Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Depression

Depression - Economics. a period during which business, employment, and stock-market values decline severely or remain at a very low level of activity.

Oil is down to $59 a barrel that would be good news but it's not. It's an indication that demand is gone. Same holds true with commodities, retail and manufacturing. The only things I see going up today at least are railroads and shorts (not the ones you wear). GM reported that they have $2 billion left to burn through and at that rate will be finished by January.
Watching the financial channel it looks like the pom poms are all worn out leaving a trail of streamers on the floor.

Then there's the mortgage bailout. Sounds like a good starting point until you consider the pending layoffs in just about every sector. As we remember 70% of GDP is from consumer spending. The latest "plan" is to lower the interest rate on mortgages by nearly half and possibly extending the mortgage from 30 years to 40. So in essence what they are asking is to let a home buyer be in debt the rest of their life and there's no guarantee once these people get this bailout they won't get laid off and default anyway. If there's no stimulus to create jobs then this may be all for nought.

4 comments:

MRMacrum said...

Yeah, I drew the conclusion that lower barrel prices was not such a good thing awhile ago. I think we have just seen the beginning of some very tough times. Hopefully the duration will be short.

BTW - I passed on something to you.

BBC said...

Everyone wants to be bailed out, with a bonus on top of it.

I grew up learning about the great depression and how hard others in the world have it.

Spent a lot of time as a youth very poor myself, but I occurred to me that we always had more than many others did so it never bothered me to be poor, or what others might think of as poor.

Always had some shelter of some kind, and some food so was thankful for that.

As for current times, I expect a very hard time for America for some time, but that remains to be seen right now.

I've set myself in a place where if they get really hard it won't have much effect on me. And I would love to see the greedy people really hurting for a while.

MRMacrum said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Distributorcap said...

this is a depression. period