OK, so now Obama has gone back on what he's been saying over and over again, that bankruptcy for GM basically won't happen. Again a politician double talking = shocking!
I have to say, its rather disturbing the road we have gone down and I fear it will only get worse. NY is about to pass a bill taxing anyone making over $300,000 extra.
These are very dangerous precedents they keep setting all out of FEAR and as you know FEAR = False evidence appearing real.
I don't mind the excess tax except it works against commerce. It is absolutely ignorant and fear based to prosecute sucess. We should go with a Flat Tax rather than do what we are doing. At least that makes sense. I'm a small business owner, if I get squeezed I have no choice but to lay people off because it cuts my margins down to nothingness potentially. I'm one of 100,000s of small business that are impacted by these things.
I was watching video on Bloomberg this evening showing riots in Europe where they destroyed anything representing wealth. The rhetoric out of Washington is very dangerous, it fuels this fire that gives creedence to the notion that wealthy people are bad and should be punished.
I am in process of writing an article about the foolishness of the path we have embarked on. We simply can not continue down this path without putting our entire political and economic system at severe risk of complete breakdown. Anarchy feeds on rhetoric and chaos. When people are depressed, or angry (they are on the same plane) its almost always easier to look outside oneself, and to cast blame, often casting a net that encompasses whole groups. Racism is usually about self hatred. If one is content with onself its very hard to hate others. Much terrorism springs from poverty. Not all, but a lot of it.
Much of the rhetoric coming out of Washington, unfortunately, is based on their own fears. Fears for their jobs, fears that they will face the nations wrath. Pinning "Wall Street" as though that's actually something that is one big thing is just as ludicrous as racism. Not all the people who work on Wall Street created this, in fact probably 99% or MORE had as much to do with it as all of us in a culture of consumerism. Yet politicians speak of it as though its the birthplace of Lucifer, or greed. That's simply not true, it's a ludicrous picture. Yes, there are pieces of it that are certainly liable, but targeting everyone just creates anarcy and encites hatred to the point where many people who got bonuses at AIG fear for their life.
What do I know about it? Some of you know, when I first started and made my reputation I got death threats in 2000 and 2001. 16 of them in fact. And, some threatened to fire bomb my entire family. Why? Because I was on CNN FN saying that the market was going to go down - WAY WAY WAY DOWN, and since I was right and I was on TV saying it was going lower, some people who lost a lot of money blamed people "like me" for their losses and their fear and misery.
So, yeah, I know a bit about it. I talked to the cops and the FBI, and hired body guards. Some people are just plain nuts and some get nuts under duress. We're all humans, and the ultimately truth is that we're all in this thing called life together. It is very disturbing that this administration, that was voted in under the auspice of bringing people together seems to have forgotten that under the duress of the reality that they stepped into a hornets nest.
Right now this country, in my opinion, needs to buckle down and really deal with reality and instead of just acting and reacting, take a deeep breath and take 30 or 60 or 90 days where they don't do a thing. We keep hearing this nonsense rhetoric that if they didn't do this or that that the whole system would fall apart. I find that hard to believe, as do many brilliant economists. FEAR mongering from Washington has created their own reality. Yes, look what happened when they let Lehman fail! This is such BS its beyond belief, and yet everyday this is quoted as though it is a fact. What a crock. It's self serving propanganda at it's finest.
Now Obama says that it might be best if GM declares bankruptcy. Yeah? Well, duh! But, you jokers were the same jokers who for months now have said it would be HORRIBlE if GM went bankrupt, that it would be devastating to the economy. Please, stop with the lies and deceit, the American people can handle the truth. By constantly lying you are creating a powder keg that is going to explode at some point, you are fanning the fires of anarchy, not avoiding it. Sooner or later we have to pay the piper. Let's pay it NOW and build from it, instead of trying to enable a system that is very very broken. Instead of acting out of FEAR, why not act out of honesty and deal with the citizens of this country as adults who care and are scared right now. Telling them lies doesn't do anything but give them false hope, and I believe false hope leads to disaster. Reality is much better, it may not be easy to digest but at least it's fixable. You can't fix something that you are constantly told is ok, when it isn't.
As I write this the futures are down about 2%. I'm wondering how in the world anyone is dumb enough to own bank stocks, or REIT's or insurance stocks when the lie about not Nationalizing may just come to pass a lot sooner then most believed possible. If they can lie about GM, what makes anyone dumb enough to believe they aren't lying about the banks?
Hopefully you got on board SRS Friday, I did. I think it goes back to all-time highs in the not too distant future, but we'll see soon enough! I'm a trader, so I'll get out of it if we start to move the other way, but ultimately I think commercial real estate is gonna be tough to go up.
As always, I hope I'm wrong, but I would rather be a realist then live in false hope. I've gotten so many emails asking me if Obama and Guithner have saved us.
Saved us? No one's saved anything, that's one thing you can take to the bank. You invest in this market for anything other than a trade, you are a SUCKER. How's that for clarity? Besides, if you make too much someone just might hate you for it and threaten you, too the way the rhetoric keeps coming from Washington. Why don't they look at Goldman Sachs? It's time to really investigate this stuff, and I'd start with Goldman, to me they are culprit #1. Did you see the article in Forbes about them probably manipulating the oil markets? Again, I do not believe it is a coincidence that GS and MS are the two left. GS was about to fail as well and the government intervened.
Keep your integrity my friends and don't believe everything you are told. This country was founded and will ultimately get out of this mess with ingenuity, and with capitalism. With rewarding hard work and thinking outside the box. If we make these things that this country was founded on "evil" and punishable God help us all.
And, thank you all for your well wishes, I'm off for another couple of weeks unfortunately, I should be ok, but am still in a lot of pain. Hey, it's a lot better then being fire bombed, though!
RULE!
Waxie
3 comments:
Thanks for your insite.
ITS MUCH TOUGHER TO STEAL MORE MONEY FROM TAXPAYERS VIA CONGRESS, ESPECIALLY AFTER AIG BONUS SAGA... OBAMA KNOWS IT. HENCEFORTH, THE CHANGE OF HEART FOR GM.
LAST week raised the likelihood of a play on the major indices because of probable quarter-ending window-dressing.
This much is relatively easy to figure out. It's beyond the next week that things get a bit more hazy. There seems to be a feeling in some circles that the bottom has been reached and it's probably sunny skies ahead - Fed officials on Friday for example, spoke of the economic data picking up possibly by mid-year, while some analysts have been quoted as referring to 'inflection points' implying that markets have turned. Our take on all this is the same as it's been for months now - if you print enough money and pump enough cash into zombie banks, car companies, insurance giants and a hugely leveraged consumer-driven economy, even the worst of blood-sucking undeads should twitch into some semblance of life.
But it will not result in a lasting, durable recovery; in fact, it is possible that the subsequent fallout will be worse than before because of the disappointment that will ensue.
This is what is happening now in the US - thanks to an estimated US$3 trillion that the Federal Reserve and Treasury are injecting into America's economy (without accountability, a topic we'll leave for another column), people are starting to think that the worst is over and Wall Street, whose run over the past fortnight was also probably aided by window-dressing, has tried the get the bullish bandwagon running again.
The truth of the matter is that although the bandwagon might trundle along for a while yet - possibly even a few more months - it cannot sustain because of the flimsiness of the underlying economic recovery that is being engineered, especially when the engineers are ex-Wall Street types.
Rather than rely on Fed officialdom and investment bankers, both who have a vested interest in claiming a recovery is imminent, our preference is for independent observers who operate beyond the sphere of Wall Street and politics.
One outspoken critic of the latest US bank bailout plan is Princeton academic Paul Krugman, 2008's Nobel Prize winner for economics, who has openly said that the plan will not work and when it fails, Congress will probably not approve any more money for the Obama administration.
In his Friday New York Times commentary titled 'The market mystique', Prof Krugman correctly points out that the government is in effect bribing the private sector to buy toxic assets with its proposed public-private partnership and also correctly criticises the 'quick-fix' mentality behind the entire rescue effort that is trying to get banks back to where they were a few years ago.
'As you can guess, I don't share that vision. I don't think this is just a financial panic; I believe that it represents the failure of a whole model of banking, of an overgrown financial sector that did more harm than good,' said Prof Krugman.
Interestingly, Citigroup's FX Technicals said basically the same thing in its Friday market commentary: 'We honestly still think that people do not get the seriousness of this 'economic deleveraging' taking place . . . this is not a deleverage of the past five-six years, but of 25-30 years worth of excess,' it said.
The unit goes on to say that the US and entire global economy has been operating like a massive hedge fund for the past three decades, supplementing stagnant real incomes with cheap credit and asset market appreciation to maintain a lifestyle and illusory wealth creation that would otherwise not have been possible.
The worry is this - that model of the world is clearly unsustainable going forward yet everyone (led by Wall Street-backed US officialdom) is doing their best to engineer a quick return to that model as possible. It will probably result in a short-term uptick in the numbers and the market will respond, but when - not if - the next collapse comes, it's difficult to see how an even bigger rescue can be mounted.
Hey Waxie,
I hope you are feeling better soon. Scary thing cars.
Thank you for fitb and fas and all that at the beginning of March.
March coming in like a lion and going out like i don't know what.
Folks in the congressional committee on the mark to market issue are outrighht threatening the chair of the financial accounting standards board with termination, if the fasb doesn't immediately come to heel and adjust the mark to market rule to the specifications of the banking institutions that have made substantial political contributions congressmen on the financial services committees.
During the bank run-up at the beginning of the month some BAC executive was quoted as saying, "Thank god for country-wide." Which pretty much translates as - hey congress is on our payroll and they're gonna make it so that we can systematically and legally lie about the value of the debt on our balance sheet - and country-wide has a whole lot of this really lousy debt, so we'll be able to lie alot and it'll look like we're making money when we're actually broke and that's a great thing for us and the country, too. Hey, don't you think?
And this BAC yo yo is probably getting lots of conventional compensation and even more bonus money cause he's so smart and loyal and cause of course leverage still works. you just have to alternately bribe and threaten the government with financial annihilation.
It's sick really. It's tough to judge who is stupider and more lacking in integrity - these babbling clowns at the banks
or their tools down in DC.
Bernanke is at least relatively consistent in his actions and in what he says; and, I believe, is as straight as he knows how, whether he's right or wrong.
maybe there'll be a miracle and everything will be all right.
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