A Bigger Problem Than Contagion, Is the Human Problem

31 thoughts on “A Bigger Problem Than Contagion, Is the Human Problem”

1. @ Galdur. Rupert Murdoch owns a big stake in the History Channel. He's made a lot of money from gold companies like Goldline advertising on his media outlets. So the fact the History Channel ran an alien gold conspiracy program was just too much, I couldn't resist. Here's the part 2 video after you watch the one above: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RulUb-V5Hq8

2. @ Galdur LOL. Thought you might enjoy this. Breaking News On Origin Of Gold Bugs! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3UYCP77YJo

3. "A good portion of the housing bust of 2008 was at least two years in coming as noticed at the popular level by such things as living off credit cards and defaults on those payments."

   Two years? People had been over spending on credit cards for as far back as 20 years if you check news stories. So what was the big difference going into 2008? Think back. What changed everything and titled the balance of power more towards capitalism and favoring the rich? In 2005, Bush and the Republicans passed a massive restructuring of federal bankruptcy laws which punishes middle-class debtors and awards increased payouts of as much as $1 billion a year to their creditors, mainly banks and credit card issuers. The 500-page bill was largely written by the financial/banking industry, who had spent $40 million and eight years lobbying Congress for a measure to make it more difficult for individuals to escape debt repayment.

   So trying to shift the blame away from the Republicans who deregulated banks and financial firms, which allowed them to create derivative shadow markets where baskets of loans were being traded, in cohorts with rating agencies which rated the baskets A+ and above ratings, all fueled by violating contract law and creating liar loans on the front end just so the loan could be sold as another basket, changing the laws for grant deeds and how they were kept, on and on, -- excusing all of that conduct with the argument that, well, it was peoples irresponsible spending habits and their credit card debt that caused the housing crash which caused the recession, is weak and just doesn't fly. That's why you've got hundreds of thousands of people protesting in the streets man, the majority of Americans don't buy your argument.

   Keep in mind that the induction of guilt, i.e. Jesus died for your sins, is the key to human control. If you can make someone feel guilty as if they are too blame, you can control them. Don't allow people to control you by making you feel guilty: i.e. the debt on your credit card was too high and that's why the economy crashed. Consider also that credit card companies during Bush and the republicans control wrote regulations and rules that allowed them to change a payment deadline with little notice or specify an exact time of day that payment is due. Trying to stay on top of an early morning deadline or due dates that change unexpectedly often leave even the most responsible customers saddled with charges, it also allowed them to charge those that have never exceeded their spending limit fees because many consumers who stopped charging when they neared their limit find that the interest rate and additional charges are what pushed their account over the line. Also credit card companies had many sneaky tactics used to make sure you keep paying additional charges, even when you pay off your bill. For example, many banks calculate finance charges using what's called double-cycle billing, a confusing practice that averages out the balance from your previous two bills. So if you carry a balance and pay a finance charge one month, you'll get hit with a finance charge on your next bill as well, even if you've paid off the balance. then, there's a practice known as "trailing interest" - another "gotcha" to watch out for. If you send in a payment according to the full amount on your statement, you may find that you still owe a small balance next month. That's because you accrued interest between the time you sent the payment and when it was posted to your account. And all it takes is one delinquent payment to cause the credit card company to up your interest rate, often substantially. But thanks to a widely-used practice called universal default, you could end up with a higher interest rate, even if you pay on time. Credit card issuers can increase your interest rate - even if you have a perfect payment history - just because you missed a payment on another card or bill.

   So even if you accept the premise that credit card debt caused the recession, which is stupid, the argument can be made that the reason credit card debt was so high in the first place was that the financial sector was allowed to write the laws, block bankruptcy, and allow deceptive practices to flourish. Or course the biggest blow coming in 2005 with Bush and the republicans changing bankruptcy law.

   Michael Savage's real name is Michael Weiner: he's known as the Savage Weiner. He's an idiot. He's a nasty little weiner that needs his ass kicked. I tried listening to him and each time, I kept feeling a little dumber afterwards.

   As far as your paranoid and delusional conspiracies on Marxist revolution, proletariat surrender, this country is deliberately being led to its ruination, Apocolypse or Revelations, Godless moral degenerates leading this nation to ruin, well... hey, whatever floats your boat man. If conspiracy theories and stuff makes this life a little more enjoyable and easier for you to get through, whatever works for you man. Just a word of advice, you might want to just tone that down a little when having a serious conversation so people don't come to the conclusion that you're crazy and insane.

4. LancJ -

   A good portion of the housing bust of 2008 was at least two years in coming as noticed at the popular level by such things as living off credit cards and defaults on those payments. By this time the 2008 matter is summarized simply by noting the sale of discounted housing to people who COULDN'T AFFORD IT was an economic disaster for various reasons. The easiest marks were likely the "racial minorities" who are called that only because it is politically useful for the lib establishment to define them that way and exploit them in the appropriate manner. This is good business for their overseers as well. On the selling side no one care whether or not anyone can afford the purchase of a home. Seller gets his money, the realtors gets theirs, the bank, which sweats out what to do with an obviously un-collectable loan it has to make or be sued for racial discrimination, resells to someone who bundles the whole stinking mess and sells it as a security. Whoever buys that is eventually screwed when the defaults occur. Anyone who bought what they can't afford regardless of race, creed, or color or political affiliation and education takes a chance. I had three buildings full of Puerto Ricans and lived among them in the ten flats of what used to be a Jewish/Polish neighborhood. I kept one and have been here since '74. I got a fine 1892 stone two flat for $5000, a four flat of the same period for $22,500, and my three story four flat with side yard across from a large park for $27,500, all in the mid-seventies when everyone else was fleeing Rican crime and riots - including a lot of Ricans. Those were a risk of sorts as well. The Ricans fled the Daley dictatorship, the city is depopulating, and a miserable gaggle of overeducated Fidelista Ricans is trying to keep out whites, yuppies, Negroes, Mexicans, and anyone else.

   No one was "forced to buy" a house but all institutions were FORCED to finance them because of racial politics which boils down to negroes specifically as that is the mentally enslaved dependent population. The Seven-eleven girl was a real case and so was the musician who allegedly played in a Mariachi band in Colorado. BTW, I heard there were five million homes purchased by illegal aliens, which if that radio report is true, may be another part of the non-payment problem. An illegal at one time could have resold the home to another such party and split with the proceeds.

   Yes, it is a glitch that some sort of earth opening and mining operations can cause contamination of water. Why I bet it even happens in earthquakes. In fact I think volcanoes (neither of man's origin) do somewhat the same thing. The Gulf oil spill was allegedly due to an engineering problem and bad oversight. But with good engineering and oversight an earthquake would have been a problem. Being far out at sea is another problem which happens to be brought about by rstrictions on "coastal drilling". That is due to enviro-weenies who magnified a potential problem by making it a depper drilling project. The Brown Clown deliberately took fifty days before pretending to note a serious problem needed intervention since his Marxist revolution and ruin technique requires upheaval and collapse to make the proletariat surrender their testicles for a bowl of gruel. That is actually the whole bent of his management of this nation and he has many allies. This country is deliberately being led to its ruination after which we see the rise of alignments as indicated in the Apocolypse or Revelations. What you have is a Marxist uprising aided and abetted by collitch stoonts who are as bad as anything from the sixties, but now more dangerous as we have a nation in the hand of a large bunch of Godless moral degenerates. Bigger difference seems to be in a better incidental capability for spreading the plague. They leave semen trails like slugs or snails wherever they've been encamped.

   Hit Michael Savage on WTNT Virginia at 5 p.m. and you'll get hot scandal on all the interlocking particulars. He was on WIND Chicago but a melange of fags and Democrats descended upon the station, probably with the help of some Log Cabin Republicans, and got him replaced with someone who is allegedly "a taste less wild". I stopped listening and get my political and economic psychosis from WTNT when I need a fix.

5. First there needs to be agreement on how you define success. Abolition of slavery was a government policy with drastic economic implications as was universal suffrage and taxation predicated on representation. The Chinese economy prospers without the last two and some argue includes the first.
   I agree that extremes are bad which is why I challenged "The big take away from all of this, is solid proof that socialism does not work and never will work." an absolute statement followed by "You cannot keep giving more and more benefits to people who do not want to work." These are assumptive statements not statements of empirical fact.
   The real question is not what one believes is happening but what is actually occurring. For example, the increase in unemployed since 2008 is not due to a corresponding drastic increase in the number of people who don’t want to work but a demonstrable decrease in available positions. 30,000 layoffs from BOA aren’t due to an uncovering of a host of reluctant workers but a precarious financial state. And who got them into that and how?
   If outward appearances is used as a measure of causative proof then the fact that most western democracies are in dire financial strive to which the perceived solution in Europe is the appointment of non elected technocrats, as in Italy and akin to China, then it would tend to indicate that the problem is democracy and elected governments. Reform is need not outright dismissal.
   Certainly you have a right to express opinion as we all do but, as in the market place, expect the veracity of those opinions to be challenged by competing ones.

6. Apparently the Annunaki are very hungry for gold and since they are arriving any moment now via a brown dwarf or hiding behind some meteor - their arrival will make goldbugs extremely rich. Accumulating almost totally useless stuff at 5X extraction cost will pay off big. This argument is bolstered by the recent revelation that world commerce has been understated by transactions with other heavenly bodies.

7. Hey Fly Guy man. While academia debates whether we are capitalist society as brain food for college students, there is general agreement that elements of capitalism include private ownership of the means of production, creation of goods or services for profit, competitive markets, and wage labor. Most economists classify the US as capitalism based on the degree that government does not own most large corporations/businesses and also on the ground of property rights.

   Moreover, many new economists and market analysts classify the US as capitalism because private corporations control most of government: they control who gets elected (campaign donations), and they control the laws that are written (lobbyists). This relationship is so obvious and so overpowering, it is what the Occupy protests are all about: too much capitalism.

   Somewhere, we lost the ability to care for and about each other and instead replaced it with the unbridled pursuit of greed.

   Anybody telling you that we live anywhere even close to a socialist society is someone who doesn't know the definition of socialism.

   The problem is that we've gone ultra-capitalism and swung too far in that direction. Big banks and financial firms were largely deregulated during 8 years of Bush which resulted in this last man-made recession. Laws were re-written, regulatory power was reduced, oversight was removed, taxes were lowered during 8 years of Bush which caused the economy to collapse.

   Rather than claiming we are not in a true capitalistic society and that's the problem, and re-igniting the same old socialism versus capitalism argument which this article and your comments do, there is another option: Democracy.

   We exist between Democracy, and Capitalism. The balance has swung too far to Capitalism as we now have come to realize. It needs to swing back to Democracy a little and that's what is happening with the Occupy protests. Even one of the author's of our Democracy wrote, "A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned - this is the sum of good government." The man, Thomas Jefferson. Consider these Thomas Jefferson quotes:

   All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.
   Thomas Jefferson

   All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.
   Thomas Jefferson

   Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.
   Thomas Jefferson

   I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.
   Thomas Jefferson

   If Jefferson was alive today, he'd love to see the Occupy protests for it is the dial turning back away from Capitalism and more towards Democracy.

   Don't let Fox News and the Republican party put in your head that the only two options are Capitalism and Socialism and therefore the Occupy protests are Socialism. That's just not true.

8. Hey LanceJ -

   The only problem with your assessment is that we no longer live in a capitalist society. Not that it was ever pure mind you, but we now have a system where the government is messing around in the markets and screwing everything up. In fact, it may even be worse than a socialist society. I think what the author was saying is that socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried and will continue to do so and our's is looking more and more socialist.

   Anyway, as the old Chinese curse went - May you live in intersting times. We are definitely there and I do agree that we cannot hold our model up as anything even close to exemplary. I only hope we can draw back from the abyss.

9. So, the secret of Goldman Sachs´ warehousing business success is that they´ve been exporting to Venus and Mars. Whoda guessed?

10. Exports to Mars
    Official statistics probably exaggerate global current-account imbalances

    Nov 12th 2011 | from the print edition

    ECONOMISTS are constantly urging governments to adopt policies that would reduce global imbalances—which, in crude terms, means that China should slash its current-account surplus and America its deficit. Yet they ignore the biggest imbalance of all: the current-account surplus that planet Earth appears to run with extraterrestrials. In theory, countries’ current-account balances should all sum to zero because one country’s export is another’s import. However, if you add up all countries’ reported current-account transactions (exports minus imports of goods and services, net investment income, workers’ remittances and other transfers), the world exported $331 billion more than it imported in 2010, according to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook. The fund forecasts that the global current-account surplus will rise to almost $700 billion by 2014.... more

    http://www.economist.com/node/21538100?fsrc=scn/tw/te/ar/exportstomars

11. Hearing that HFT algos are scouring tweets now for momo trading tips. Look out below.

    Adam, given the high correlation between gold and equities (they rise and fall together) I would question your call on gold. Otherwise nice job as usual.

12. Bumper sticker economic arguments based upon the past are untrustworthy. It is easy to prove, according to one's ideology, that either socialism or capitalism is very bad. In fact, both have been implemented by idiots who were gaming the system and making it unsustainable. Like biological evolution, cultural evolution is cruel and largely mindless.

    Conditions and technology can change rapidly and governments are necessarily tracking a moving target.

    If you want a productive and sustainable economy, good computer software can be much better than the congress of the USA. Economic models are pragmatic guides in controlling the levers of monetary and fiscal policy while, because of flawed minds and flawed cultures, human government, however it is constructed, is plagued by corruption and stupidity.

13. "The issue is not necessarily the biggest bankers as they do whatever they are expected to get away with or are told to do. That problem is Congress..."

    Take it one step further, you can do it. Congress is not the problem, for Congress itself is an institution. It's the congressmen who made up Congress that's the problem. Who pays to get congressmen elected? Bankers, financial firms, big oil, big pharma, etc. Who pays to get laws written that benefit them? Bankers, financial firms, big oil, big pharma, etc.

    "The 2008 bust was apparently due to cheapo rotgut housing loans supporting a policy of expanding home ownership. This meant selling to what is called “minorities” as a rule but anyone who can’t afford to buy a home is fine just so long as they vote Democrat or liberal."

    If you believe this absurd statement, then it was only Democrats and liberals who lost their homes. That's absurd. Both Democrats and Republicans lost their homes. The 2008 bust was caused by liar loans where the banking industry qualified anybody for a house just so that they could basket that loan up and sell it to somebody else. They didn't care about if somebody could afford it because the whole goal was to sell the loan quickly to another entity. Then, they created a shadow market where they began using derivatives to trade those baskets of loans. Worse, even the rating agencies began giving those baskets of loans false ratings because they were being paid by the very same people who they were giving the ratings to. This is why house prices kept rising beyond the average wage/affordability in increasing areas across the US and why I, and about a million other traders, predicted the housing collapse. Just look at all the hundreds of millions of dollars in fines that have been handed out to financial firms and banks since President Obama took office. You think financial firms and bankers would just pay hundreds of millions in fines for no reason? This all could have been prevented had Bush not deregulated banks and financial firms.

    "Jerkoff Jackson in a black and tan Superman suit was ready to pounce on anyone who failed to sell an expensive home to a female negro suburbanite working in a Seven-Eleven. Reliability of buyer or prospects for repayment were irrelevant. Force fed mortgages were bundled up and sold upstream or downstream to anyone who would buy into an expanding market."

    Your reference to skin color is offensive. If your logic holds, then only black people should have been foreclosed on but that's just not the case. Further, your reference to "force fed" mortgages is dumb. No one forced anyone to buy a house. Just ask Newt Ginrich who was paid $1.8 million as a lobbyist for Fannie-Mae. Also, "mortages were bundled up and sold... to anyone": dumb man. Do you have access to these mortgages that were bundled up? Did you buy one? You said "anyone". It was not anyone. That's why it's called the shadow market in which these baskets of mortgages were traded. Bankers and financial firms even paid to rewrite laws that allowed them to trade these baskets of loans without having to file a copy of the grant deed with local county offices, which is pending litigation right now and will most likely result in more fines. You haven't done your research and you probably exclusively watch Fox News which is why your arguments are very shallow and not based on current litigation/fines.

    "As for comments about Big Bad Oil and polluted drinking water smelling like gas, methane, diesel, etc, I am not impressed that thousands or tens of thousands have that problem at the moment due to some glitch. It happens."

    That's your argument: it happens, and opps it's a glitch?

    That argument is so lame, I'm done wasting my time talking with you. This is just vain babbling. I have better things to do with my time.

14. Hi Adam

    The trade triangles are a really great technology, however wouldn't it be better if there was also some system of informing the trader of the suggested S/L instead of letting them decide on their level of comfort (that is what was conveyed to me when I had inquired earlier). I can't trade the portfolio suggested by Marketclub because many of the components are not available in my country so I have to choose between a couple of metals and currencies. BTW there was some talk of including Indian markets in your list of 250,000 stocks - has that been done, it would be a great incentive for me to rejoin Marketclub.

    Thanks

15. The only way to deal with government overspending is to take away the votes of the left - that is not going to happen.

    What will almost certainly happen is an global economic slump that will not only break banks but governments to - then we will have to start all over again.

16. The issue is not necessarily the biggest bankers as they do whatever they are expected to get away with or are told to do. That problem is Congress, the president, the guy who runs the presses (Greenspan and successors)and whomever else. The 2008 bust was apparently due to cheapo rotgut housing loans supporting a policy of expanding home ownership. This meant selling to what is called "minorities" as a rule but anyone who can't afford to buy a home is fine just so long as they vote Democrat or liberal. Jerkoff Jackson in a black and tan Superman suit was ready to pounce on anyone who failed to sell an expensive home to a female negro suburbanite working in a Seven-Eleven. Reliability of buyer or prospects for repayment were irrelevant. Force fed mortgages were bundled up and sold upstream or downstream to anyone who would buy into an expanding market. However I noted around 2005 or so comments about people living on credit cards or increasing card defaults or bankruptcies. I also recall comments about financial risks to banks and in particular the fall of a
    California bank after Sen. Schumer made a comment on its stability. It was downhill from there.

    As for comments about Big Bad Oil and polluted drinking water smelling like gas, methane, diesel, etc, I am not impressed that thousands or tens of thousands have that problem at the moment due to some glitch. It happens. It shouldn't. At least the Germ Theory is now believed and proven and even that was barely believed in Dickensian England. That was not an issue of Big Bad Medicine but a mix of psychological and scientific factors.

    Capitalism, meaning your free investment of money and resources, works fine. Jesse James was a capitalist as much as Andrew Carnegie. His end wasn't a failure of capitalist theory and neither is the death of a banker in a limo crash. We may be a bit piggish in appropriations for self-serving political purposes, but the real PIIGS are those who followed the paths of cradle to grave socialism due to having lost a sense of self-sufficiency, which is why many of their parents came to this country. The place of privilege and resulting abuse was much of noble-run Europe's modus operandi. Classic socialism seemed a cure. It isn't.

    Lower Reagan taxes did expand tax income and greatly expanded business right through the Clinton era. Unfortunately Democrats ran the House where spending originated. They also refused to rein in looser regulations which Bush later asked for in his last two years as THEY now ran the House again. The last two years of Bush were all Democrat in both House and Senate and with the Executive office they have been sodomizing the nations since the last election. Certain Repubs went along with it and must be condemned.

    In Illinois the lib Democrat newly elected governor managed to bribe enough voters in house or senate, including one who was voted out but still in office until the new session, and passed a 2/3 increase in income tax rates. That was to help balance a giant budget deficit. It is pushing the state into economic backwardness while leaving pension debt, etc, there. That is expected to be paid with more taxes as the leech public employee unions won't give up the 80% of wages pension benefits or whatever it is they're getting.

17. And pretty soon, with 7 billion people on the planet, an even bigger problem will be Human Contagion.

18. I disagree with the conclusion drawn that this is proof socialism doesn't work. I mean the title of your article could have been: "A Bigger Problem Than Contagion, Is the Central Banker Problem". The focus of your article could have been on Greece losing their ability to inflate their way out of debt like we in the U.S. can do. If you took away our (US) ability to inflate our way out of debt, we took would probably fail and then some socialist would be saying this is proof capitalism doesn't work.

    In the US, we have hundreds of thousands of people protesting in the streets (Occupy XXXX) because their money was taken from then (tax dollars) via the threat of prison (how government persuades people to pay taxes) and used to bail out the rich bankers, who then kicked millions of people out of their homes, and paid themselves bonuses, gold parachutes, etc. at the same time. Meanwhile, we have our fellow citizens going into massive debt and even dying over a corrupt healthcare system that bought politicians and paid for the current laws to be written the way they are. Then, millions more being ripped off via education loans they can't consolidate or refinance more than once because once again, the rich bankers paid for laws written that benefit them. I mean really, in a free market, anyone willing to buy my student loan should have that option so I can get a lower interest rate, just like a car loan, house loan, or any other loan. Worse, student loans are the only loans that can be deducted from your social security payments once you retire.

    Meanwhile, big oil paid to get laws written that allow them an exemption from EPA laws so that you have thousands of Americans whose drinking water is so bad, they can literally light it on fire due to fracking. The tap water is so polluted it forms a rainbow and smells like gas.

    I hardly think that the people of the US are in any position to be telling the people of Greece, hey, look at us, socialism doesn't work but capitalism sure does. You should stop being a PIIG and be more like us!

    They know what we are and they don't want to become like us. You can't fault them for that.

    What do the stock charts tell us? They tell us that during the 90's, we had a good balance between the right ideology, and the left ideology in this country: capitalism versus socialism, taxation, cost of healthcare, 1% versus the 99%, etc. Let the charts, let the market, guide your thinking. If lower taxes boosted the economy, we never would have had this past recession for Bush slashed taxes during his 8 years in office and President Obama extended them and even slashed more. If less government regulation was the answer, we never would have had this past recession for Bush slashed government regulation and even put lobbyists in charge of government offices like the EPA and passed laws that got government out of regulating banks and financial firms. Look at the charts. The 90's struck the right balance. I find it strange and sort of sad that you have republicans holding to their same old talking points: lower taxes, less government regulation, when that's the very thing we did for 8+ years and it created this last man-made recession. Again, let the charts guide your thinking: 1990 - 1999, was much better than 2000 - 2010. Republicans always talk about loving the free market, and then they impose their own ideology over the top of it. If you love the free market, you have to learn to listen to it even if it is contrary to your own political beliefs otherwise you end up being just another ideologue.

19. Hey, most of us have been busy giving up 20% in the last 5 years, as wages remain frozen and inflation has gone up.

    I am including the "volatiles" of FOOD and ENERGY as part of the real/true inflationary rate, because I actually have to drive to work and to the store to buy food (which is shipped to the store in real trucks that actually burn real diesel fuel, just like the tractors used to put the petrochemical-based fertilizers on the soil, cultivate and harvest the food) . . . forget the BS government figures, inflation is real and with frozen wages and an inexorably increasing price structure, the middle class and its assets (including the value of their homes) have been rapidly dwindling down to UNDERWATER figures.

    Yes, most people don't know what is going on in terms of the macro picture, but all they have to do is look at their checking accounts to know what is happening to them. Throw in a couple of kids going to college for $350-500 per credit hour and presto, chango! Indentured student servants with worthless college degrees because the industrial base was sent overseas, and broke parents with mortgages larger than the value of their homes.

    Greece, Italy, France et al only have to look over here to see their own future.

20. As the Pope said a couple years ago, "we are in the End Times". The pieces of degenerated nations are being aligned for a final magnetic connection and then surrender. As it says, there will be buying and trading of the souls of men. A good example is Cook ( a/k/a/ Crook) county, Illinois in which Chicago sits as the festering boil. The city legislature, with a new and heavily connected very rich mayor (Gauleiter Emmanuel), has just dumped a basket full of their own sacrificial testicles before Dear Leader's throne and praised him roundly for his new budget with its proposed tax, fine, and rate increases. With some exceptions they are all bought and paid for whores, should be running rib and catfish joints, have what are really hired hand jobs, and are getting social brownie points playing Big Man to their local tribes and clans. This is the fault of the various world populations, including our own, "who have gone a-whoring out from under their God" and who have in America's case, elected the means of their own destruction.

    I will acquire a bit more physical silver, spread my miserable trove of investments 'mongst the commodity classes, foreign producers who will be out of the line of American tax persecution or seizure by socialist governments, and likely big government approved survivors. I am literally securing my property with with decorative custom iron fencing but will put a decorative concrete and block wall about 2' high under that so I don't have to worry about a vehicle going through it - which I had happen twice with heavier wood fencing. I could do the same with smaller dragon's teeth for that matter. Remote multiple cameras viewable on a laptop would round that out. I mentioned to one outfit the possibility of mounting cameras on a rotating turret with a gun mount. Nail the suckers with one command and let out the hogs 'n dawgs to clean up the evidence with a second command. Never heard back from them.

21. Please stick to business fundamentals and spare us the psuedo political reflections on the perils of Socialism.

    We all know the refrain by now. Something bad is happening, socialsts are bad, therefore the bad thing is caused by socialists.

    1. Catweasel,

       I believe that extremes in any political persuasion are bad period. The reality is politics in 2011 do affect the markets and to ignore what is going on is a big mistake in my opinion. You have the right to disagree with my opinions, just as I have the right to state my opinion. That is what makes America great.

       America was built on free enterprise, it was not built by a government that wants to control everything in our lives. I do not know of anyone program that the government has come out with and that would go for republican or democratic administrations alike that has been successful, do you?

       Every success in the markets,
       Adam

22. I agree with what the person (DGDye) said about politics and trading. However, since you brought it up Adam, socialism and capitalism both have faults. Perhaps the best system is something of a mix. With capitalism, the for- profit healthcare industry does not serve millions in this country. Insurance is too expensive for the working poor and its inflation rate is raging. Competition serves innovation and efficiency but it also promotes environmentally unsustainable consumption....

    1. Weightmark,

       I do not disagree with your comments.

       Adam

23. This was a great piece you wrote today, 'Sir Adam', and methinks you ought to write at length more often.....Your rationale is right-on. (I dub thee "Sir Adam" for the respect you have among your members - and us freeloaders.....Thanks so very much!)

24. As with over priced valuations of stock v true underlying fundamentals, so is it in history. The devil is in the detail.

    Considering that between 2001 to 2006 both houses of the US congress were Republican and the Presidency to 2008. That Italys right wing coalition government for most of that period and since has been run and funded by a Multi Billionaire. That France's Government is Gaulists and Germanies centre right. How precisely is socialism to blame, aside from the tired old refrain that something bad is happening, socialists are bad, therefore socialists are to blame.

    Which socialists presuaded banks to overleverage themselves and pay exorbidant salaries not related to the encumbant risk of there positions (such as AIG). Which socialists forced bond holders to over expose themselves to Greek debt.

    Which socialists apart from the Blair Labour (socialist lite) government were enthusiastic for the now $800 Billion dollar cost of two adventurous wars in the middle east?

    Which socialists cut the US governments tax take (income) while increasing dramatically its military commitments (expenditure) leaving it exposed to economic shifts (GFC) which drastically exaccerbated both.

    Blaming socialism for this crisis is akin to blaming a company's misfortune on its workforce while ignoring boardroom and executive fiscal imprudence.

25. I am now 80 years old and owned and operated a multi-million dollar business for 40 years. I have watched our governments and our society decend into the depths throughout my life. I have become convinced that there is a force out there that is slowly working toward toward one world government, with the wealthy elite in charge. It is a secret society that has been around for centuries. Go to your computer and Google "Illuminati". Read what you get and it will make a decent person sick

26. Adam;

    The problem that we have is that the governments (including ours) are like Medusas. They are filled with writhing arms, performing their functions, but there is no head. Worse yet, the arms are now fighting with each other, and neither is willing to give an inch. Compromise? Please show me where it is. Guidance? Another silence. Those that have the intellegence to run their governments should stand and announce their solutions (however painful) to the present situation. I'm waiting . . .

27. Political and economic discussion can be very interesting and a lot of fun...but it can be lethal if allowed to infect your trading. When Michael Marcus interviewed Bruce Kovner in the 1970's he hired him because he felt Kovner had an absolutely open mind that believed anything could happen. For those that don't know, Kovner went on to average 87% annual returns for several years and now routinely personally earns about $1 billion per year.(87% annually turns $5000 into $1.4 million in 9 years).

    As one recent example, on October 4, we had a substantial pivot point in the markets. Not many traders recognized it as they were busy predicting the end of the world, led by Europe, and waiting for everything to roll over to the down side. It didn't happen, and still hasn't happened. Those who hesitated to invest that day have missed out on a spectacular run, primarily because they were watching CNBC and Bloomberg. That's why I got rid of all business news stations years ago. They distract you from what IS happening with what COULD happen.

    There can be no ups or downs in the markets without it showing up on the charts...it's impossible to happen otherwise. Good traders stick to the charts and leave their economic opinions to the economists and the populist wannabe fund managers -- none of whom are rich from trading, by the way.

    I'd suggest have fun, but read the headlines at the end of the trading day.

    Cheers

28. Thanks Adam, i really appreciate your daily trade traingle
    reviews of the markets!

29. Bingo! Right on!

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