Stock Market

On a semi-related note.

http://sadguysontradingfloors.tumblr.com/post/53519557/i-cant-add-a-caption-to-this-that-could-possibly

I find it rather funny that the big push for the bailout was to stop the tanking of the markets. Yet basic greed dictates the bailout would only entice the market to decline even more. This is a major reason I was against such action. Talk about shortsightedness on the part of the political system. This situation is an example of "redistribution of wealth" at its finest.

I fully expect the US markets to drop another 15% and the EU & Asian markets to drop at least 20% before the major hemorrhaging is done.

If I had the cash I would start buying shares in games companies like EA, Who cares if they have dropped 40 odd percent in the last month in a year or so chances are they will have risen over the past value giving a profit.

PS: when I first saw the name of the topic I though it was about the building in GC2 then I saw where it was.

It's actually good if you're in your 20's, 30's, 40's, as it's much more room for the stock market to boom.

Oh yeah, people pulling their 401ks and investments are short sighted. The market will recover, well all just need to calmdown. The bailout was supposed to give people hope but people keep pulling.

The bailout is to keep the banking system from collapsing.

No, the bailout is to keep the mortgage market from collapsing.  Individual banks are in trouble, the banking system as a whole would just get to make more money buying up the bad assets for cents on the dollar from the failures.  What wouldn't be good is housing prices returning to reasonable, and credit only being available for people that aren't sucidal loans.  That would end the social engineering projects they have going that have built this bubble to start with.

The whole world is on the verge of collapse, and the media, as you just rightly said, is the main cause of it. By spreading the news of doom, don't you just bring doom to your table?

It's a bubble, there is no worlwide collapse coming.  We got to have a burst instead of a deflation is all.  The wealth that didn't exist has already disappeared for the most part.  If they can just avoid taxing themselves into a depression and killing off the investment opportunities it's causing, the world will be just fine.  Unless the fucktard OPEC members decide they really like $160 oil, in which case the massive slowdown it caused will continue and the Africans and Asians will go back to eating bugs and grass before it ends.

Well the worst is over now and I expect a 3% - 5% flux for the next couple weeks going into x-mas season. That is unless the hedge fund asshats fight the government with restructuring packages. If they do then I expect another 10% drop with in the week and an additionaly 20% in Asia and the EU.

I am so depressed because people like Spartan think the worst is over.  NO, it's NOT.   With the fear of a global recession, people would be more careful about their money.  The credit market is pretty much done and gone.  Less people want to shell out during Xmas = middle class crisis.   And without the strong middle class market, America is just another country. 

America's middle class was all but ruined by a the past few republican presidents and congressional leadership. Additionally barring any major issues with multinational institutions and central bank bullshit the worst of it is in fact over as far as I can tell - for G8 countries at any rate.

The people who will get hit the hard in coming weeks are more than likely those in developing countries. Fear is just that fear it is not factual and should not be acted upon by a reasonable person.

Hell yesterday and the day before I had to advice several friends whom have lost nearly 50% of their retirement funds as well as a few stock accounts in the past couple weeks not to unload and simply sit it out and in fact I encouraged them to buy more stocks since it appears there is a first rate fire sale going on.

Nah, this has been brewing for a long time, before Bush. I wouldn't blame a political party for this.

It is kinda dissapointing that our stock market depends so much on psychology.

Only in a country where even the poor are above poverty level, can something so asinine ever be propogated.

Exactly. Bush jr is the tail end. To me it pretty much starts with Nixon.

Every financial expert I've talked to said the same thing - if you have money somewhere else (CDs, savings, etc) and don't really need it for the next 5 years, buy now. No, the market will not get back to where it was in the next year, but in a few years you'll be grateful you did this.

Some people go as far back as Roosevelt. Why blame a party anyways? It's not as if the Republicans have been in power the whole time.

From what I can tell, all of the factors that have made this possible have been accumulating under both Democratic and Republican leadership. It's not any party that is to blame, it's just that whoever was in power didn't see it coming.

Which is sad, because I've listened to both Democrats and Republicans that have seen this coming for a while. They may have disagreed as to which factors are the most important, who is to blame, and how to fix it, but it does seem that they all agreed we couldn't stay on this course forever. It just seems that nobody could get the attention of Washington.

True enough.

I tend to lay blame at Nix's feet since he started the HMO concept. Which was sort of green light for naked greed in the name of profits at the expense of the general public welfare. Moreover the repubs (I was one for over a decade) have been the torch carriers for rampant deregulation across the board in spite of industry failure after failure and reduction in government oversight as well as citizens services and have controlled the Congress for nearly all of the last five decades. Moreover when the reps went fundamentalist and started wholesale pandering to special interest I went dem officially but at heart I'm lib.

I'm a lapsed anarchist and a partisan Democrat. I like to blame both parties but want mine to win back power so we can do our usual job of getting a few important things done while we busily decide who is going to shoot who in the foot so we don't have all that responsibility for too long. Plus, I think we're generally readier to acknowledge our warts and call a fellow partisan "fool" if that's what we believe. What seems to have taken down the modern national GOP is a severe case of groupthink (as opposed to our moderate one). They have made the very act of disagreeing with authority just cause to question someone's patriotism. That's not good for hashing out complicated problems.

As far as history and the current crisis goes, the Great Depression and the New Deal are definitly a major node, but we had a long history of panics before that, and both taxing and the monetary system were big fights during our founding (the Articles were *such* a mess). Which is a backwards way of saying I think it better to look at specific laws and policies than to find a president to blame.

One of the things I hope for most and expect least out of an Obama presidency is a national confrontation with our excessive expectations of the office. It's true that to an extent the stock markets are a set of mood rings for the rich. But it's also true that too many of us too often try to use presidents as puffed-up heroes and villains with oversimplified stories that help us avoid the hard work of understanding and addressing policy problems. They're only people in the end. George Washington understood that deeply, despite his great love of being the belle of the ball--he shocked his fellows by choosing "Mister" as his salutation and actually deigning to shake people's hands at those parties he so loved.

p.s. Re Nixon: a number of "true conservatives" probably hate him more than you might think--on some scales, he was one of the most "liberal" presidents of the last 50 years. He experimented with wage and price controls, supported methadone clinics, and went to Beijing. Me, I'm still bitter about those hearings interrupting my Saturday morning cartoons *forever* and Nixon ending up with a pardon. Robbing a kid of cartoons just because you can't hire top-quality burglars and have an unfortunate fetish for recording audio in your office--harrumph.

I do believe this is the first time I've heard someone claim to be a libertarian while castrating the republican party for deregulation and cutting of "services" and joining the democrats in response.

Shit happens, people are imperfect.  Industry fails despite regulations all the time, there were more bank failures before the deregulation than there are now.  Mistaking the flaws of humanity in general for something exclusive to the private sector is foolish, considering government screws up far worse than they do just as frequently.  Ten trillion dollars in debt itself would have been the end of any private company under a similar strain.

@Psy - strange but true. What is in someone's heart is not necessarily what they live by. Just knowing is what is important. Moreover in a perfect world I would love a lot less of social and economic control but I'm practical enough see that would not really happen due to vested interest and as long as those making the rules are pretty much from one class and the system is set up in such a way that getting involved seriously requires one to basically sell their soul to special interest.

So the game is very rigged if you will - that is not right. Hence my democratic practices as a citizen. It is the lesser of two evils as the old saying goes...