Some say it has peaked. The current Great Recession could have been a way to delay the consequences of Peak Oil by dampening demand. What else has happened while the credit crisis was brewing? Our adventures in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq may not be coincidences. Those strategic locations give us proximity to the Caspian Sea natural gas reserves, Iran, and the gas pipelines mostly from Russia going west to Europe and East to Pakistan. China isn't stupid either - they're snapping up farmland, mines, and oil concerns all over the world. The events of the past 10+ years remind me of a game of RISK. At first, the players choose territories. And when the world is carved up - all the territories chosen - then the fun really begins. There will be no World Government. Just regional Players... Africa is doomed. So too are chunks of South America. Water and Energy will be the real commodities. And for all you wind turbine and solar fans - How many wind turbines do you need to produce the components of a wind turbine to get it running? Same with solar. My point is that even alternative energy relies on fossil fuels. Try smelting the metal and producing the glass needed for those technologies with the very same energy produced by those technologies. Try transporting a wind turbine across the country without using oil.