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DeLepp- good point. I guess Hitler was too -oh no! I just invoked Godwin. Darn. When will I learn? 🙂
yes, bx, just the thought that there was someone out there about to go to contract on a house and then said, “uh oh, the what says not to buy,” and then withdraws the offer. There must be thousands of them out there just killing the market. Gives me nightmares just thinking about it. 😉
bxgrl, in some juandiced eyes so was jim jones!
I am still wiping tears of laughter from my eyes- the What is a hero??
“c-gar, he looked like he was 80 when he was on barney miller”
So true, DeLepp!
ditto, me too – I just attacked stevieb on the Last Week’s Biggest Sales thread, and I never do things like that
“I blame it on american car manufacturers making the indicators red, like the brake lights, instead of obvious- orange, effectively dampening down any safety advantages gained from visibilty. If you can’t really tell if the car is indicating left, whats the point?”
Ditto, the DOT stringently regulates automobile lighting. Speaking of oil, it took years for the DOT to allow car makers to use different lighting for each car so that the cars could be made aerodynamic. Europe, as usual, was way ahead of us. Remember those hokey round lights on every car?
Re Newsweek:
It’s hard to imagine we are having a ‘bubble’ in equities. We are still 40% from the Dow’s high. We are still more than 50% down on the Nasdaq, more like 60% adjusted for inflation. You are still in the red in equities for the last decade. That’s hardly a bubble. A bubble was when a guy writes a book called ‘dow 30,000’ when it’s a third of that.
Perhaps there’s a bubble in gold, perhaps in t-bills. Perhaps not.
To me, one thing that defines a bubble is the ability to rapidly create more assets to feed the bubble. When demand crashes, so do the assets since there is an excess of supply.
In the US, we have tons of available land that can, and was, developed for housing. We fed the bubble until it burst. We can always feed an equities bubble by bringing more companies public, but that’s not happening to a great extant now. It could easily enuf.
Oil is a different story. While to my knowledge there have been a handful of major discoveries recently, they are all deep sea or Arctic. Unless oil stays over $70/bbl, they will not be recovered. The fact is that we have run out of easily recoverable oil, what is left is in the Middle East and cartel-controlled. It makes no difference whether we have seen ‘peak oil’ or not, clearly it is coming, and within most of our lifetimes.
While some analysts scream that the ‘fair value’ of oil is $55/bbl, I don’t think so. The recent crash to $35/bbl was driven by panic, just as the crash in equities was. So it is natural that oil has recovered just as equities have.
Therefore, oil is not like housing, no one is making more of it. Personally I would like to see oil in the $85/bbl range. Not high enuf to destroy Western economies, but high enuf to allow the new sources to be tapped, while science works on alternatives for the long term.
The difference today is, of course, that if you believe there is a ‘bubble’ in oil, housing, or equities, there are financial instruments available to anyone with a brokerage account that will allow you to cash in on the popping of this mini-bubble he’s taking about in Newsweek. I’d like to see if he’s invested that way himself, or, like our very own What, he doesn’t put his money where his mouth is.
c-gar, he looked like he was 80 when he was on barney miller.
“Abe Vigoda Status:
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http://www.abevigoda.com/
LOL. Another site says “He has been 80 for the past 20 years”, though he’s actually 88.