I’m not an economist or a trader, but I play one on the Internet. As a result, I’d like to give you my predictions for the market and share my long term investment strategy.
First, I am currently heavily invested in canned goods, firearms, ammunition, and gold - with extremely fortified positions in remote land and barbed wire. I can make a strong case for any company that sells batteries, generators, gasoline, torches, candles, flashlights, light explosives, armor plating for residential use and first aid kits.
As the strength of the dollar weakens even further, I’d start considering heavy investments in the currency of the future - candy bars, cigarettes, prostitutes, duct tape, alcohol and bottled water.
If your portfolio is light on any of the following tangible goods, you should stock up now:
Blankets
Hunting and camping equipment
Survival gear
Anything sold by Cabela’s
I would also strongly advise divesting any holding that places great faith in the American government’s ability to handle the current economic crisis. After all, the companies represented by the market have now lost so much value it’s entirely possible they won’t have enough money to pay their taxes and government services will have to be cut way, way back.
If you have any children of military age, I’d suggest you have them enroll in the military and request assignment to the same geographic area where you plan to establish a base camp. That way, when the government storms your compound, your child may be able to keep his buddies from killing you. If you don’t have a child old enough to be your man on the inside, stock pile significant amounts of the future currency items listed above. They may keep young kids unpaid by a broke military from pillaging your stronghold.
Finally, you should consider moving to somewhere with a stronger, healthier economy. You know, like one of the third world countries we’ve been supporting with copious amounts of foreign aid for the last five or six decades. If you pursue that strategy, however, I’d suggest you leave now as they’ll probably seal the borders soon.
Good luck, investors, and happy hunting. See you on the other side of the apocalypse.
Now, I’ll first repeat my firmly held position that John McCain is no great shakes, but come on. How do you, with a straight face, suggest that Obama, who even CNN admits largely owes his political career to someone who targeted his fellow Americans with explosives, should be held harmless for that association? How do you then, in the very next breath, suggest that McCain and Palin are somehow responsible for what one or two unhinged nutbags say or do while attending a rally?
Further, when most of the Democratic party online has spent the last five years calling Bush a war criminal, a traitor, or worse, how do you feign indignation when someone suggests that calling our military a bunch of baby killers is tantamount to treason? Here is Obama’s exact quote in context:
Now you have narco drug lords who are helping to finance the Taliban, so we’ve got to get the job done there [in Afghanistan], and that requires us to have enough troops that we are not just air raiding villages, and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there.
Compare that to John Kerry’s now infamous winter soldier testimony:
I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command….
They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
This portrayal of our military as a bunch of mongols ravaging the countryside with little regard for “killing civilians” and “air raiding villages” is epidemic in the Democratic Party. It is part of the anti-military talking points. You can’t possibly act surprised that people take Obama’s remarks as an attack on our military.
Yet we’re supposed to look the other way when a man who wishes to be Commander in Chief denigrates our troops?
At the same time, we’re supposed to give a candidate a pass for associating with a man who apparently believed, and remains without remorse for the belief, that the only appropriate use of military power should be against civilians working in our own government? A man who, after bombing his countrymen, still says he wishes he could have done more for his cause.
Honestly? You will defend Barack Obama’s associations with that man, and his own disdain for our troops, yet you will try, with flimsy reasoning, to connect the GOP ticket with some random crowd members?
What if the roles were reversed. What if John McCain had spent 15 years cuddling up to Tim McVeigh? What if Terry Nichols had held a campaign kickoff event for J-Mac in his home? What if McVeigh had worked to secure tens of millions of dollars for an initiative that John McCain ran? Would you give him a pass? I doubt it.
While I am shocked by the Democrats’ indifference to Ayers, I also think the events of the Vietnam war were, as Obama says, 40 years ago. People have moved on.
However, I do not see how you can ignore that, also ignore your candidates defamation of our military’s service on behalf of our nation, and then try, laughably, to make McCain and Palin responsible for some random nutjob in a crowd of thousands.
I thought I’d pull out an oldie but a goodie from the 2004 campaign. It’s the Daily Show’s coverage of the Coral Gables debate and “the expectations game.”
Let’s be clear about one thing. The economic disaster we find ourselves in is not entirely the making of Wall Street. For the Democrats in the audience, it is not entirely the fault of Republicans. For the Republicans in the audience, this is not entirely the fault of Democrats. This is, to put it plainly, the net result of the perfect storm of stupidity.
If you have ever read The Perfect Storm, there is a great explanation of the three weather phenomenon that came together to create the system that is the focus of the book. The movie glosses over the explanation, so read the book instead.
What we are witnessing this week is the same interaction of three deadly factors. Any one of the three would be destructive. In total, however, they have just cost you and I a trillion dollars. And don’t for a moment think the total will end there. Mark my words, this bailout has only begun to cost us.
The Three Factors
Under a Republican congress and Democratic President, Washington expanded a Carter era relic called the Community Reinvestment Act.
In other words, banks will make loans for houses to people who are ill-equipped to pay them back. The “encouragement” came in the form of penalties for not doing so.
Add to that another bill passed by a GOP controlled Congress with a Democratic President. That bill, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act sought to:
Enhance competition in the financial services industry by providing a prudential framework for the affiliation of banks, securities firms, insurance companies, and other financial service providers, and for other purposes.
In other words, prior to the law, Insurance companies could sell insurance, banks could do loans, securities firms sold stock, and never the three should meet. After the law, it was a free for all. Banks created securities out of the shitty loans they issued under the CRA, Insurance companies under wrote those while creating their own shitty securities, etc, etc.
Now into the mix you have to throw the American people. They look at the news and see home values going through the roof. The react the same way they did during the Beanie Baby craze. They rush out to get a piece of that action. They can buy a $5 stuffed animal and sell it for $300 on eBay, so they buy the hell out of Beanie Babies.
Unfortunately, economic laws will only support that for so long. The company will make more (thereby reducing demand for the things), people will lose interest, or some other force will enter the market and suddenly your left with crates full of stuffed animals rotting in closets. Beanie Babies were an artificial market.
In the same way, people saw home ownership as a great way to make money. Home flipping became the rage, people took out second mortgages to buy second homes, and suddenly everyone had to buy a house.
The Perfect Storm
The trouble is when you have people who can’t afford to buy houses meeting up with people who have to sell houses to keep from running afoul of laws designed to promote home ownership among the poor, you wind up with a) a guy who will lie about his income or b) a guy who will lie about the value of the house or the terms of the loan.
So suddenly a lot of people are invested in houses they can barely afford anyway, and the real terms of those notes go into effect. People can’t pay, so the value of that note becomes worthless.
Since you have built shitty securities on the value of that house, the value of those securities go into the toilet. When that happens, the debt that the mortgage company is carrying becomes unsustainable and the house of cards comes tumbling down.
This is exactly what we’re witnessing. We’re seeing exactly what happens when an artificial market comes tumbling down. There never was a market for housing for people who can’t afford it. The government created one, took their eyes of the guys who were managing it, and is now asking us to throw another deck on the house of cards so people who can’t afford to borrow can keep doing so.
DC is Fundamentally Broken
I have said that Washington DC is so fundamentally broken it is going to drag the rest of the country down with it. I am more convinced of that than ever today.
With this bailout, we’re solving nothing. We’re simply allowing people who shouldn’t have credit to keep on borrowing. We’re enabling addictive behavior. The Congressmen who voted for the bailout should be tried as traitors.
Despite all of that, I was forced to watch to politicians on TV last night both of whom blamed “the greed and corruption of Wall Street” for the mess while giving a pass to the incompetence and stupidity of Washington. Make no mistake. This dismal situation was the result of horrible policy that started with, and was supposed to be overseen by, Congress. They passed the laws that allowed this to happen and ARE TAKING ABSOLUTELY NO RESPONSIBILITY for the mess they created.
What’s worse, is both candidates for President, and both candidates for Vice President, appear to have learned absolutely nothing from watching this happen and are pursuing the same ridculous policies that have crippled our nation.
I believe you can absolutely count on two things.
First, when the next Administration is about 6 months or a year into its term, they will have to deal with an economic disaster of Biblical proportions. This is a band-aid fix for a missing leg. It’s stupid and will do nothing but punt the problem into an off-year when the sheep aren’t watching.
Second, if you think we dodged a bullet with this bill today, you haven’t seen anything yet.
The speaker’s point was we live out our collective need for the latter is each by participating in the former in each pair. We have a tribal background that makes us warlike, so we engage in sports. I think the point is fundamentally flawed. I, like most people I know, have a healthy competitive streak, but engage in sports because it’s fun and I get exercise. It’s not because I want to act out conflict issues.
What was more interesting about the TED discussion, though, was the exploration of the different moral values shared by liberals and conservatives. The site drove to a website where you can participate in the mass moral survey. I tripped on over and took the test and here are my results compared to the larger populations of “conservatives” versus “liberals”.
My Moral Compass
What I find fascinating is how far out of sync I am with liberals and conservatives. The site doesn’t give you the option to explore your score as it relates to others with ideological interests matched to your own. I’d be curious to see if other “libertarians” had similar scores. I scored far lower on the religion/purity scale than even the liberals, but I also had far less respect for “authority” and “loyalty” than even the lefties. I’m not sure if that’s a reflection of my membership in the “leave me the hell alone” coalition.
Some of the questions about “harm” were a bit skewed by the study’s lack of distinction between harming people and harming animals. I’m a hunter. I like to put meat in my fridge. Yet the test asks whether I think “it’s morally wrong to harm a defenseless animal.”
I said I absolutely disagreed for the simple reason that shooting a deer could be described that way. Frankly, I think anyone who has used shampoo tested on animals that had their tear ducts removed or eaten a Thanksgiving turkey that has been force fed growth hormone injected grain for a year or two has done more to “harm” defenseless animals than my one bullet, one kill hunt. But that’s another discussion.
That view does, however, account for the low number on my “harm” trait. It was also impacted, apparently, by my negative response to the statement that the single greatest concern we should have in life is that nobody suffer. Suffering is part of life, and common to every animal in the animal kingdom. We’re never going to change that.
My larger question still remains. Are libertarians dramatically different from liberals and conservatives? If you’re interested in answering that question, and consider yourself libertarian, register at yourmorals.org and take the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. Once you have, leave me a comment with your political ideology and scores. I’ll compile them and report back in the future.
