Fluorescent Dreams Wax Cylinders - Welcome to the recession. It's going to get worse.

Never ever ever trust corporate executives to tell the truth when it comes to bad news.

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Crap is a good word for it.

*sighs* Not the best time to be going back to school and not working is it?

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At least when hyperinflation hits, your student loans will largely vanish into the wind.

And you'll still have the skills you learned to help with the search for a job that will survive economic downturns. All in all, school doesn't seem like a bad idea.

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It's a great time to go to school.

When jobs are scarce, make yourself more employable for the next upturn. Or learn languages if everything goes to hell in this country.

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I'm learning sign, though we need a refresher before we get back to it. Im just lucky to have the support network I do, horrendously lucky.

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And BofA just announced that one of my credit cards, the total group rate, is going up to 20 per cent! Mind you, I don't keep a balance on any credit card, but still for the people who do. The Fed lends it out at 3.25 per cent. I'm lucky to get 1 per cent on the passbook - 4 per cent on the MMA - and am expected to pay 20 per cent if I can't pay a loan off. With that kind of spread...
Sheesh.
Wanna bet they don't declare it an actual recession until AFTER the Democrats take over? They are so trying to delay the R word.

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BofA is a shitty bank through and through. You shouldn't even be with those bastards, unless they own your soul.

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They bought out the bank that had the credit card. And it is a Nature Conservancy card, so what I would usually get a goody points goes the NC which is a good thing. Besides they have the cutest otter picture on the regular card.
As was noted in my original note - I pay off all credit cards each month. So I'm actually looking for cards that have No Annual Fee and have some other redeeming feature. Interest rates are actually not even on my radar, save to note when the bank has gone nutso again and thus remind me why I pay them off each month. :-)

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I know, but what can I do? They have the services I need and avoiding them seems to lead sto them purchasing who I went to. I avoided MBMA for ten years and then they bought them and transferred all the credit cards to those rules...

They've gone so far now as to remove the declined state from all our cards - they just jack the credit rate and charge $10 or $35 each time it would've been declined instead.

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Look at what happened here in the UK with Northern Rock, rumours of problems (even if they weren't entirely accurate) led to serious problems to the extent the government had to nationalise the bank.

I suspect when trading opens on the Dow later this morning, it's not going to be pretty.

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This isn't good at all. I'm thankful that I resisted the temptation to buy a house at an inflated price. I'm also glad that my wife and I are living within our means by a fair margin, as I know prices will continue to rise. Our nation needs a NEW New Deal to get our people working and producing again. If we continue to consume products that predominantly come from overseas, we will eventually wind up as a third world nation.

BTW, Chip? Could you send me an email address to which I can send you a large attachment? I still want to send you a demo of what I recorded =0)

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*smile*

My email address is my username at hypersurf dot com.

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I think its funny, and not in a "HaHa" way that even worse than any republican administration has ever been this one has let big business and industry do whatever the hell it wanted. The EPA doesn't exist anymore in any shape or form. Safe guards have been tossed aside. They rape the environment at will, Thousands of Jobs have been sent overseas, all for the sake of building up big business.
And the economy still tanks and we are in a recession.

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And my landlord laughed at me when I started building a bomb shelter in the storage room. Guess I don't seem so crazy now. Well, okay, I am crazy, but the gap between lunacy and reality is getting narrower every day.

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Will someone get off their ass and stop pretending they know what recession means and start calling this thing a depression now? Recessions aren't suppose to last 15+ years.

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I'm not even sure you can call this a depression. A depression implies a temporary condition, an inflection in the trends. My big worry is that this crap is here to stay.

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We need a bigger word then.

Decline? Decline is good.

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I like Dark Age myself.

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Na, we're not quite dark age yet. Not quite Fall... Umm... Sunset Recliner! ... No...
Candlelit Toddler! No...
I'm sure someone will think of something...

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Gold
Natural Gas
Brazil
Canada

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*laugh*

10% of my retirement funds ARE going into Canada.

I'm not interested in buying gold, though -- I prefer to buy when prices are low, not when prices are high.

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I'm not interested in buying gold, though -- I prefer to buy when prices are low, not when prices are high.

That's *precisely* what I said to myself six months ago! I'm glad I trusted my research more than what I tell myself. ;)

Gold is predicted to continue rising (with brief pull-backs) over the next 12-18 months. I've seen peak predictions of $1500-$1800/oz. The first time the Fed *raises* interest rates is where you'll see the real drop in precious metals. That's not going to happen anytime soon, given how inept the Federal Reserve has been so far.

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Have fun riding gold further up, if that's what you believe. I don't know (and don't much care) how high gold will reach; I'm a simple and boring investor.

When something reaches record-high prices, I only think about selling, never buying. I usually find my "bigger fool" in the mirror. I don't rely on finding him elsewhere.

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And there's talk that they will lower the interest rate by an unprecedented 1% tomorrow. Pretty soon there will be negative interest rates...

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They tried that in Japan. For most of the 1990s, after Economic Bubble of the 1980s burst, interest rates (the interbank loans) got down to 0.0% and stayed that way for several years. Interest rates from Bank of Japan is still 0.25%, but many of the underlying issues haven't been addressed, making any upturn there fragile.

The real problem with the US is there was way too much emphasis on buying stuff on credit (both at the governmental and personal level). That combined with a growing wealth gap has undermined the worth of the dollar. Now that credit is collapsing, everything is shifting to commodities, while the market tries to figure out a way to not to rely solely on the US consumer; the rise of Chinese and Indian middle class is accelerating that trend. We're at our limits, and until we figure that out, nothing is going to change.

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Buying on credit is definitely a big problem. I would not want to deal with a country that can't even pay off the interest on its debt. And every year when they say how much the average American consumer puts into savings it seems to be under $500, which seems almost criminal. (okay, kids and really old people probably aren't putting much into savings, but they also are not frequently the ones polled)

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The BS regarding Bear Stearns isn't so surprising. If there's one thing we can depend on from a major corporation it's bullshit.

What's disturbing is that UTC is attempting a hostile takeover of Diebold such that yet another election can be hacked. WTF? Gee, how long will it take the feds to approve that acquisition?

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Too bad the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is metaphorical. Oh, well.

Happy St. Patrick's Day (have some fairy dust)!

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We've developed a mountain trade deficit since 2000, when outsourcing would improve executives' bottom lines and that was great for the millions of disenfranchised tech workers because it would eventually trickle down, right? But we've had a horrible time of it since then, and federal money to the states has slowed to a trickle UNLESS IT PREVENTS TERRORISM, and those programs have more money than they know what to do with. We haven't had our highways and bridges maintained because that used to be federal money. But, didn't you know there's a war on? It's more important to throw money at government cronies and hand duffle bags full of twenties to Iraqi informants. Cash-strapped states are forced to chase down old debtors and traffic tickets and consider selling off public lands just to stay solvent. The subprime market and its collapse was another symptom: it only happened because no one who was in the market could afford a conventional loan. Banks couldn't do business with the normal people because they were ALL credit risks. Doesn't that spell recession?

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