Central States Pension fund that covers over 400,000 truckers is planning to cut pension payments by 50-60%. They cover Teamsters, UPS drivers, and many others. When bonds pay zilch, pension plans are screwed. Workers and pensioners were living in a false reality, still getting their paychecks and pensions all while savers got their returns cut to nothing. Pensioners thought they were spared, but they weren't. Workers are next up.
We're all screwed by the system. Best reason to focus on trading! WIN stands for Work Is Nonprofit Currently I'm looking at the weekly chart of the Industrials. We got a lower high Q4 of last year, then a wedge formed so right now they could be backing up the truck to load up on shorts or thinking that the lows of 2014 year are holding. It wasn't hard to know to get short Nov-Dec of last year but right now... wow, if I was an actual investor or longer term trader I think I'd take a vacation and wait for the price to go below the 200SMA at which point I'd buy companies that pay dividends.
Recessions. "As to the question “what should be done about it?” we will let Murray Rothbard speak: “[Thus], what the government should do, according to the Misesian analysis of the depression, is absolutely nothing. It should, from the point of view of economic health and ending the depression as quickly as possible, maintain a strict hands off, “ laissez-faire” policy. Anything it does will delay and obstruct the adjustment process of the market; the less it does, the more rapidly will the market adjustment process do its work, and sound economic recovery ensue. The Misesian prescription is thus the exact opposite of the Keynesian: It is for the government to keep absolute hands off the economy and to confine itself to stopping its own inflation and to cutting its own budget.”"
The economy is very contradictory. It depends on many factors such as the governments, the central banks, and even the natural disasters. So now it's no more than guesswork.
%% Well good points; most bear markets dont really crash sharply like 1929 or 1987; most downtrend[bear market] like big banks, 2000-2002, 1973, 1974.NOT a prediction ;wisdom is profitable to direct. One bear guide in alaska told the host on Wall Street Week he would rather face a charging bear than a bear market.LOL; i prefer a bull market, or bear market
Why do we "go down" when the Chinese sell U.S. debt? If by debt you mean Treasuries, in case you haven't noticed Treasuries are between .26 and 2.6% yield. In the glory years of Reagan they were in the 8% range. So even if the Chinese sell off, so much that Treasury yields go up many hundred percent above the current values, we're still in 80's territory. I don't remember a huge amount from the 80's, but I don't think we were "going down" then and there's no indication we're "going down" now regardless of how much U.S. debt is sold off by the Chinese. The linkage between the Chinese market and the U.S. market is almost entirely one way, meaning it hurts them a lot if our economy hiccups but it doesn't impact us much if theirs does.
Remember when everyone lost their minds about how much of our debt the Chinese owned? It seems no matter what happens, there's never a shortage of people to worry about the sky falling because of it. I remember the 80's and everyone had the same feelings about Japan ruling the world forever.
The US is in a weird place nowadays. The Federal public sector owes more than it can ever hope to pay and borrows to make the minimum payments.... and runs a deficit! About 100 million people stopped even considering working... I think we're in a fugue state or something and headed off a cliff eventually. Collapse in 2016? Don't know, don't care that much. Collapse eventually? Don't see any way around it. I don't want to get trampled by some bail-in, am wondering how to sidestep that s%^t, and they are for sure going to do that and everything else they can think of probably. They do wage and price controls via Obamacare [hasn't worked once in 2500 years of history] so yeah, like Trump says, they are stupid.