Looks like most of you were wrong, except for MattinSF and MJuric. Back in Jan. 08, MJuric said he he hoped he was wrong about 10,000. Correction, MattinSF predicted 10,000 before 13,000 so he was technically wrong, except it didn’t stay above 13.
This chart is the DJIA from Oct. 07 through today. It looks like after the Big Dump in Jan. when Matt originally posted this, the Dow barely touched 13,000 except for a couple times in May. It’s been down hill since.
Also last tri in 83 was corrrect when he said, “the man controls the elections and the stock market. we are all powerless.”
“Houston, we have a problem”.
"I was at a thoroughly depressing breakfast conference today where a guy showed a couple of slides that tracked the rise in US debt in the last 30 years with the comparative rise in the stock market.
His analysis is that our whole economy since the early 80s has been a false one, built on debt, deferred spending, and writing IOUs that we’ll never be able to honor. It is not an economy based upon innovation, production, and investment.
He predicted that it if we changed our ways today and made a 180 degree turn towards a more sustainable economy it would take 50 years to repair the mistakes of the last 30.
Basically he was saying every company and stock in your portfolio is vastly over valued by magnitudes of X3 or X4.
I had 3 cups of coffee. "
Sounds like fun. Pretty depressing stuff… I usually don’t read the WSJ but I picked up a copy last night because I wanted to read the Lehman unraveling story. There were so many articles about other countries banking problems I was overwhelmed, then the market goes down another 500pts today and I am sitting here wondering why didn’t I move my 401k money out of stock funds into something super conservative, like the mattress fund. Things could get extremely ugly.
My wife’s company has been bought twice by private equity firms who sliced and diced the company, laid people off then resold pieces off, adding no real value to our economy but filling their own coffers. We have had similar conversations like the one you mention above about the new way - soon to be old - to make money is adding no real value to our economy lbo’s, derivitaves, credit swaps etc. while our manufacturing and intellictual base is shrinking. Now that all of the credit markets are unwinding and ponzi scheme financial instruments disintegrating, it won’t be a pretty sight when we peek behind the curtain to see what’s left.
The intellectual base isn’t shrinking, it just went in to finance, trading and marketing because those are the areas society values and so rewards with large incomes.
9000 is just around the corner, look out belowwwwwwwww.
you heard it here first.
8000 by January.
Right now I am so out of equities it isn’t even funny----the last 30 days has seen the quickest turnaround of the U.S. dollar against some Asiatic currencies that I’ve ever seen.
Aussie went from .96 to .65 (I bought a little on the way down & completely loaded up on futures at .66, and then shorted the hell out of it on a 90 day play).
New Zealand similar.
Almost every world currency has been down against the dollar as Kerry trades unwound, and everyone became risk adverse & sought shelter in the U.S. dollar. Now the question is–what really has changed in the fundamentals vs the past 4-5 years of a sliding dollar? Aside from the U.S. finally, slowly realizing that the past 7 years we’ve been living on false equity & real debt, nothing else has really changed (though commodities seem to be overvalued a bit).
What I’ve done with my $$, and what I recommend, is to bet against the dollar in the short-term (Y/E 2008), as this “correction” (especially against the Aussie & the NZ $$) just doesn’t make sense given where the dollar has been trading over the last 5 years.
9000 is just around the corner, look out belowwwwwwwww.
you heard it here first.
8000 by January.
More like 8000 by the end of the week. We just blew past 9000 with zero resistance.