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Termyn8or -> RE: Im no business major.... (12/15/2007 7:19:49 AM)
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JAK, I'll probably see you in my Walmart thread.
Anyway, there are millions of ways to cook the books. They have a baseline, a break even point, but just who set that ? That break even point is a giant sucking sound out of each and every one of our wallets. We have been totally screwed since 1933.
If I have a credit card with a $15,000 balance (which I do) and I pay faitrhfully and do not overuse the card, the balance goes down slow but sure. But what people do not understand is that this is not a good thing, it is simply not quite as bad. So next month my balance might be $14,500, how is this good ? This is not good, this is simply starting to climb out of a hole.
Now if you take that break even baseline depicted in the graph, and move it to where it should be, in a sound, non-debt based economy, the indicator line on the graph would be so far away it would take a ream of paper to print a copy.
We live in a world of expectations. We have been conditioned to expect these things, we were born into it. We expect to have a car payment, and a few other bills.
In contrast, in the old days a young Man would save up for a car. Buy a jalopy and possibly his Dad would help him fix it up. Now a car payment is a foregone conclusion.
I like how they advertise the "freedom" of having a credit card. That kid with the jalopy can quit his job if he decides and his car is his. With it he can go find another job, that is if he wants to be able to afford gasoline to put in it. Nowadays, there is a three year note on a ten year old car. He must continue to work to make the payments or the car will be repoed and his credit is affected adversely.
Nowadays you can sue if you cosign for someone and they don't pay, damaging your credit. Good credit is considered almost more of an asset than money. But that makes sense, nobody of anywhere near normal means can pay cash for a house. But they used to a long time ago. Even new cars. I know a guy bought a brand new car about every ten years or so whether he needed it or not. He didn't even trade in the old one, he let the kids have it. He paid cash. He was a farmer, he is alive and well, but is retired. We have talked. He was successful on a small family farm, averaged about 170 acres. From what I understand, they did well because they didn't pay interest.
While other farmers were getting $200,000 loans for combines and who knows what else, this family had a policy of paying cash, even for the new car. I think they did make an exception for the combine, but then it is possible that they just sold off some of the land. Actually the place varied between like 130 and 200 acres.
But there have always been debtors, there have been sharecroppers, thus the saying "bought the farm" when they died. That saying is borne out of the fact that there was no way in life a sharecropper could ever actually own the place.
But the sharecropper started with nothing and we all die with nothing, and I guess it was a good enough living to stick with, and they did survive. The difference is that we entrusted the great wealth of this country to a bunch of crooks. Even before the FDR administration, in fact I think it was Wilson who put the final nail in our coffin. But it goes way back from there.
Many years before, when Roger B Taney was secretary of the treasury, he commited an act of high treason at the behest of the President. For that he was awarded a lifetime job as a federal judge and is now best known for the Dred Scott decision. Real humanitarian huh ? But look a bit further back into Taney's life and you will see what got him the job and you will see that both he and the President who appointed him should have been executed for treason. Note that the President had to fire three or four people from that post before he found someone willing to do what Taney did.
That's a name, Roger B. Taney. You know how to Google, and you have enough, I am not a history teacher. My source of this information is from a college dictionary, the BIG kind, from the fifties, so I am unable to reproduce it here. But then this is all a matter of public record. And friends, if you can't trust old books, you can't trust anything.
The fact of the matter is that one day the US is going to be in default. I have seen this happen on a smaller scale. People do not remember. The city of Cleveland in which I have lived most of my life went belly up a few decades ago. The city went into default and there were some repos, some land and office furniture. The main creditor was Cleveland Trust, a bank that subsequently changed their name. In light of this, I can see why.
But there is still a city, such as it is. We are still here. They didn't haul the Terminal Tower off and sell it to China. That's not how it works.
The point is, this is going to happen to the entire country. It is going to be alot worse for several reasons. First of all a city's economy is one thing. It's collapse does not affect international deals. It does have a negative impact on the region, but that is minor compared to what is in store for us.
When the US defaults, the dollar drops like a rock. What happens then is obvious, imports cost alot more, and I mean alot more, quadruple at least. Probably even higher than that. Now if this had happened forty years ago, that would be OK, we had the ability to feed ourselves and manufacture most of what we need. However that has changed. We import alot of food even, and there are no reserves. There used to be storehouses full of grain, and other commodities. Now the "futures" in these necessities are traded like stock in a candy store.
Let me lay this on you, define futures trading. It has been around as long as any of us, and after I say what I say I am sure someone will try to rebut it, but here goes.
When you trade in futures/commodities what you are doing is buying up necessities, to drive up the price so that everyone has to pay a bit more and you make your money for nothing. You don't even have to truck or store the grain or pork bellies or whatevwer. If you made a good guess you gain money, and actually today, I think it is probably hard to lose money in futures. While I don't follow it too closely, I think it's better than common stocks as far as an investment goes. It's unlikely that pork bellies will go belly up.
But if you really think about the concept of futures trading, without any preconcieved notions, you might find it at least amoral. For example I am a millionaire, and my neighbor likes Budwieser, and I go all over town and buy all the Budwieser. I offer to sell him some, as I have all there is. Ten dollars a sixpack.
Do you do that to your friends and neighbors ? I could see it if you're pissed off at the guy, but in the absence of that, you are TAKING. I don't know how everybody else is, but I try to be fiendly unless and until there is a reason not to be. So a sixpack that he should get for six bucks is now ten, and I pocket the four.
Do you consider that honorable ?
Now what is so different about the futures market ? See this is world into which we were born. Once you start understanding empirical morality (for lack of a precoined term) you see that the whole shebang is a big scam. And that explains perfectly why the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.
Look at what big money did to us in the 1920s. There was no ridiculous change in cuircumstances, not that things always stayed the same, but there was no major disaster or anything. The crash was caused by big money pulling out. And there's not a damn thing anyone can do about it because one should understand the concept of venture capital. It is not the rent money to say the least.
People are generally too stupid to play the game. If I decided to learn the market I would probably do alright, but I have been taught how to gamble. Understand this, Jim taught me how to read the board at the track and follow the big money. This requires timing. When you see the board change you make decisions, and I figured a method out mathematically to remove a hell of alot of the house edge. These two things coupled together make for a winner, but you still don't bet the rent under any circumstances.
And Morris, he explained to me about stocks. He said something like "You don't need to know how the company is going to do, you need to know how people THINK it's going to do". It's a gamble like any other, at the track the nig money waits till the end to bet, they do it electronically in some cases.
Now hold on here, something just occurred to me. Not that it hasn't somehow, but I think I can express it. The fact of the matter is all that money that gets taken in at the track, and that can be alot, they don't get to keep it all. If you go to the track and look around, 90% of the people are behind, that is overall they have lost. The track does not have all that money, and the big money betters, they stay big money because they know what they are doing. Some have inside information, others do a hell of alot of research, or both.
Compare this to the stock market. When you see through all this bullshit, you see the difference in the like of the difference between playing Rummy and Gin Rummy. (I think that was a pretty damn good analogy).
No matter what the game, there are winners and losers, and luck is not required. One you get enough money, you don't even need much skill.
The stock market (I mention it because it was part of our downfall) was touted as a medium by which people could invest in companies that would use the money for expansion and make more profit by expanding. Sounded real good huh ? Well what happened is that unbeknownst to most, big money set the whole thing up, and they did not do it for us.
A billionaire can buy so much stock in a company, unless the shares are limited, and in a short bit of time just walk into the "owner's" office and sit down. He can say "How's our company doing ?", and that would be benevolent. He can ruin the company with the stroke of a pen. He doesn't even have to sell his stock, just put it on the market.
But then he does have a vested interest, and has every right to exercise control. When you put a company on the public market you are selling out. The old way of business was that the business pays for it's own expansion. But that is not the new way.
And that is the problem.
T
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