On Fri, 30 Jan 2009 13:00:00 -0500, "Eisboch"
wrote:


"Vic Smith" wrote in message
.. .
On Fri, 30 Jan 2009 08:44:38 -0800, jps wrote:



The bill sucks but don't blame Obama for the **** we're in or the debt
our progeny will shoulder.

I suspect that bill will be radically changed in the Senate.
Too much resistance to the debt incurred.
And too many pieces that aren't "stimulative."
We got burned when the pols rushed TARP, and public resistance
against hurriedly tossing money is pretty high.
What I'm enjoying seeing is tentative jabs at "free trade."
We need more PERMANENT jobs.
Without addressing that need none of this stuff is good long term.
Cheap consumer goods and crass materialism is what got us here.
Wall Street bull**** telling everybody they could be rich without
labor.

--Vic

IMO, this mentality that is killing us now started in the dot com balloon.
(that burst)
I remember companies going public within a year of incorporation and having
stock being valued and sold for astronomical prices although they had never
turned a profit. In fact, some had never produced a product or service.
It was the beginning of the get-rich-quick using other peoples' money
thought process and everyone was in on the game.

Yeah, I remember my daily entry into the investment department where I
worked as a contractor supporting the fixed income piece.
October, 1997. $50 billion value.
The employees supporting equities (@ $20 billion) were always sitting
around the "decor" tables scattered there eating bagels and reading
Barrons, Fortune or the WSJ. Bigshots. Bonused.
Same people I had worked with 10 years earlier, but they kept their
noses to the wheel. They mostly read IBM manuals then.
Those dot com IPO's kept rolling in for a couple years.
Even before the bust about half those employees were dumped and the
best sent packing to other departments.
Not that they should have been. They were mostly very good people,
who were suffering with cognitive dissonance.
The CFO was a greedy sleazeball afflicted with the same hubris.
Of course the CFO got his way.
But the dot com bust was just a speed bump on the way downhill.
The DOW just kept going up.
Track it with industrial job losses, savings rates, and personal debt
and it's clear it was a unsustainable. My take, anyway.
Here we are. I predicted this when Americans went to Jap cars and you
couldn't get U.S. made consumer electronics.
But I was way off in my timing. I always thought it would happen by
the mid-nineties. We lasted this long because the pols - including
the Dems - abandoned all fiscal responsibility and fell for the Wall
Street con job on free trade (NOT) and free money (NOT).
Classic house of cards, sand castle stuff.
I see this getting a lot worse. We're hitting Reagan's low points on
economic indicators. I expect we'll blast through his unemployment
figures soon. The corp HQ my wife cooks for is putting about 20%
of the employees on the street.
Hope I'm wrong.
Hey! On the bright side, I'm often wrong!

--Vic