Who Do You Blame For The Market Crash?

[reevesr1]

Congrats Dave!

 

It does suck that her pregnancy caused the downfall of the market. But good for you guys, I guess.

[SanJuanWorm]

Hey Rickr its not all bad. I just proved that it wasn't dumb ass americans after all right?

[Castuserraticus]

For a highly informative and balanced view of financial markets overall google John Mauldin and sign up for his free e-letters. Following his analysis saved me a lot of pain.

[LynnF]

Congratulations Dave....what a nice surprise!

 

P.S. I don't think your girlfriend "got herself pregnant". 9 out of 10 dentists agree that it's mostly the guy's fault.

 

Hey everyone...just think about all the great times we're going to have next season, talking about who's outfishing Dave. I can hardly wait

[SanJuanWorm]

I have the ability of a ninja to sneak outta the house Lynn. Don't forget I live right beside the river now.

[Maximum]

I have the ability of a ninja to sneak outta the house Lynn. Don't forget I live right beside the river now.

 

 

Oh Dave, you shall see, its not so easy.....congrats too btw, it is better than you can imagine and not as bad as people make it out to be.

[jonny5]

These oldies have it figured out.

 

[LynnF]

I have the ability of a ninja to sneak outta the house Lynn. Don't forget I live right beside the river now.

 

Your reality cheque is about to bounce again Dave.

[birchy]

Holy *hit was this funny.

 

Damn skippy!

 

 

 

Congrats Dave!

[snakeman]

This guy who blogs on youtube has a good explanation for it, I think he's bang-on:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu_moia-oVI

[SanJuanWorm]

I shall name the child.......... McDudeRainbowLove

[maxwell]

ahh come on dan the mountain man devlin...... then we can call him dub d junior

[loyaleddie]

These oldies have it figured out.

 

 

 

I fell out of my chair laughing at this one!!! thanks

[Taco]

I shall name the child.......... McDudeRainbowLove

 

Cute....................... did you ever hear Robin Williams explanation of male/female relationships?

 

 

 

 

 

God gave men two heads...........................................................................

................and only enough blood to run one at a time.

 

 

:angel:smail:

[hydropsyche]

...so thats why I get dizzy......

 

Congrats, DD, but according to this guy, it wasn't your wife's fault.

 

 

U.S. mess started with Carter

 

By SALIM MANSUR

 

Last Updated: 4th October 2008, 2:46am

 

The story of man's fall is in part the history of unintended effects of his initial actions.

 

Paris of Troy falls in love with Helen of Sparta that puts to sea a thousand Greek ships, and the Trojan War is unleashed. Gavrilo Princip, driven by his Serbian nationalist fervour, assassinates the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and it ignites the First World War. Neither Paris nor Princip calculated the unintended effects of his initial actions.

 

As the United States is rocked by the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and a deep recession or worse looms on the horizon threatening the global economy, politicians -- Democrats and Republicans -- have scrambled to work out a rescue package for the collapsing capital market.

 

But how could the U.S. government be unaware of the capital and liquidity crunch of such dimension building up over time so that a taxpayer bailout of Wall Street to the tune of a trillion dollars was urgently needed? How did this tsunami of bad loans come about in the first place?

 

The story is one of unintended effects. And politicians who unleashed it have remained in full throttle of denying responsibility.

 

The origin of the crisis goes back to 1977 when then president Jimmy Carter signed into law the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) passed by the Democratic-controlled Congress.

 

MORTGAGES FOR ALL

 

The CRA required, as the U.S. Federal Reserve Board notes, "depository institutions to help meet the credit needs of the communities in which they operate, including low and moderate income neighbourhoods, consistent with safe and sound operations."

 

In other words, by law lending institutions were instructed to provide money as mortgages and commercial loans to underserved communities of mostly low income Afro-Americans and underprivileged minorities with poor credit history.

 

The reasoning behind CRA was to make housing affordable for that segment of the American population that could not meet credit tests of the financial industry. The CRA was civil rights action with roots going back to the Great Society push of president Lyndon Johnson's administration a decade earlier.

 

The CRA requirement brought loosening of underwriting standards by lending institutions, and the beginning of bad loans or the "sub-prime" mortgages. The two government-sponsored lending institutions -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- aggressively pushed sub-prime mortgages to high risk borrowers, and then covered the questionable mortgages by access to government-backed credit legislatively available from the U.S. Treasury.

 

In 1995 during Bill Clinton's administration, amendments to the CRA increased lending for home purchases and the bad loans piled up while a frenzy of buying led to a real estate bubble.

 

In 2003 President George W. Bush's administration sought a corrective overhaul of the lending practices and in 2005 Sen. John McCain pushed for reform oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

 

BUSH FIX DERAILED

 

On both occasions corrective measures were derailed in the Congress subcommittee hearings by the Democratic leadership led by Sen. Christopher Dodd in the Senate Committee on Banking and Congressman Barney Frank in the House Financial Services Committee.

 

The politics of affirmative action for affordable housing twisted sound financial practices, and over time it created a heated housing market that could not be sustained indefinitely.

 

A mountain of bad loans eventually crashed, and the U.S. capital market was frontally assaulted by the unintended effects of the CRA.

[Teck71]

I think the sperm one Barb should have just given the hummer that night.

[Castuserraticus]

...so thats why I get dizzy......

 

Congrats, DD, but according to this guy, it wasn't your wife's fault.

 

 

U.S. mess started with Carter

 

By SALIM MANSUR

 

Last Updated: 4th October 2008, 2:46am

 

The story of man's fall is in part the history of unintended effects of his initial actions.

 

Paris of Troy falls in love with Helen of Sparta that puts to sea a thousand Greek ships, and the Trojan War is unleashed. Gavrilo Princip, driven by his Serbian nationalist fervour, assassinates the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and it ignites the First World War. Neither Paris nor Princip calculated the unintended effects of his initial actions.

 

As the United States is rocked by the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and a deep recession or worse looms on the horizon threatening the global economy, politicians -- Democrats and Republicans -- have scrambled to work out a rescue package for the collapsing capital market.

 

But how could the U.S. government be unaware of the capital and liquidity crunch of such dimension building up over time so that a taxpayer bailout of Wall Street to the tune of a trillion dollars was urgently needed? How did this tsunami of bad loans come about in the first place?

 

The story is one of unintended effects. And politicians who unleashed it have remained in full throttle of denying responsibility.

 

The origin of the crisis goes back to 1977 when then president Jimmy Carter signed into law the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) passed by the Democratic-controlled Congress.

 

MORTGAGES FOR ALL

 

The CRA required, as the U.S. Federal Reserve Board notes, "depository institutions to help meet the credit needs of the communities in which they operate, including low and moderate income neighbourhoods, consistent with safe and sound operations."

 

In other words, by law lending institutions were instructed to provide money as mortgages and commercial loans to underserved communities of mostly low income Afro-Americans and underprivileged minorities with poor credit history.

 

The reasoning behind CRA was to make housing affordable for that segment of the American population that could not meet credit tests of the financial industry. The CRA was civil rights action with roots going back to the Great Society push of president Lyndon Johnson's administration a decade earlier.

 

The CRA requirement brought loosening of underwriting standards by lending institutions, and the beginning of bad loans or the "sub-prime" mortgages. The two government-sponsored lending institutions -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- aggressively pushed sub-prime mortgages to high risk borrowers, and then covered the questionable mortgages by access to government-backed credit legislatively available from the U.S. Treasury.

 

In 1995 during Bill Clinton's administration, amendments to the CRA increased lending for home purchases and the bad loans piled up while a frenzy of buying led to a real estate bubble.

 

In 2003 President George W. Bush's administration sought a corrective overhaul of the lending practices and in 2005 Sen. John McCain pushed for reform oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

 

BUSH FIX DERAILED

 

On both occasions corrective measures were derailed in the Congress subcommittee hearings by the Democratic leadership led by Sen. Christopher Dodd in the Senate Committee on Banking and Congressman Barney Frank in the House Financial Services Committee.

 

The politics of affirmative action for affordable housing twisted sound financial practices, and over time it created a heated housing market that could not be sustained indefinitely.

 

A mountain of bad loans eventually crashed, and the U.S. capital market was frontally assaulted by the unintended effects of the CRA.

 

Very interesting. A problem this large had to have a long history. Adding in rampant securitization compounded the willingness of banks to take on lower and lower quality customers because they didn't have to carry the loans on their books.

[Nick0Danger]

GREED

[Weedy1]

GREED

 

More Sins:

 

From: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?articl...cessary_reforms

 

Seven Deadly Sins

 

Sin One: Allowing Mortgage Lending to Become a Casino. Until 1969, Fannie Mae was part of the government. Mortgage lenders were tightly regulated. Homeownership rates soared throughout the postwar era, from about 44 percent on the eve of World War II to 64 percent by the mid-1960s. Nobody in the mortgage business got filthy rich, and hardly anyone lost money. Fannie's job was to buy mortgages from banks and thrift institutions, to replenish their money to make mortgages, and along the way to set standards. Fannie financed its operations by selling bonds. In the late 1970s, private Wall Street firms started emulating Fannie. They packaged mortgages, and converted them into bonds. Over time, their standards deteriorated, because they could make more money creating riskier products. In order to avoid losing market share, Fannie emulated some of the same abuses. Government did not step in to regulate the affair -- which was a time bomb waiting for the creation of the sub-prime mortgage business.

 

Sin Two: Allowing Unregulated Bond Rating Agencies to Decide What was Safe. Sub-prime is only the best known of a widespread fad known as "securitization." The idea is to turn loans into bonds. Bonds are given ratings by private companies that have official government recognition, such as Moody's and Standard and Poors, but no government regulation. These rating agencies have become thoroughly corrupted by conflicts of interest. If you want to package and sell bonds backed by risky loans, you go to a bond-rating agency and pay it a hefty fee. In return, the agency helps you manipulate the bond so that it qualifies for a triple-A rating, even if the underlying loans include many that are high-risk. Without the collusion of the bond-rating agencies, sub-prime lending never would have gotten off the ground, because it would not have found a mass market. Had regulators looked inside this black box, they would have shut it down. They might have needed new legislation, but they never asked for it. And public-minded regulators might have done a lot under existing law, since banks (which are regulated) were heavily implicated in the financing of sub-prime.

 

Sin Three: Failing to Police Sub-prime. The core idea of bank regulation is that government inspectors periodically examine the quality of bank assets. If too large a portion of a bank's loan portfolio is behind in its interest payments, the bank is made to raise more capital as a cushion against losses. Problems are nipped in the bud. But complex securities require more sophisticated regulation than simple loans. Regulators basically waived the rule on adequate capital for the new wave of mortgage lenders who created sub-prime. Many mortgage companies were not banks. They made loans only to sell them off to the Wall Street sinners of Deadly Sin No. 1 (see above). So there was no loan portfolio to examine, and no real capital. The Democratic Congress anticipated this problem in 1994, when it passed the Homeownership Opportunity and Equity Protection Act. This prescient law required the Federal Reserve to regulate the loan-origination standards of mortgage companies that were not otherwise government-regulated. But Alan Greenspan, a free-market zealot, never implemented the law. And when Republicans took over Congress in 1995, they never called him on the carpet.

 

Sin Four: Failure to Stop Excess Leverage. The financial economy is crashing today because so much speculation was done with borrowed money. A typical leverage ratio of a hedge fund or private equity company is 30 to one. That means $30 of debt for $1 of actual capital. If you make one serious miscalculation, you are out of business. And in the case of sub-prime mortgage companies, the leverage ratio was infinite, because they had no capital. The game was entirely based on creating debt. As long as times were good, financial firms could keep borrowing to finance their deals. But once investors looked down, they panicked. Some parts of the system are unregulated, such as hedge funds and private-equity companies. But they all ultimately get a lot of their funding from banks. And regulators do retain the power to look closely at banks' books (see Sin No.3 above). Had they used that power to police the kind of highly risky stuff banks were underwriting, they could have shut it down.

 

Sin Five: Failure to Police Conflicts of Interest. Remember the accounting scandals of the 1990s? In those scandals, accounting firms were paid once to audit corporate books and then again to help clients cook the books and still pass muster with the audit. That was a sheer conflict of interest. Though accountants were (loosely) regulated, Congress did not crack down until cooked books caused the stock market to crash. A second conflict of interest was the corruption of stock analysts, who were telling customers to buy dubious stocks because their bosses were profiting from underwriting the same stocks. In the aftermath of the dot-com bust, Congress narrowly cracked down on these two abuses with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act but simply ignored others -- such as the role of bond-rating agencies and the habit of basing executive bonuses on stock prices that could easily be manipulated by the same executives.

 

Sin Six: Failing to Regulate Hedge Funds and Private Equity. When Roosevelt's New Deal acted to rein in the abuses in financial markets, it regulated the major players -- commercial banks, investment banks, stock brokers, holding companies, and stock exchanges. But two of the biggest purveyors of risk today -- hedge funds and private-equity firms -- simply did not exist. Today, private-equity firms and hedge funds do most of the things banks and investment banks do. They basically create credit by making markets in exotic securities. They buy and sell firms. They speculate in financial markets with borrowed money, taking much bigger risks than regulated banks. According to House Banking Committee Chair Barney Frank, more than half the credit created in recent years has been created by essentially unregulated institutions. The people in charge of the government -- conservative Republicans -- took the view that these new-wave financial players offered transactions between consenting adults who needed no special consumer protection. But they were oblivious to the risks to the larger system.

 

Sin Seven: Repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. This action, in 1999, was one of two major cases when a cornerstone of New Deal regulation was explicitly repealed. (The other was the repeal of the Public Utility Holding Company Act, and if your utility rates are sky-high, you can thank Congress for that, too.) Glass-Steagall provided that if you wanted to speculate as an investment bank, good luck to you. But commercial banks were part of the banking system. They created credit. They were regulated, supervised, usually enjoyed FDIC insurance, and had access to advances from the Fed in emergencies. So commercial banks and investment banks were two different creatures that should stay out of each other's knitting.

 

But beginning in the 1980s, regulators who didn't believe in regulation either allowed explicit waivers of some aspects of Glass-Steagall or looked the other way as commercial banks and investment banks became more alike. By 1999, when Citigroup had jumped the gun and assembled a supermarket that included a commercial bank, investment bank, stock brokerage, and insurance company, Glass Steagall was so hollowed out that it was effectively dead. The coup de grace was its official repeal, in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. That's Gramm as in former Sen. Phil Gramm, a deregulation zealot and top adviser to John McCain.

[Castuserraticus]

More Sins:

 

From: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?articl...cessary_reforms

 

Seven Deadly Sins

 

Sin One: Allowing Mortgage Lending to Become a Casino. Until 1969, Fannie Mae was part of the government. Mortgage lenders were tightly regulated. Homeownership rates soared throughout the postwar era, from about 44 percent on the eve of World War II to 64 percent by the mid-1960s. Nobody in the mortgage business got filthy rich, and hardly anyone lost money. Fannie's job was to buy mortgages from banks and thrift institutions, to replenish their money to make mortgages, and along the way to set standards. Fannie financed its operations by selling bonds. In the late 1970s, private Wall Street firms started emulating Fannie. They packaged mortgages, and converted them into bonds. Over time, their standards deteriorated, because they could make more money creating riskier products. In order to avoid losing market share, Fannie emulated some of the same abuses. Government did not step in to regulate the affair -- which was a time bomb waiting for the creation of the sub-prime mortgage business.

 

Sin Two: Allowing Unregulated Bond Rating Agencies to Decide What was Safe. Sub-prime is only the best known of a widespread fad known as "securitization." The idea is to turn loans into bonds. Bonds are given ratings by private companies that have official government recognition, such as Moody's and Standard and Poors, but no government regulation. These rating agencies have become thoroughly corrupted by conflicts of interest. If you want to package and sell bonds backed by risky loans, you go to a bond-rating agency and pay it a hefty fee. In return, the agency helps you manipulate the bond so that it qualifies for a triple-A rating, even if the underlying loans include many that are high-risk. Without the collusion of the bond-rating agencies, sub-prime lending never would have gotten off the ground, because it would not have found a mass market. Had regulators looked inside this black box, they would have shut it down. They might have needed new legislation, but they never asked for it. And public-minded regulators might have done a lot under existing law, since banks (which are regulated) were heavily implicated in the financing of sub-prime.

 

Sin Three: Failing to Police Sub-prime. The core idea of bank regulation is that government inspectors periodically examine the quality of bank assets. If too large a portion of a bank's loan portfolio is behind in its interest payments, the bank is made to raise more capital as a cushion against losses. Problems are nipped in the bud. But complex securities require more sophisticated regulation than simple loans. Regulators basically waived the rule on adequate capital for the new wave of mortgage lenders who created sub-prime. Many mortgage companies were not banks. They made loans only to sell them off to the Wall Street sinners of Deadly Sin No. 1 (see above). So there was no loan portfolio to examine, and no real capital. The Democratic Congress anticipated this problem in 1994, when it passed the Homeownership Opportunity and Equity Protection Act. This prescient law required the Federal Reserve to regulate the loan-origination standards of mortgage companies that were not otherwise government-regulated. But Alan Greenspan, a free-market zealot, never implemented the law. And when Republicans took over Congress in 1995, they never called him on the carpet.

 

Sin Four: Failure to Stop Excess Leverage. The financial economy is crashing today because so much speculation was done with borrowed money. A typical leverage ratio of a hedge fund or private equity company is 30 to one. That means $30 of debt for $1 of actual capital. If you make one serious miscalculation, you are out of business. And in the case of sub-prime mortgage companies, the leverage ratio was infinite, because they had no capital. The game was entirely based on creating debt. As long as times were good, financial firms could keep borrowing to finance their deals. But once investors looked down, they panicked. Some parts of the system are unregulated, such as hedge funds and private-equity companies. But they all ultimately get a lot of their funding from banks. And regulators do retain the power to look closely at banks' books (see Sin No.3 above). Had they used that power to police the kind of highly risky stuff banks were underwriting, they could have shut it down.

 

Sin Five: Failure to Police Conflicts of Interest. Remember the accounting scandals of the 1990s? In those scandals, accounting firms were paid once to audit corporate books and then again to help clients cook the books and still pass muster with the audit. That was a sheer conflict of interest. Though accountants were (loosely) regulated, Congress did not crack down until cooked books caused the stock market to crash. A second conflict of interest was the corruption of stock analysts, who were telling customers to buy dubious stocks because their bosses were profiting from underwriting the same stocks. In the aftermath of the dot-com bust, Congress narrowly cracked down on these two abuses with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act but simply ignored others -- such as the role of bond-rating agencies and the habit of basing executive bonuses on stock prices that could easily be manipulated by the same executives.

 

Sin Six: Failing to Regulate Hedge Funds and Private Equity. When Roosevelt's New Deal acted to rein in the abuses in financial markets, it regulated the major players -- commercial banks, investment banks, stock brokers, holding companies, and stock exchanges. But two of the biggest purveyors of risk today -- hedge funds and private-equity firms -- simply did not exist. Today, private-equity firms and hedge funds do most of the things banks and investment banks do. They basically create credit by making markets in exotic securities. They buy and sell firms. They speculate in financial markets with borrowed money, taking much bigger risks than regulated banks. According to House Banking Committee Chair Barney Frank, more than half the credit created in recent years has been created by essentially unregulated institutions. The people in charge of the government -- conservative Republicans -- took the view that these new-wave financial players offered transactions between consenting adults who needed no special consumer protection. But they were oblivious to the risks to the larger system.

 

Sin Seven: Repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. This action, in 1999, was one of two major cases when a cornerstone of New Deal regulation was explicitly repealed. (The other was the repeal of the Public Utility Holding Company Act, and if your utility rates are sky-high, you can thank Congress for that, too.) Glass-Steagall provided that if you wanted to speculate as an investment bank, good luck to you. But commercial banks were part of the banking system. They created credit. They were regulated, supervised, usually enjoyed FDIC insurance, and had access to advances from the Fed in emergencies. So commercial banks and investment banks were two different creatures that should stay out of each other's knitting.

 

But beginning in the 1980s, regulators who didn't believe in regulation either allowed explicit waivers of some aspects of Glass-Steagall or looked the other way as commercial banks and investment banks became more alike. By 1999, when Citigroup had jumped the gun and assembled a supermarket that included a commercial bank, investment bank, stock brokerage, and insurance company, Glass Steagall was so hollowed out that it was effectively dead. The coup de grace was its official repeal, in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. That's Gramm as in former Sen. Phil Gramm, a deregulation zealot and top adviser to John McCain.

 

A famous economist (Friedman I think) hypothesized that stability creates instability. After a generation or two, people forget why the rules were put in place. The assumption becomes "We're in a a new era of perpetual growth/stability". So, the rules are relaxed to allow greater creativity. "Give them enough rope to hang themselves" comes to mind.

 

Many believe that if we can just put enough regulations and oversight in place we can prevent problems from happening. Human ingenuity can always find ways around barriers. Also, who sets the rules? A panel of experts? The talking heads are very good at providing infinite variations of who's to blame and what they would have done. This is not helpful at all because every new situation has new causes and effects. Which of the experts has a true handle on a problem that is in the development stage? I watched this situation develop via the perspective of several analysts who picked out different aspects of potential problems. None of them anticipated the collective result.

 

Sub prime is the visible face but the true overall problem is credit gone wild. Providing loans became a competitive worldwide industry where $billions were made. Look at Iceland. The bank loan portfolios were worth more than the national GDP. Banks that saw other institutions raking it in joined the party.

 

Canada seems to be the island in the storm. While credit standards were somewhat relaxed our conservatively socialist culture does not seem to buy into excesses. It just seems so obvious that loans to people/companies with bad credit is not a good thing.

[reevesr1]

There was an piece on 60 minutes last week.

Step 1: Lend money to risky customers

Step 2: Bundle a whole bunch of these up and create a Mortgage Investment vehicle

Step 3: Find someone willing to invest in these shaky investments. How? By offering a "Credit Swap". The investment bank offered what amounts to insurance on the investment, a guarantee on some portion on the investment. Why not call it "insurance" you ask? Because insurance is regulated. The insurer has to have funds on hand to cover the policy. Not so with these swaps. They could offer the policies with no money to cover the risk. So you have this HUGE unregulated market. The guy on 60 Minutes estimated there are 60 TRILLION dollars of these credit swaps (call it side bets on side bets). When the investments went south, then all these policies came due. Without money to pay. That's what brought down the big investment houses. If it would have been just Freddie and Fannie, it would have been bad, but not disastrous.

 

While much of what has been said in this post is true, the reality is there is no way that a bunch of bad mortgages in and of themselves could have brought down the financial industry. It was all the crap that was going on behind the scenes. The big downside of capitalism is greed, or the ability to pretend to create shareholder value. Not sure which one is worse. Whatever the case, the blame lies less with Joe Six Pack and more with Montgomery Hiller III. (I just made up that name, don't google him.)

[Weedy1]

There was an piece on 60 minutes last week.

 

This is the story. Click on the video.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/05/...in4502454.shtml

[Smitty]

Jim Rogers with George Soros ran the well respected Quantum Fund. Two years ago I had the privilege of listening to Jim Rogers at a trading seminar. I respect what he says, some damn good insights at that conference.

 

Here's a video of him, talking about what he's buying or will buy:

 

http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=s864BubROCQ

 

I am reminded of that famous line from Han Solo in the original Star Wars "One thing's for sure, we're all gonna be a lot thinner". Kinda appropriate for the markets these days...

 

I hate to be a Stehpen Harper mime, but essentially, the Canadian economy is pretty sound, our banks are amongst the most respected in the world right now, and over the next 2 to 4 decades the light will shine even brighter on Canada. We have everything the world needs - the 3 "F's" - Food, Fuel, and Fertilizer, plus oil, plus natural resources, and our country is essentially empty (our pop. density). Mcleans mag. recently quoted some immigrants who referred to Canada as "El Dorado".

 

The whole world essentially has a hangover after years of partying, and Canada is affected too. The rampant panic selling and fear will eventually be mitigated as people calm down. It may take anywhere from the next 3 to 24 months, but market will find a bottom. Markets always do.

 

Smitty

[Guest Sundancefisher]

The building sentiment is that another recession is on it's way due to the collapse of the European economies... England, Ireland, Greece, Spain, Portugal to name a few are in big trouble... The US with their massive debt and deficit can not spend the world out of the pending recession.

 

I tend to agree. I think oil will drop to $50 in the next 6 months.

 

Buckle down folks... We are all in for another bumpy ride.

[bowfin]

i think you are wrong on the price of oil by the end of sept it will be close to 100 bucks a barrel we need in alberta to get the price of nat gas to come up to get things humming again