The daily link

It appears some of us are interested in the business of trading, hopefully for both fun and profit.
Here's a place to talk about that. I suggest two main categories. How to trade (timeless), and what are you trading now, and why, and how it turned out. Those tend to be missing from the pro boards, so pundits can have selective memory....but that's not all that is important. Being wrong is part of the game, and how to handle it and make money anyway is crucial, for just one example.
Forum rules
The usual. Be nice, be informative, tell it like it is.

Re: The daily link

Postby chrismb » Tue Aug 09, 2011 1:00 pm

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-pos ... ue-factory[/quote]


I didn't realise the US was $25 x 10^18 in debt [see graph half-way down]. That's going some! Yeah, I see the problem now. :lol:
chrismb
 
Posts: 620
Joined: Thu Aug 05, 2010 6:32 pm

Re: The daily link

Postby Doug Coulter » Tue Aug 09, 2011 1:47 pm

It depends on how you measure of course (which in turn depends on who's measuring) -- officially it's 14.xx trillion (10^13 or so). However, our government has stolen the money from the social security pension fund and medical care funds, to the tune of another 66 trillion or thereabouts...and those are no longer making money on their own from tax intake, so.....the guy doing that chart probably just didn't count the zeros right - the numbers are incomprehensible to most people anyway. Of course, since we're printing money, it will be payable with paper that's not worth much under the current system of fiat currency -- a haircut by any other name...
At any rate, the shape of the curve is about right -- and it's only for government debt -- now add all the mortgages and charge cards and future obligations....and bank leverage (7 earths, not 7 earth GDP's but seven whole values of everything on earth). Though that last isn't just one country -- banks are trans-national now. Of course, your govenment is the only one who can sell you into debt without your signature, directly that is. Which is why they ripped us all off so bad backing up asshats who run banks, recently -- the banks couldn't do it alone without blowing their cover as our true masters. As it says in HHGTTG -- the president is there to draw attention away from the real power.

I didn't hear your more-radical thoughts on the water cooler economic thread, but mine is -- throw the bums out. Sure, vote in people you absolutely hate, it won't make a bit of difference until about rev 3 anyway, when they finally get the message we were voting the other guy out, not them in. The soap box hasn't worked, the ballot box hasn't worked (yet)...not quite time to get out the ammo box -- they are jumping the gun in London (or should I say, the bat? http://money.cnn.com/2011/08/09/technology/amazon_riot/ ). As it says here: viewtopic.php?f=51&t=328&start=20 the whole multi party government thing is an illusion, -- so don't drink the Kool aid, see with clear eyes whats really going on. Not that it really helps much, but at least if I'm getting skewered, I like to know who is holding the spear.
It improves my aim.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
User avatar
Doug Coulter
 
Posts: 3515
Joined: Wed Jul 14, 2010 7:05 pm
Location: Floyd county, VA, USA

Re: The daily link

Postby chrismb » Tue Aug 09, 2011 4:00 pm

Doug Coulter wrote:I didn't hear your more-radical thoughts on the water cooler economic thread.


I suspect you might not want to know! I guess you know how radical I can get!!

Did I read that right, is that for real - that you reckon the total debt within the US economy is more than the capital wealth of the world?
chrismb
 
Posts: 620
Joined: Thu Aug 05, 2010 6:32 pm

Re: The daily link

Postby Doug Coulter » Tue Aug 09, 2011 6:02 pm

You read it right, but that's not the exact implication. The total debt, which is mostly leverage on paper held by large banks worldwide (and it's frigging legal) -- options, derivatives and so on -- is 7 times the present net value of everything on earth. And it's a zero sum game -- in other words, depending on how things go down, someone owes someone more than can possibly be paid -- by everyone. Yes, it's only a piece of paper (lots of it) but...our current legal system gives guys guns to enforce contracts (Police, Judges, and lawyers, we call them).....at present.
(see last paragraphs)

It's as though we allowed some insurance company with finite resources (the banks) to write insurance, that should it have to pay off (all these bets expire, but they just re-bet), there is absolutely no way it could pay them all. This is what took down AIG here. They had written insurance on all that mortgage debt, and obviously, too cheaply because they had a faulty risk model, and there was no regulation because they didn't use that word, and there were no laws covering this "financial innovation" -- insurance, but called a Credit Default Swap, or CDS for short.

A full explanation won't fit here -- or maybe even on this board, but it was interesting to me to learn how this all works and where the money went.

Basically, let us suppose I've bought some of those prepackaged mortgages in the form of a bond assembled by some large investment bank. That means they bought them from the lending banks, and sliced and diced them (supposedly for "diversity") and resold them on as "bonds" that pay interest as the homeowners pay off their mortgages. I feel that's got some risk associated with it, which of course, it does, and I want to be really sure (and maybe I'd like to be able to use this bond as collateral to borrow more money, and buy another one.....). So I agitate various financial institutions until I find one willing to write a contract that says they'll cover any difference between what the bond claims it will pay, and what it actually does. They go for it -- since they see this as a AAA grade bond (thank the ratings agencies who take money in exchange for rating things), they sell me this really cheap. Now that I have this "safe" thing, with insurance on top, anybody on earth will lend me money against it, cheap, because hey, there's no risk, right? I take the money, and I do this whole thing again until for an original say, 100k bucks, I've got 10 million bucks worth of these bonds. Since they are guaranteed to pay perhaps 5-6%, and I borrowed all that money at .25% (at the Fed) or 2-3% (at a normal bank)...there's no limit how deep I can get into this, but most people stopped at about 100::1 "leverage". Where did all that money come from? The fed, in the limit. If I'd borrowed it at say C or BAC or JPM ,or GS, they just borrowed it from the Fed at .25% and loaned it onto me for 4 times that -- free money for them, remember - it's all safe, right? And everybody has someone's signature to go collect from, someone is holding the bag at every step of the way. This looks too good to be true for everyone! (and like the saying goes, it IS too good to be true). All that money "sprang into existance" as a promise to pay (like all fiat money) in this case, the original borrower's promise to pay the home loan back with interest. It didn't exist before that second. This makes some people's heads hurt (as we don't experience this ability to make money appear as private persons, you need a license to steal that only banks and other institutions have), but it's really how things work. The long version of the crash course goes into much more detail if you can stay awake for it all.

The bank that originated the mortgage knows they're not going to be holding it for more than a few minutes -- one of the big boys will buy it off them as soon as they write the loan, and they get their money back immediately, with some on top for doing that job. After that, they have no reason to care what happens. The big boys who buy up all these mortgages know they're just selling them on as well, at a profit of course, so they don't care either. They "earn" their pay for doing the packaging (and having the front money they know they'll get right back), and slicing and dicing these to make them "safer". So when someone buys one of these "safe" bonds, what they've really got is a tiny part of a bunch of mortgages -- they have no single whole ones, but a bunch of bits of a lot of them, which is what made the mess practically impossible to untangle when they started to fail. The government(s) had to keep these same crooks around, and well paid (bonuses) besides, to untangle the mess and it's not done yet. This is not a USA only phenomenon, through the magic of communication, this idea got pushed worldwide, I understand the Spanish got on board even harder than we, due to a possible nice 2nd home market for Europeans. It's worldwide, and worldwide, greedy investors, private and public, bought the crap out of these super high yiedling "safe" investment instruments. Whether it was just guys, big banks all over the world, or pension and mutual funds, everyone hopped on the wagon -- heck, a 6% or so guaranteed (or double guaranteed if you bought CDS for a few pennies) thing is "too good to be true" or at least very attractive, but greed and not having to work as a trader as I do was just too attractive, so self deluded investors fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

As an aside, someone noticed this going on, a guy with Aspbergers syndrome, and he is the guy who jiggled Goldman Sachs into finding someone to create CDS for him to buy (which was only AIG at first, they are an insurance company kind of, along with other stuff) -- without owning the underlying mortgage risk himself. This is strictly illegal in the normal insurance world -- you can't buy life or fire insurance on your neighbor for darn good reasons -- one might make him more likely to die, the other make his house more flammable. This amounts to the same thing as a "naked short" which is it's own subject, but that's illegal. But, since they didn't call it insurance, but a derivative contract, there were no laws in place to control this -- and there still aren't -- you can guess why, but politicians worldwide get plenty of dough to get re-elected from certain sources.

So now the stage is set. Banks, investors, pension funds, mutual funds worldwide now all own this nasty package, and the more ambitious of them are leveraged up to 100::1 on it all. They think they're safe, as they bought insurance in the form of a derivatives contract from a big rich outfit that should be able to pay in the case of defaults.

I feel the need to point out that while this was truly an American "innovation" -- once the idea got out, the entire world jumped on it. It wasn't just us. In fact, as it now sits, it isn't mainly us.
At first I was fooled by our local partisan finger-pointing (and indeed there were and still are some guilty parties to point at here), but on further research nah, it's every large financial institution, no innocents in that game over a certain size. But I do freely admit, this idiotic scheme originated here.

Now people start to default -- these things weren't safe, and it's now obvious why -- the people in charge of only making good loans had no reason whatever to care if they were! There was plenty of profit all down the line as remember, when you buy a house on tick, you're going to pay almost double the purchase price (or more) for it by the time you've paid off the loan, and the banks of course sold these on at something closer to that value than the value of the loan made -- more like the total payoff value, rather. So financial institutions all along the line made a big chunk of change, instantly on this, and left the buyers to finally collect on it all (which they delegated to loan service agencies, and there are now legal issues with that, they didn't dot all the i's or cross all the Ts when they did this -- but while those guys are slime-bags too, they are not the ones who mainly need to be covered with tar and feathers).

Bankers used this huge windfall from "innovation" (yeah it's probably even patentable) to reward themselves with crazy huge bonuses -- many-many billions. Due to "the way it's customarily done" that money can't be clawed back, and who knows how to make it impossible better than bankers anyway? Instead of keeping the money prudently in the bank, they gave it to themselves personally....

Now, these things start to fail, which is obvious. I know some of the people who got those liar loans. A part time special-ed school teacher in my neighborhood got $500k to build a custom nice mansion for herself (and also ran up 70k on credit cards, got a personal loan from a neighbor to clear that, and did it again before leaving town). This is how someone can get into that much debt on a very low income (and she was fired for drug use shortly after and before even the first payment was due). She was hot, and my poor sucker neighbor fell for it....he's now smarter, but a lot less well off.

So, these nice "safe" bonds that everyone all over the world now owns, start not paying. The main trigger was manipulation of the price of oil by another large bank (Morgan Stanley in this particular case). Most people really did intend to pay, but after oil hit ~140, no way -- in this country it's a major expense, everyone drives big honking vehicles most would call trucks and live far from work -- and that's not the only way high oil costs the average person anyway.

Ok, so the banks -- Bank of England, Ireland, Germany, Japan, "our banks" which aren't really USA except they have their offices here -- they're all trans-national, as well as pension funds etc start to notice they aren't getting paid the interest coupons on these bonds. So, they call up the guys who sold them, who tell them -- not my problem you bought it (or "is that your signature" as in the cartoon linked above) go call the insurance you bought and get them to pay. Well, in the large, that was AIG, who while being a pretty large outfit with a lot of money, once a lot of these started failing, couldn't cover it all -- and they were getting calls not only from bond-holders who'd bought CDS, but also people who simply bought them to speculate, even though they didn't own the insured bonds themselves -- the CDS were cheap and ripe for that type of bet -- in fact were invented by a guy who had that in mind all along (I forget his name, but "the big short" is a book about him).

The rest is where the rest of the world started hearing about it all. AIG can't pay, the cry goes up to heaven, we get TARP and QE and all that crap. Due to politics, our Fed (if they can be said to be ours, they are actually the Rothschilds and some others from UK with less scary sounding names like the guys who also own DeBeers) decided to stem some of the damage by bailing AIG, or in some cases the banks directly. Most of that funny money actually went directly overseas to France, Germany, Japan, and so on -- they tried to keep it a secret, but a freedom of information act lawsuit force them to reveal who go the money some months later on. It is a huge document you might still be able to find. They timed it so as for it not to be in the news, some other big story taking the "oxygen" while this was revealed. Some other "never let a crisis go to waste" just happened to happen right then.

I know this crap is fact, because I paid an expert from the business for 6 months to help me find it out. This is not tinfoil hat theory, its plain old fact. We followed the money, all of it.
AIG (and others) selling "insurance" to multiple entities, most of whom didn't even own the underlying risk (essentially, naked shorters became legal through this loophole), simply amplified the "losses" by a fat factor -- and created a large set of people who WANTED this to fail (Morgan Stanley for one, but there are many, and if it involves money Goldman Sachs is there too). Nice house there, too bad if something should happen to it, or your ability to pay for it, eh?

Ok, so that put a sour taste in everyone's mouth, no one is doing that much anymore [i]on mortgages[/i]. The 7 earth number comes from other stuff that isn't home mortgages, but things like bets on whether a mine will produce X tons of copper, or whether the price of gold will reach Y value, and other things like that. Obviously you can't bet 7 earths worth of money if you had to front the money. you don't have to with derivatives. You only have to front a "Risk premium" to do that, again, because we can't get proper laws (and in truth proper laws are hard to write here without making for some other very bad unintended consequences for everyone from farmers to airlines trying to lock in prices for their crops or their fuel).

And that's where we are now. After a short period of de-leveraging, the banks and other big financial institutions simply moved their bets elsewhere using the same mechanisms, and levered themselves right back up again, I hear it's now more like 32::1 at this point. Why shouldn't they? When they make profits, they keep them (maybe pass some on to shareholders, but the actors get those juicy bonuses). When they lose, if they lose big enough (and this is the enabling mechanism for "BIG") -- we taxpayers in the only case of finding yourself in debt WITHOUT your signature, eat it for them, they still get bonuses, wash, rinse repeat. And we mostly sit here and whine about it and take it, because it's all legal, our elected masters say so and pushed it on us. If you want to get mad -- I've ID'd the culprits here to get mad at. I followed the money (and it cost me about 20k to get it done) and that's where it went, and why.

Now it appears that the side effects have created attempts at revolution in places. Like the Arab countries. When the price of say, grain, goes up 20% due to various increased costs in this situation, like the money printing to bail out these $%#$ -- we don't notice ourselves. That $3-4 box of cereal we eat has only about 0.20 bucks worth of grain in it... we don't notice. But poor folk all over the world, who can barely afford the raw grain, to process themselves into food, man, they notice. At some point "anything would be better than this" and "they have nothing to lose" or are easily able to think that, and out come the guns and revolutions. While we (people like you and I) didn't steal from the poor to give to the rich, we were complicit when we didn't pay attention to how this fantastic boom was happening. Seems no one ever questions when things are seemingly going well -- only on the backside do we learn, in pain -- human nature at work there. But the upshot is that it wasn't the crash that was fake -- it was the preceding boom that was....So since we only look after the pain happens, we never see it coming (no one could have seen this coming is a frequent absolving quote, but of course someone did....). It was this set of loopholes in the laws that allowed what is no different than printing money (or naked shorting) that caused all this. And as a result, certain entities now own a much bigger chunk of the world than they did before, and all it cost them was legally printed funny money, the rest of us got stuck holding the bag for even that -- and the interest on it. Who says evil bankers are stupid?

Here's a book with a little of the background on all this -
http://www.amazon.com/Big-Short-Inside- ... 0393072231

But only a little. The whole story is more complex, as stated above (and I don't yet know it all, just the outlines of which I'm quite certain).

This whole extend and pretend game is an acknowledgement of that -- there's only one chair to sit in when the music stops, and as most of the bankers aren't right by that one chair, they use their influence (more like ownership in fee simple) over all our governments to keep the music going -- at any cost -- till they are by that chair. Since only one or two of the twelve or so can be by that chair at a time, the game goes on at horrible future cost when it all comes down. Next time, it's for real. There's too big to fail, but there's also too big to bail and maintain anything like the status quo. All these guys care about is extending that time past where they personally care. And now perhaps one can begin to understand how the partisan political finger pointing is merely a distraction from all that and it's pretty pointless to waste time on it -- they are ALL guilty.

I got the 7 earths number from various sources. Todd Harrison (who did this for Morgan for a living before going straight) gave me the number -- 4-5 quadrillion in bad paper still exists now. I got the number for present value of earth elsewhere and did the math. Having posted it here and there on the 'net, it's now a meme.

I must add -- out of all the countries on the earth, only one put their own citizens above this crap scheme -- Iceland. They're doing OK, even though the big boys refuse to deal with them anymore -- we really could just let them fail as Iceland proves by continuing to exist just fine, thanks.

It is against this backdrop that I trade for a living, whistling past the graveyard, and making hay whilst the sun shines. It helps to know who is holding various bags. I think at this point even our governments have mostly figured all this out and are running very scared, since they are directly complicit in this (and have profited by it directly -- your pension fund is invested in something, as well as that campaign help). They can't possibly print enough money to cover it all without making the money worthless -- but they can't stop as long as they want to stay alive either.
It's truly a pickle they've managed to get us into here. They will of course never reveal the truth -- they are part of the guilt. Even finding out who got the TARP money was hard to do and required lawsuits, with the results only being revealed during a time when something like Osama bin Laden's death was eating all the news oxygen. ( I think it was the crisis just before that, but you get the idea). We all remarked on the timing at the time, how slick they pulled that off. Turns out the entire world is a ponzi scheme -- even Verizon needed immediate loans of billions to make payroll from that TARP deal (and McDonalds, Harley, and a few others). Doesn't Verizon charge enough as is to make payroll? Turns out, that with those high paychecks given to their directors, no, they don't - even though it seems like rape when you pay the bill. They borrow the money to pay their own workers and just keep "rolling the debt" over forever -- your phone bill goes into a very few pockets! Truth, check this yourself. There is a myth that companies are "cash rich". Well, they show all this dough on their balance sheets. But it's all borrowed and the lack of communication from country to country's financial regulators (deliberate?) means that they don't show the matching debt...

There is just a different set of rules for us "little people" and to see things as they are, you just have to get used to that one. The law ain't the law, it's the golden rule -- them with the gold, makes the rules. This is yet another reason I don't patent half the things I could. No point, if they have real value, I'm toast anyway. The only reason I bothered to type all this is that other golden rule -- I believe in Karma, and if I can save my pals (or anyone else) from this vicious machine, I feel better.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
User avatar
Doug Coulter
 
Posts: 3515
Joined: Wed Jul 14, 2010 7:05 pm
Location: Floyd county, VA, USA

Re: The daily link

Postby Doug Coulter » Tue Aug 09, 2011 7:14 pm

While I'm on the topic of expose, here's a little food for thought. Whether there's an explicit bailout going on or not, consider this. The discount window at our Fed will lend money at 0 to .25% to any accredited institution (any bank in the world, and some others in normal times, anyone at all under TARP when it existed). The borrower can then buy US T bills that pay maybe 3+% (nod, wink) with this money, then use those T bills with zero haircut as collateral to repeat that, indefinitely. Do you now understand why some banks proprietary trading desks show long periods (many months) without a single day of losses trading? My pet goldfish can make money that way. And we tax payers are on the hook for every frigging dime of that -- these #$%#$ don't care if they eat their young (literally in this case, who is going to pay for that?). Does the announcement the Fed made today to extend these low rates forever (till the second half of '13) now make more sense to anyone? Why shouldn't they do this -- the big boys behind the Fed think longer term and for them, this is zero risk and a way to keep their agents alive and working for them.

I'm not saying the agents themselves (big banks, guys like Soros) know this themselves. Timothy McVeigh thought he was working for the government when he helped blow up the Murrow building after all, and who am I to argue with the man on the spot? No time or space for that one here, but one wonders. It's all too easy to utilize greed to motivate people to do what they think is good for themselves without them asking too many questions. Which leads to this not suitable for work (or maybe this board) video link.

Don't watch this if four letter words offend you. The title and refrain of this entertaining performance contain one of them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6Fpoebz2LE

12a896b09091012ee3c400163e41dd5b.gif
The game as played. Thanks Phil for the heads up.


And interestingly, the ever gloomy Zerohedge just published this, and by a banker of all people:
Does that mean we are trapped in a position whereby the Fed cannot raise rates? Quite frankly it doesn’t really matter what the Fed does; real rates have to go up, are going up and will go up. The more the Fed and the government misallocate capital, the more the real cost of capital will have to rise higher to compensate. The only thing that will get real rates down is either a massive new discovery of incredibly cheap fossil fuels or the innovation that delivers cheap fusion. Otherwise it is a case of the cost of capital rising and causing demand destruction.

Link:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/must-read ... ng-changes

And above, I forgot consumer debt, and municipal/state debt. There's no end of this stuff it seems. You guys over the pond didn't think we were living so high off the hog and consuming such a huge fraction of the worlds resources because we were so much smarter or more deserving, did you? Nah.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
User avatar
Doug Coulter
 
Posts: 3515
Joined: Wed Jul 14, 2010 7:05 pm
Location: Floyd county, VA, USA

Re: The daily link

Postby Doug Coulter » Wed Aug 10, 2011 12:20 pm

Todd. http://www.minyanville.com/investing/ar ... 1/id/36269

There are a few sets of ten commandments around, and it's illuminating to look at them and compare. I'll see if I can dig up W O'Neill's and scan it here. Very instructive. There's not much disagreement on these, but the different phrasing and emphasis on one makes the other more clear.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
User avatar
Doug Coulter
 
Posts: 3515
Joined: Wed Jul 14, 2010 7:05 pm
Location: Floyd county, VA, USA

Re: The daily link

Postby Doug Coulter » Thu Aug 11, 2011 12:38 pm

A funny one, nothing heavy for the moment. Probably time to trim PM's and take some money off the table though.
http://www.collegehumor.com/video/64772 ... everything
Remember, powerful tools cut both ways!
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
User avatar
Doug Coulter
 
Posts: 3515
Joined: Wed Jul 14, 2010 7:05 pm
Location: Floyd county, VA, USA

Re: The daily link

Postby Doug Coulter » Tue Aug 16, 2011 1:05 pm

Saw this on ZH. Jon is funny and sometimes right....
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-a ... e-top-tier

Amazing that the guy who basically tied for first -- even when Michelle B bought free entertainment for her supporters...gets no mention at all in the news (either liberal or conservative).
Talk about trying to maintain the status quo. Hardly ever is it more obvious how the system is rigged. And hey, they shouldn't even do this - they thrive on "news" and there's no doubt Ron would make a lot of good headlines for them...so one wonders how this fix was put in.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
User avatar
Doug Coulter
 
Posts: 3515
Joined: Wed Jul 14, 2010 7:05 pm
Location: Floyd county, VA, USA

Re: The daily link

Postby Doug Coulter » Mon Aug 22, 2011 12:35 pm

http://seekingalpha.com/article/288875- ... -in-stocks

Chris has been calling them right decently consistently for a pretty good while now. Worth a read.

Edit: a little more dark humor:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBoYYc1APr8


For what it's worth S&P's CEO just lost his job....for telling the truth on our government. The end of credibility is here. If people don't get it when it's this blatant, well....I just hope they don't drag us down with them when they get what they deserve.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
User avatar
Doug Coulter
 
Posts: 3515
Joined: Wed Jul 14, 2010 7:05 pm
Location: Floyd county, VA, USA

Re: The daily link

Postby Doug Coulter » Wed Aug 24, 2011 1:30 pm

Inflation Trader over at Seeking Alpha recommends this book, and it looks like a good one, actually. Awhile back I hired an out of work mortgage broker to help me follow the money and learn some of this same stuff, and I'd have to say it was worth it.
http://www.amazon.com/Financial-Shenani ... ewpoints=1

I have no idea how good this book is, but IT is one of the few writers I respect over there....

There's no shortage of doom and gloomers out there -- and even a stopped clock is right once in awhile. However, there are few that are smart, articulate, and successful all at once. While the eye of the storm meme should have been attributed to ToddH, this guy has a pretty compelling message. As he says himself, however - it's not safe to predict both an outcome and a time for it. I have slightly more faith in humans finding a way to muddle through than he. Remember, all that debt is a paper construct and a good fire would wipe it all out in one sense, not to mention evening out the distribution of wealth considerably -- which I suppose is why that fire hasn't yet happened. But it could...

http://seekingalpha.com/article/289617- ... much-worse
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
User avatar
Doug Coulter
 
Posts: 3515
Joined: Wed Jul 14, 2010 7:05 pm
Location: Floyd county, VA, USA

PreviousNext

Return to Trading Markets

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 6 guests