And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself-Well...How did I get here? [...]
And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife!
Talking Heads
"Once in a Lifetime" (YouTube)
1984
It is only when the tide goes out, that you know who was swimming naked.
Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett Quotes
Fantastic guest commentary from the Prudent Bear inventors' website, under the headline "The Great Consumer Crash of 2009." Here's the lede:
“It is easy to ignore the storm if you look at the opposite horizon. When the storm reaches your location there can be no more ignorance.”Read the rest of the article here.
I hate to tell you, but the storm has reached your location and it is a Category 5 hurricane. The levees are leaking. Ignore it at your own peril. The 6,000 sq ft McMansion buying, BMW leasing, $5 Starbucks latte drinking, granite countertop upgrading, home equity borrowing days are coming to an end. The American consumer will not go without a fight. For the last seven years the American consumer has carried the weight of the world on its shoulders. This has been a heavy burden, but when you take steroids it doesn’t seem so heavy. The steroid of choice for the American consumer has been debt. We have utilized home equity loans, cash out refinancing, credit card debt, and auto loans to live above our means. It has been a fun ride, but the ride is over. We can’t get steroids from our dealer (banks) anymore.
This is the best comprehensive article on the present condition of the U.S. economy that we've come across in quite a long while -- lots of charts and graphs, considering various important economics "data sets," -- presented in language clear enough even to be comprehensible to readers who are unschooled in the jargon of academic economics, we think.
Something to think about the next time you hear some cable network talking head predict the economy is set to "recover" in 2009.
Don't let the cat get your tongues.
6 comments:
Keep reading and rereading this information until your eyes stop glazing over and you begin to comprehend the facts.
It is critical that we start paying attention to the fact that our lifestyle of "borrow and spend" is coming to a screeching halt.
It is not going to make a whit of difference who gets elected president because the pig trough days are over.
I have my money on this side of the bet.
Thanks for the Prudent Bear article, Blogmeister.
They tell the story straight and true.
One bit of information in this article that had not registered with me before is that we can no longer lease automobiles and keep rolling the leases over.
I am actually going to have to come up with enough cash to buy a car and good enough credit to get a loan on one..
How many of us can do that? Frontrunner will have to add dozens of cars.
Prudent Bear is an interesting site.
Northern Trust also does a good daily commentary.
Click Here
Bloomberg.com is also good.
Of course, there is the Mogambo Guru,
Click Here
Mish is good,
Click Here
And for the conventional wisdom, there is this guy,
Click Here
This site gets a lot of different things (it's currently down, hacked),
Click Here
For a good book, try this,
Click Here
Then realize that if reading all this was all it took, everyone would be rich. Somehow, you gotta have the knack, and that can come a and go. The book I mention is regarded as the biography of the greatest trader of them all. He became very rich, then broke and in debt, then rich again. He died broke - shot himself.
And you may say to yourself "My God What Have I Done?"
I sure hope it was worth it.
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