Investing

[Screwball]

That adds so much, congrats.

[gehringer_2]

4 hours ago, Screwball said:

Hold hard assets like land.

you have to even wonder about that. Farmland is out - there will be no-one to work it; residential is out - it so expensive to build housing no-one can afford it; lakefront is out - climate change is doing to change the water level; commerical is out, no-one wants to go back to the office; retail is out, everyone shops online.....

[CMRivdogs]

Land can be taxed. Without enough assets or income it would be hard to hold onto. Plus in a worst scenario economy the chances of selling such an asset would be close to slim and none.

Went thru that with the Bush 1 post Iraq war recession. We had a house we could not sell.

[Screwball]

Suicide always an option.

[chasfh]

[Deleterious]

Well...

US Initial Jobless Claims Drop by Most in Almost Four Years

Quote

Initial applications for jobless benefits in the US dropped by the most in nearly four years, reversing an unusually large jump in the prior week and consistent with low levels of layoffs in the economy.

Initial claims decreased by 33,000 to 231,000 in the week ended Sept. 13, according to Labor Department data released Thursday. That’s in line with levels seen throughout this year and not far off the pre-pandemic trend. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists called for 240,000 applications.

Quote

The decline unwinds a large jump in the prior week, when initial claims rose to the highest level in nearly four years. That period included Labor Day, and the data can be more volatile around holidays. Also, the advance was mostly concentrated in Texas, which a state official attributed to attempted fraud.

 

[gehringer_2]

5 minutes ago, Deleterious said:

was mostly concentrated in Texas,

 Tx spike was ~16K so a little more than half of the jump.

[romad1]

People will have to reevaluate their retirement planning now that the MAGAs have decided they may NOT retire.

[chasfh]

2 hours ago, romad1 said:

People will have to reevaluate their retirement planning now that the MAGAs have decided they may NOT retire.

I don’t understand. Did I miss something here?

[romad1]

2 hours ago, chasfh said:

I don’t understand. Did I miss something here?

They are going to up the social security age to something that suits the interests of the oligarchs.  

 

[chasfh]

12 hours ago, romad1 said:

They are going to up the social security age to something that suits the interests of the oligarchs.  

 

[romad1]

5 hours ago, chasfh said:

Wanna get me in the streets with torches and pitchforks?  This is how. 

[Deleterious]

They said a record $7.7 trillion in money market funds right now.  Yet, markets are still at ATHs.  AI Bubble.

 

[gehringer_2]

39 minutes ago, Deleterious said:

They said a record $7.7 trillion in money market funds right now.  Yet, markets are still at ATHs.  AI Bubble.

 

I wonder how this breaks out though? Is this cash being held by the super wealthy who are already in the market in a big way and the cash holdings are just ordinary diversification (so in effect it's another measure of wealth concentration), or is the market unusually widely split between bulls still buying at any price and bears that have already bailed out with fewer people in between.

Edited 5 hours ago by gehringer_2

[chasfh]

1 hour ago, Deleterious said:

They said a record $7.7 trillion in money market funds right now.  Yet, markets are still at ATHs.  AI Bubble.

 

I have done really, really well on AI-fueled stocks in the past two years, although I have not yet locked in the gain. I am about to set some trailing stop limit orders through ToS so I don't experience a repeat of the Sun Microsystems Debacle of 2001 (where I watched $140,000 in paper wealth shrink to $30-something,000 before finally cashing out—still not bad for an initial $7K bet).

[Tigeraholic1]

[gehringer_2]

14 minutes ago, Tigeraholic1 said:

Great, we'll go from a market that is frozen because current owners don't want to give up low rate mortgages to one where current owners can't sell because they are underwater. 🙄

Actually I wonder how much drop in $/ft^2 we are getting as opposed to builders building  smaller units.

Edited 3 hours ago by gehringer_2

[Screwball]

5 hours ago, Deleterious said:

They said a record $7.7 trillion in money market funds right now.  Yet, markets are still at ATHs.  AI Bubble.

 

I wish I could read this, but I can't get around the block. Depending on your plan, money market stuff hasn't been a bad play. I'm not going to look it up, but even Buffett was doing this more than usual from what I read. I can say, after playing this kind of stuff myself, short term too, has been pretty good. No risk. I'm old. No complaints.

That said, like others mentioned, you could have made an absolute killing over the last... I don't know - since 2008/2009 the last time they blew up the financial system. March 6th, 2009 the S&P 500 hit an intra-day low of 666. Ain't that wild? If I remember right.

This was 9 years after the dot-com bubble that blew up. And now, if you look at a chart, this puppy looks like Mt. Everest. The everything bubble. Over the last 14-15 years since the great financial crisis of 08/09 they have pumped and dumped "everything" with this AI stuff being the latest flavor.

I remember the old guy Art Cashin of CNBC who spent 50 years on the floor of the NYSE say in an interview one time "we came in here every day thinking today is the day it's all going to pop. It took 3 years."

Like the old saying; the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. So very very true. 

At the same time, we are flooded with money. And they keep making more. The market is no reflection of things on the ground in America, or the world. This is a debt fueled bubble of all bubbles. All it needs is a pin.

For fun, I searched the 2009 low to see how close I was. I thought it was the 9th, but it was the 6th. I got a kick out of the google search result though (bold mine);

Quote

The S&P 500's lowest point during the March 2009 financial crisis was an intraday low of approximately 666.79 on March 6, 2009. This was followed by its closing low of 676.53 on March 9, 2009, marking the bottom of the bear market before the index began its long bull run. 

Bear market my ass, it was a ****ing crash!

While I'm on with searches and quotes, no matter what monetary theory you follow and believe in, I always thought the one below made sense.

Quote

 

There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency involved.

Ludwig von Mises

 

The Fed target is 2%. Doesn't sound like much. We've ran hotter than that for a long time because they do a piss poor job of measuring it. We continue to get less for the money we have. To fix problems they create more money via debt. Cheaper, easier money. It works till it don't.

Then of course there is this little thing called interest. I've heard that will bite you in the ass. 

It's all about the math. Exponents are a bitch. This won't end well once again. And the banksters will get bailed out. 

 

Edited 1 hour ago by Screwball