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True, in the words of Jim Cramer, there's always a bull market somewhere.
Having said that, commodities have been the NEW ENGLAND PATS/GREEN BAY PACKERS for the past decade in the financial world.
Also, disagree, stocks are not one of the best ways to make money..........but it can be a nice little savings vehicle over time.Comment -
I agree on commodities. I kind of consider them part of the stock market. As for buying and holding a stock I'm no fan of that by any means. I couldn't sleep at night being fully invested. I do a lot of arbitrage and play a lot of deal stocks along with bobbing and weaving. I sell a lot of naked call and put options. I look wherever I feel risk/reward is in my favor and where I feel I know what I'm doing. Don't want to be the blind square getting eaten up by the insiders. With all the ETF's available on commodities it's so much easier to invest in them than in year's past.Comment -
America in 5 years
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Emily Haines has the brain of a cockroach.Comment -
I'd hope so. When the S&P broke below its 50 day SMA at 1331 it was off to the races on the shorts. It didn't hold the 150 day SMA at 1290 last week. Look for it to test 1257 which is the low for the year and where the 200 day SMA is currently. If it breaks that.......down below!Comment -
Idiot post.
Oil is far from running out. Decades away. And there is no fear of a monetary collapse. But it's cool to say stuff like that because it's titillating and in certain crowds it might make you sound smart...But not smart enough to spell the word ridiculous.Comment -
STOCKs-----snoozefestComment -
I gotta move the F outta the USAComment -
401k Just flat line today. Looks like I'm throwing everything into JP Morgan Stable value, next week.
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After the crash: the pauperisation of middle-class America
by Richard Wolff - Guardian
With the crisis now in its fifth year, it's plain that the rich and powerful have restructured society toward ever-greater inequality
The current global crisis of capitalism began with the severe contraction in the housing markets in mid 2007. Therefore, welcome to Year Five. This inventory of where things stand may begin with the good news: the major banks, the stock market and corporate profits have largely or completely "recovered" from the lows they reached early in 2009. The US dollar has fallen sharply against many currencies of countries with which the US trades, and that has enabled US exports to rebound from their crisis lows.
However, the bad news is what prevails notwithstanding the political and media hype about "recovery". The most widely cited unemployment rate remains at 9% for workers without jobs but looking. If instead, we use the more indicative U-6 unemployment statistic of the US labour department's bureau of labour statistics, then the rate is 15.9%. The latter rate counts also those who want full-time but can only find part-time work and those who want work but have given up looking. One in six members of the US labour force brings home little or no money, burdening family and friends, using up savings, cutting back on spending, etc.
At the same time, the housing market remains deeply depressed as 1.5-2m home foreclosures are scheduled for 2011, separating more millions from their homes. After a short upturn, housing prices nationally have resumed their fall: one of those feared "double dips" downward is thus already under way in the economically vital housing market.
The combination of high unemployment and high home foreclosures assures a deeply depressed economy. The mass of US citizens cannot work more hours – the US already is No 1 in the world in the average number of hours of paid labour done per year per worker. The mass of US citizens cannot borrow much more because of debt levels already teetering on the edge of unsustainability for most consumers. Real wages are going nowhere because of high unemployment enabling employers everywhere to refuse significant wage increases. Job-related benefits (pensions, medical insurance, holidays, etc) are being pared back.
There is thus no discernible basis for a substantial recovery for the mass of Americans. The US economy, like so many others, is caught in serious stagnation, a situation flowing partly from the economic crisis that began in 2007 and partly from the way in which most governments responded to that crisis. Thus US businesses and investors increasingly look elsewhere to make money.
Rapidly rising consumption is not foreseeable in the US, but it is already happening where production is booming: China, India, Brazil, Russia, parts of Europe (especially Germany). Growth-oriented activity is leaving the US economy, where it used to be so concentrated. The US was already becoming less important as a production centre as profit-driven major US corporations shifted manufacturing jobs to cheaper workers overseas, especially in China.
In recent decades, those corporations' export of jobs expanded to include more and more white-collar and skilled work outsourced to India and elsewhere. Now, US corporations are also spending their money on office, advertising, legal, lobbying and other budgets increasingly where the expanding markets are – and not inside the US.
Obviously, both Republicans and Democrats are agreed to do nothing more that quibble over insignificant margins of so huge a deficit. Meanwhile, they perform live political theatre about their "deep concern about deficits and debts" for a bemused, bored and ever-more alienated public.
Neither party can shake off its utter dependence now on corporate and rich citizens' monies for all their financial sustenance. Therefore, neither party imagines, let alone explores, alternatives to massive deficits and debts. After all, government deficits and debts mean: first, the government is not taxing corporations and the rich; and second, the government is, instead, borrowing from them and paying them interest. So, the two parties quibble over how much to cut which government jobs and public services.
Yet, the tax burdens of US corporations and the richest citizens (what they actually pay) are significantly lower than in most other advanced industrial economies. Indeed, they are far lower than they were inside the US a few years ago. In the mid 1940s, the corporate income tax brought Washington 50% more than the individual income tax. Today, the corporate income tax brings the federal government 25% of what is taken from individuals.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the top individual income tax rate in the United States (the rate paid by the richest citizens on all their income over about $100,000) was 91%. Today, that rate is 35%, a staggering cut in the taxes on the richest Americans, far larger than the cuts in anyone else's tax rates. Half or more of today's federal deficits would be gone if we simply taxed the richest US citizens at the rates in effect in the 1950s and 1960s. If we also taxed corporations in relation to individuals as we did in the 1940s, the entire deficit would vanish.
In summary, shifting the burden of federal taxation from corporations to individuals and from the richest individuals to the rest of us contributed to massive deficits and debts. Instead of correcting and reversing that unjust shift, Republicans and Democrats plan, instead, to deal with deficits and debts by cutting Medicaid and Medicare and threatening social security.
A revealing historical incident can introduce our conclusion about the capitalist crisis as it enters Year Five. In May 2011, as gasoline prices rose to between $4 and $5 per gallon, a US Senate committee run by Democrats summoned the heads of major oil companies to testify. The senators asked why the federal government should continue to provide them with special tax loopholes and direct subsidies of $4bn per year when their companies were earning record high profits. The Democrats had offered a meek plan to merely cut those loopholes and subsidies from $4bn to $2bn per year. After the hearings, the US Senate voted not to cut the loopholes and subsidies at all.
The largest corporations and richest citizens long ago learned that if you want to sustain an extremely unequal distribution of wealth and income, you need an equally unequal distribution of political power. Those corporations use their profits to pay huge salaries and bonuses to their executives, to pay big dividends to their major shareholders, and to "contribute" to politics.
The corporations, their top executives and the major shareholders whom they enrich all regularly finance the political campaigns and politicians that perform that sustaining function. An increasingly unequal capitalist economy pays for the increasingly undemocratic politics it needs.
Any serious effort to change the basic situation, functions and direction of government policy must change the answer our society now gives to this basic question: who gets and disposes of the profits of producing goods and services in the US economy? So long as the answer remains corporations' boards of directors and major shareholders (the status quo), current trends will continue until bigger economic collapses bring the system to self-destruction. Then we will have graduated from a crisis with banks "too big to fail" to a crisis that is itself "too big to overcome."
A changed system – perhaps called "economic democracy" – in which the workers themselves collectively operate their enterprises would immediately redirect enterprise profits in different ways, with very different social consequences. For example, according the bureau of labour statistics, during 2010, the pay for average workers rose 2% while the pay for CEOs rose 23%. Workers who collectively directed their own enterprises would distribute pay increases very differently and far less unequally.
Likewise, to take another example, self-directing workers would allocate their enterprises' profits to the government (that is, pay taxes) but demand in return the sorts of mass-focused social programmes that the current CEOs and boards of directors want government to cut. Democratic enterprises would have to work out collaborations and agreements with democratically run residential units (cities, states, etc) where their decisions impact one another.
This short article is hardly the place to work out the details of so changed an economic system. That is, after all, the task of democratic economic and political institutions to do together, once the change has been discussed, adopted and set in motion.
Throughout the cold war decades, and even after the USSR dissolved in 1989, we remained, as a nation, afraid openly to discuss and debate a basic economic issue. Does our economic system, capitalism, serve our needs sufficiently; does it need basic changes; or might a change to another economic system be best? Instead of a debate over alternative answers to such questions, we permitted little beyond self-congratulatory cheerleading for capitalism. Seriously questioning capitalism, let alone challenging it, remained taboo, an activity to keep repressed.
That repression encouraged an unquestioned and unchecked US capitalism to become ever more unequal, delivering more "bads" than "goods" to ever larger majorities of people. This unsustainable situation is being strained to breaking point by the crisis that now enters Year Five.Comment -
Fish.....Good informative article. This was an interesting part, "In the mid 1940s, the corporate income tax brought Washington 50% more than the individual income tax. Today, the corporate income tax brings the federal government 25% of what is taken from individuals."
I had no idea it had changed that much. I couldn't believe they continued the Bush tax cuts. It helped me as I converted all my IRA's that hadn't already been converted to Roth's and I stand to benefit from the extension but it was not the right thing to do for the country. I do like how the Replublicans are pressing the Dems for less spending though. I would love to see a smaller government and if they could keep taxes at the same level and lower government spending and still balance the budget that would be great. But the way politicians love to spend it will be very difficult to do so. Lower the rate and broaden the base has a lot of fans now; I being one of them. Realistically I think they need to go to a Value Added Tax each year to balance the budget annually. They could adjust the tax every month or quarter based on what the tax revenue shortfall is.Comment -
Mad Money man Jim Cramer says don't sell. What else can he say?? The May 6th 1000+ point drop (ended the session down 342 points) gave individual investors and fund managers a new menace to contend with, high frequency trading done in huge volume by computers using alogarithms. The hi frequency traders computers created a panic sell-off on May 6, when an incorrect formula started dumping stocks. Individual investors have always been concerned about "insiders" and "edges". This new trading tech. has many ready to pull out of stocks and go to the currency/commodity markets. Underneath all this is a panic waiting at the starting line. Regulators have to show they are willing to protect individuals or the markets will continue to drop in my opinion.Comment -
I'm not sure I agree with the premise of this article. I feel like we've been challenging the notions of capitalism since I was in high school.
And it seems to me this nation hasn't had pure free market capitalism as long as I've been alive.
I agree that corporations have too much power. But it's not because they don't pay taxes. It's because they can rewrite the regulatory laws whenever they want to prevent the little guys from expanding and offering quality competition. This decreases the need for innovation and talent requirement. It means fewer jobs and lower salaries.
It doesn't help that the middle class's tax rates are hampering their ability to invest. Inflation and corporatism has made it such that the middle class doesn't have the purchasing power it once had. Meaning businesses aren't making the revenues they once did, meaning less R/D, and less comfort for business leaders to consider expanding and creating new products. Meaning again, fewer jobs and lower salaries.
The market is flooded with qualified people without jobs. Basic economics tells us that when their is a surplus, prices go down. In this case, meaning the few people who get jobs aren't getting paid shit because the companies don't have to pay them shit because their are plenty of guys lining up right behind them to take their position.
The answer to this question isn't higher taxes. The answer is allowing individuals the right to determine how to spend their money.
Many look to the $$$ spent on the wars and blame Bush for wasting money and bankrupting us, when if you look at the numbers, our budget as a % of the GDP was lower under Bush than it had been in three decades. The last couple years that % has shot up to it's highest level EVER.
What we need to do is lower taxes on the middle class. If you liberals out there really want to help, suggest raising taxes on incomes exceeding $2-3 million a year, while also cutting capital gains taxes, corporate taxes, estate/death taxes, and the income taxes for anybody making less than 250K a year down to about 15-18%.
When corporate taxes are high, American business moves their operations over seas. And overseas businesses open up shop elsewhere. Meaning less jobs.
It's much more desirable for the wealthiest Americans to ship production overseas than for them to actually want to live overseas themselves. So you cut the business end, but raise their personal end.
And at the same time, you cut capital gains taxes, which do incredible harm to upwardly mobile middle class citizens. And you cut estate/death taxes because those also really put a crink in the potential plans of middle class Americans, who might inherit a good enough chunk of change to start their own businesses and provide competition and jobs, but are instead giving that money to the gov't who flushes it down the toilet.
It doesn't matter how much you tax the rich, it isn't going to help anybody if the middle class isn't let loose from the chains that have been shackling them down. Small businesses, the backbone of our system, are usually started by middle class people with their own start-up money. Let them keep more of it, and you'll have more small businesses. Small businesses that grow into bigger businesses, which then compete with the big boys, spreading around the market share, preventing concentrations of wealth. The government can't stop the hoarding of wealth through taxation. They only exacerbate it.No more of that talk, or I'll put the leeches on you.Comment -
Market up today because of the Mavericks win
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We have practiced a form of capitalism. It would be nice to not have to deal with regulation. However, time and again, when left to their own devices the corporate world has proven to be unwilling or unable to police itself. The pressure on CEO's to produce positive gains is enormous. It is almost unfair in a sense. Everybody knows that reinvestment, research/development are the key to longterm stability and profitability. Shareholders/fundmanagers/board of dir. etc don't want to hear it if it means a diminished return. That mentality is not consistant with true capitalism as the driving forces do not come from the market. Regulation is just another force that has to be because humans can't seem to do the right thing. Wall Street's troubles are a direct result of their own actions.Comment -
Read last nite where the housing decline has exceeded the Great Depression decline with no end in sight.Comment -
Stocks down well into the triple digits with just a little over one hour remaining in the trading day.Comment -
True. But then, even when Wall St. is policed they manage to fuk shit up.
Prohibiting the open/public sale of companies would go a long way to curbing the type of Machiavellian business practices you speak of. But this will never happen. Ask your pals at GE/GM and within the Obama Administration why.No more of that talk, or I'll put the leeches on you.Comment -
Obama destroyed America
Worst Pres of all times
We are close to a depressionComment -
While I agree that Obama's financial policies have been bad, if not terrible, Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush were all just as terrible.
Deregulation has absolutely buried the individual american's hope for financial success!
You have to change up the current financial system and regulate, but Lobbyists are not going to let that happen.Comment -
so much for yesterdays gains
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