Headline of the Day: Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble To Invest In

My new favorite onion article. It was ‘NASA get’s WiFi’ from last year.

ROFL!!

Satire is the way to tell an ugly truth while laughing at it.

It is still an ugly truth tough. :-(

BR, Eric Janzen of http://www.ITulip.com has already called for a massive buildout & up for alternative energy. Given the weak dollar, why not?

Best bet for a new bubble?

Why “Carbon Offsets” of course! What better way to show the ignorance and stupidity of man…

Maybe the next bubble will be pawnbrokers?

“At this point, bubbles are the only thing keeping us afloat.” :)

I haven’t seen Brian Wesbury make an appearance on CNBC in a while.

I want to hear about how there’s no recession on the horizon.

Brilliant. Satire is an excellent way to reveal the truth:

“According to investment experts, now that the option of making millions of dollars in a short time with imaginary profits from bad real-estate deals has disappeared, the need for another spontaneous make-believe source of wealth has never been more urgent.”

I rarely trade individual stocks. I’m strictly a futures traders who employs 100% technical analysis. The reason is I’d rather buy/sell an index and not individual stocks is TRUST. I simply cannot trust an investment in a companies ‘stock.’ Let’s face, all of these publicly traded companies once began as private concerns. The number one reason to go public is for owners to create a means to “cash out.” Do you really want to buy stock when the original owners are selling?

They often use the excuse of “wanting to raise permanent capital to fund ‘growth.'” But let’s be honest. There are huge debt markets out there that could be tapped if they were upbeat on their growth prospects. I know. I know. Raising capital from shareholders via IPO is ‘interest free cash.’ But, it’s also true that if you really believed in the growth prospects of your business, you would never sell.

Of course, there’s plenty of great businesses that have grown up in the public markets. And some have created vast wealth. But, there sure are a lot of losers.

– AT

They forgot my favorite … zinc oxide.

Clearly we need to be investing in bubbles.
Bubbles are the way to go. Big soapy, floating ones will do best.

Two-thirds of Congress, and three-fourths of the Federal Reserve Board, will take the Onion article at face value.

Me, I’m buying tungsten cowhide futures and miners of crapalloy.

The heck with all that other stuff – I’m long rope, because when we string all the crooks out there up by their necks and leave them to twist slowly, slowly in the wind (ah, where is John Mitchell when we really need him!), I figure that’s gotta lead to a huge increase in sales.

Its interesting that no one stops to think
that US Treasuries may be in the Biggest Bubble of them all…

Here’s the link to Janszen’s article on the next bubble:

http://itulip.com/forums/showthread.php?p=23725#post23725

Keep tagging me “spam” because your automated filter picks off “inc” + “com”. Or maybe you just don’t care for institutional reality checks.

The next bubbles are carbon credit accreditors (IT/FIN models) and health information technology (HIT) so-called independent software vendors (ISVs). That’s where VC and private equity will shop returns. Bush began promoting HIT-ISVs in 2004 and regional EHR datamarts (RHIOs) which feed NIH/CDC clinical funding.

You may have missed the 18-month David Brailer road show.

Just like pentagon R&D, just like mortgages, just like “faith-based” distributors, just like civilian corp.

Other bubble possibilities:

For supplying the town of Deal with fresh water.
For trading in hair.
For assuring of seamen’s wages.
For importing pitch and tar, and other naval stores, from North Britain and America.
For insuring of horses.
For improving the art of making soap.
For improving of gardens.
For insuring and increasing children’s fortunes.
For a wheel for perpetual motion.
For importing walnut-trees from Virginia.
For making of rape-oil.
For paying pensions to widows and others, at a small discount.
For making iron with pit coal.
For the transmutation of quicksilver into a malleable fine metal.

OBGs, from 1720.
The year of the Mother Of All Bubbles.

Interesting that the economics profession, which in the nineties was reluctant even to admit there was such a thing as a bubble, cannot admit today that their screwy messing with U.S. accounting procedures, like for inflation and unemployment, were among the factors causing the housing bubble. If housing had been properly factored into the inflation statistics, the Fed would have had to raise rates to cool off the bubble in 2005 – as inflation would have measured about 3 percentage points more than it did. But no. Instead, with that combo of hedonics and gimcrackery, the Fed registered just the right inflation rate to do what it wanted to do. Which of coursed sent down the value of the dollar and produced the inflationary conditions for oil.

Of course, the housing bubble was a perfect test of hedonics. If magic hedonic dollars were produced when houses were “made better”, than the consumers were, in effect, getting cheaper houses – and a cheaper good will sell to a larger demand. So it happened that housing ownership leaped. But a funny thing happened on the way to paradise – it turned out those owners couldn’t turn their hedonic dollars into real ones to pay the mortgage.

Now, that is what you need for a bubble. You need firstly a metric that fundamentally misstates it, agreed to by all the “mainstream” economists. This leads to a regulatory structure that either fails to regulate it properly or at all, since it is operating with magic figures, which then leads to an incentive structure where the profit is all in creaming off transaction fees.

Ask a good reference librarian to find this for you (it’s now blocked so the Internet Archive can’t display the full article, sigh, it’s dynamite).

The rhetoric and reality of American dream: Securities legislation and the accounting profession in …
B Merino, A Mayper – 1999 – Working paper, University of North Texas

Securities legislation and the accounting profession in the 1930s: The rhetoric and reality of the American Dream. Authors: Merino B.D.; Mayper A.G. …
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/…/2001/00000012/00000004/art00432;jsessionid=fltpb29eds3ks.alexandra?format=print

“… symbolic legislation might be sufficient to restore investor confidence. We use as our framework the pragmatic concept of democratic conversation, unique to the United States, to frame the ideological debate. We posit that securities legislation can best be understood as an effort to reestablish the viability of what has been labeled the “American dream”. We concur with the conclusion of Wettergreen (“The Regulatory Policy of the New Deal”, The New Deal, 1989, pp. 199–213) that passage of the securities legislation must be examined as a response to a moral crisis of capitalism, generated by the “immoral behavior” of the capitalist elite…. the first priority of any regulation had to be to establish the moral legitimacy of capitalism by restoring trust in the existing system….”

This is a joke. Right? April fools…

Barry
Here is a bubble I dont understand. I cant walk three blocks in Manhattan without encountering some sort of construction. Even desolate spots of Brooklyn’s Park Slope are being built up. Is the finance industry going to give New York so many new jobs that there will be renters or buyers? So how do builders finance these projects? Is it done like housing? i.e. securitized loans? Confused!

There’s tons of real-estate on the moon and Mars. Let’s colonize it, ruthless exploit the resources and destroy its fragile eco-structure like a bunch of greed-filled human beings who just want to live a decent life in our short time … restoring ourselves to the optimistic vision that brings man to accomplishing something profoundly good and powerful, rather than sitting back while being made to believe a bunch of cave dwelling, dog gassing, monkey bar climbing fleas can bring the greatest republic the world has ever seen to its knees.

“Little pieces of paper are the next big thing,” speculator Joanna Nadir, of Falls Church, VA said. “Just keep telling yourself that. If enough people can be talked into thinking it’s legitimate, it will become temporarily true.”

“This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”

The next bubble? I vote digital watches. They’re a pretty neat idea.

I couldnt agree more Ken H. But if you dispell the myth of bubbles and calling it by its true name inflation, then how would you deal with the myth of the consumer ? Then you would have to tell the American people that they could only consume what they produce – 50 50. So Im all for bubbles, big beautiful bubbles, and there will always be investors out there willing to put their hard earned money in the next bubble. And I agree untill the next bubble shows, the trasury is the best bubble in town. Just look at all those foreign central banks buying treasury bonds for trillions of dollars. Beautiful!

Forget about the new bubble!! Its just the SOS people.We have created monsters that are going nowhere but to pain & disapointment.Money talks but what is it really saying.