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My parents are 74 and 82 years old respectively now. Being homeless, chewing tree bark and a leather belt for dinner in 1940s WW2 Europe works wonders on what you expect from life. In the 60s and 70s, my parents: - never ever ate out. "Only money wasting idiots eat out" is what they told...

Good. Then what's so bad about the way people currently live as you say? There is no reason to complain at all for today's middle class. Let them live in modest homes, let them drive old cars. They have it just as good or bad as the 70s' middle class had it. You think the 70s was a working...

That's why I said expectations are way too high. The typical worker expects a lavish lifestyle, but unfortunately that is not compatible with their education nor their income. You say many people "can't afford things". I say many people can't afford those things they expect they deserve but...

Workers today -- or should I say up until recently -- expected they have a God given right to live like the rich and famous on TV. And that expectation is based on their 30k annual salaries paired with debt. 9 out of 10 taxi drivers, bank clerks and hospital nurses think they can live in a 4500...

http://www.pitrading.com/historical_data.htm

The same people complaining in this thread how machines make workers obsolete would have complained 100 years ago how tractors and fertilizers were destroying farming jobs. Or how computers were destroying office jobs in the late 70s.

You conveniently failed to mention that the MAJOR EXPORT MARKETS of the south-east Asian nations were not in a recession in 1998: USA and Western Europe. They happily continued to import goods from Asia. How would Asia have fared in 1998 with their laissez-faire approach had US and Western...

You have to work on your rhetoric. It should have been: "No one cares about housing, no one cares about consumer confidence, people still logging into facebook, people still logging into myspace." That would have been more convincing!

No I don't support gigantic government spending. I support government coordination and regulation of financial markets (and financial markets only): temporarily taking control of "too big to fail" institutions when markets fail and become inefficient -- then handing back things to the markets...

Saying that government intervention CAUSES crisis is your opinion and nothing else. I could argue in the exact same uneducated manner that a free market financial industry driven by greed caused the crisis and now can't be part of the solution. The main point however is that (financial)...

According to the Austrians, 8000 bank failures, millions of homeless and 30% unemployment helped create "a cleared out system and a clean base" to start out from. In other words, the Austrians argue that when everything turns to sh** at some point it can't get much worse. That's not too long...

Protectionism does not work, even though it sounds so logical, patriotic and intuitive. A good example is the Italian auto industry in the 80s, now an infamous graduate school case study. You can not close down the borders, penalize trade and expect to prosper. Within 20 years of...

Careful with these double short ETFs. Swing trade them over the very short term, don't hold them over the long term, they can end up costing you money even though your trade idea was dead on. You can short IYR (outright short common or synthetic short with ITM long put/short call) to get...

They would start crying about their 401k

Yes, just too bad these companies never did nor never will make ANY money whatsoever.

According to the free market nughuggers there is ZERO difference between something like WebVan or Worldcom going bust and Lehman, AIG and BAC + a bunch of emerging markets going into unmoderated bankruptcy. Even in the aftermath of Lehman they still hang on to their "self-cleasing market"...

Factories have been closing for good (and opening) for the past 100 years. Entire industries have been shipped offshore. Furniture, shoe, clothes, toys. All this to the benefit of the G7 nations, not to their detriment. Here is a quote I found interesting for the "overseas" argument: If you...

Unfortunately most of us are trading stocks and index futures, not US sovereign credit default swaps :cool:

When the UK gov. efforts drive GBPUSD to 1.00 I might actually consider relocating there :cool:

Because no educated person would even try to answer such a question. What would you have answered to your own question in 1931, 1937, 1942, 1974, 1981, 1990, 2002 -- unless you were blessed with the magic crystal ball of hindsight?