Monday, September 22, 2008

The Bear Market Continues

Monday 9/22/08 SPY @ 121.31.
There is nothing reassuring in the government-mandated short-covering rally that occurred at the end of last week.  We remain in a dire financial situation, the extent of which no one seems to know.  The smartest guys in the room (whose compensation seems to remain politically untouchable) managed to blow up firms that have survived wars, depressions, crashes, disaster, but could not survive an incompetent Republican administration whose contempt for government became a self-fulfilling prophecy.   The systematic defunding of our public infrastructure, from the people who inspect and maintain our levees and bridges to the people who are supposed to be enforcing our securities laws, is now coming home to roost.  
The closest we have come to this crisis is at the end of another corrupt Republican regime that lied about about a land war in Asia:  the end of the Nixon administration ushered in an enormous loss of confidence in all things American - check out the 1973-4 bear market.  
Will it be as bad today?  I don't know, nor does anyone else.  I just follow the trends.  
Keep selling the SPY.  Shed any speculative long positions.  
Buy GLD.
Buy DOG (the inverse of the Dow).  
The fed clearly does not know what it is doing, and has abandoned any principle, bailing out one institution one day, letting another fail the next.  This Suharto-style of short-selling-banning is the kind of economic idiocy I thought those Street-savvy Republicans were too smart to fall for... oh, well, on yet another front, these guys are proving an enormous failure. 
You can't spin a war, a hurricane, or a financial meltdown.  It's time for grown-ups to be in charge.  Let's send these clowns home in November and let our government be run by people who understand what Lincoln really meant by of the people, by the people, and for the people.  Not the lobbyists, or the neocons, or the Abramoff-Delay-Cunningham-Bush-Cheney-Libby-Chalabi (remember Chalabi?) crowd, but the people.  That's us.  It's our country and it's time we took it back.  You can't spend it if you didn't earn it, and yes, government costs money and if you make more, you should be prepared to spend more in dues for living in a civil society.  Freedom isn't free.  We can't just go shopping to get out of this mess.  
If anyone votes for More of the Same McCain or Thanks but No Thanks Palin, then you really have not been paying attention to the damage their ideas have caused.  Insanity is just doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.   By that definition, a vote for McCain is truly insane.  
Send these guys home.

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