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Originally posted by GreenBicMan
reply to post by RetinoidReceptor
Mutual Funds are not even close to invested yet.
I draw this opinion from people I trust and account trends that I have personally seen as well as many consumers "objectives" regarding account transactions/activity
Originally posted by RetinoidReceptor
I am starting to think that sometimes these movements (downward and upward) aren't real. Maybe the volumes and movements are faked with computers? Perhaps when it suits governments politically and socially, markets go up and down?
Anyone else get this eery feeling sometime
We're in the end game now, my friends. In 1950, the average US/Canadian worker was orders of magnitude more productive than their foreign counterparts. Today - um, not so much. While I would never discount the ingenuity of the US/Cdn workforce (iPods, iPhones, Blackberries? My mother wouldn't have believed these possible; my grandmother would have probably thought they were work of the Devil.), we have to realize there are also plenty of smart people in Europe, Russia, and especially China. I sincerely believe that the dystopias of writers like William Gibson ("Neuromancer" and others), Neal Stephenson ("Snow Crash"), Bruce Sterling, and more point the way to our future - a deeply bifurcated society, where those with knowledge and creativity will live fabulous lives, while those with high school educations (where, in the US and Canada, "high" refers more to the students' mental state than the quality of education) will live lives of bare subsistence, ameliorated by 600 TV channels, the Internet, easily accessible drugs, and cheap porn.
The following article is the third installment in an expository series which outlines important issues facing the U.S. economy and reveals your elected officials voting records. Please write to your elected officials and demand that they represent their constituents, instead of succumbing to the whims of big business.
The United States is under constant attack from hackers based in China. It has to be assumed that the government there is behind these intrusions because they exact almost complete control over bandwidth usage in the entire country. Beijing certainly knows about each of the attacks which originated under their supervision.
We have seen signs that the collapse of our $14 trillion economy is slowing, but that does not mean we will correct ourselves to our former state. The long-run outlook does not look good for the United States.
Economist Robert Gordon told a conference of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco in November that real GDP growth in the U.S. today is at its slowest point since 1875. That means our economy is growing a slower pace today that it was during the Great Depression, World War I, the 1980s recession, and the recessions which were prevalent at the turn of the 20th century.
Our economy has gotten so bad it is actually growing as slowly as it was when we were reconstructing from the Civil War.
RealPoint also provides a comprehensive April CMBS delinquency report. A must read for both our readers and Merrill Lynch REIT analysts. Main charts extracted below. Most notable is the explosion in 90+ day delinquencies for March relative to April. In fact the deterioration is accelerating across all metrics: no second derivative green shoots anywhere in sight in CRE land.
I realize this is a long comment but I hope I have given you lots of food for thought. While some think there is too much excess capacity out there due to weak global demand cementing deflation, others worry that the world is awash with liquidity that will re-ignite another devastating inflationary episode and a more serious global downturn.
The key in all of this is how central banks will remove excess liquidity without sending the global economy back into a severe recession. If they do not have a coordinated game plan for doing this, I believe that the 'twin recessions' outcome is the most likely scenario.