Quote from scriabinop23:
I find it very fascinating the entire market is absolutely gung ho that a rate cut WILL occur, ...
$5.00 gasoline is probably like an effective 2%+ rate hike. It'll hurt the consumer (and the rest of the foodchain) much more than a lousy 25bp will help business. ...
Can't we just acknowledge I-banks are going to lose billions more, some might even go out of business (god forbid!!!), and take the pain on the rest of this housing boom deflation ?...
Either the market is reading Bernanke very very wrong, or we are all fucked.
I agree. In fact coined the term "6L cycle" and posted in another forum some time ago. Here it is defined:
The "6L Cycle":
LIQUIDITY caused the âdot.com bubble.â When it burst Greenspanâs FED, fearful that the world was heading into recession, possibly becoming a depression, pumped out more money. This lead to:
LOANS to unqualified people, who could not afford the house they bought, but both buyer and lender were confident that rising home prices would bail them out of any trouble, and it did for several years. The buyers refinanced their mortgage at lower rates provided by the FED and often for longer terms with lower monthly payments once they had some unrealized capital gain. This put cash in their pockets, which they quickly spent. This lead to a:
LINKAGE between increasing home price and the general economic prosperity, but jobs were being exported and âMac âJobsâ replaced the lost higher-paying factory jobs. Joe Americanâs real wages went down for a several years and his ability to carry his mortgage decreased. That is his home became a:
LIABILITY, not an asset that he could borrow more against to live better but business, importing more services and goods from cheap Asian sources was prospering as never before, even when selling less in many cases. The US might have been able to avoid depression and only have mild recession if it were not for the
LEVERAGE, which pooled many of these low quality mortgages together in packages (diversifying the risk, while keeping their high rate of returns, especially as the ARMs in the package reset to higher rates). These packages were very attractive and supposedly âsecureâ because of this diversity so banks and brokerage firms allowed large investors to buy them with only small fraction of the face value. These investors and private equity firms resold the packages among themselves and to ETFs and used them as collateral for other bank loans to buy more. Perhaps at the end of the chain, only one dollar was buying 25 dollars of face value assets. But then the âfailure to performâ (mortgage default rate) went up and exposed the last buyers in the chain to bankruptcy and the:
LIQUIDATION that is happening today, not only in the US, but in EU also. A large French firm, tied to the US mortgage market, just went under and hundreds of billions (if not trillions?) of stock values have evaporated over night around the world in one day. High leverage means that only a few percent drop in homes values or increase in the default rates completely wipes out all equity of the investors holding the bag at the end of the re-sale chain. It threatens the entire banking system, e.g. Northern Rock, but I expect that it will still be possible for central banks to save the system one more time with more:
LIQUIDITY (starting this â6L cycleâ again) before this house of cards all comes crashing down in historyâs worst depression with the dollar collapsed to pennies of current value. Here we go again, (with FED's 0.5% cut) but this is the last time, I predict, before the dollar run induced crash.
Posted originally at:
http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=1502039&postcount=1
I am physicist active there in many threads (as Billy T). In one, couple of years ago, made earlier vague prediction very specific: I have predicted a "6 year window" for the dollar run to start: (Oct 2008 to October 2014.)
In another, back when DOW was at about 12,000 I predicted that it would be "flerting with 15,000* by end of first quarter of 2008," perhaps too "cocky" about two months ago, when it neared peak, I moved the end date to "first 50 days of 2008." ("Flerting" defined as coming with in 3% and falling back at least once.)
I based this several years old prediction on the dropping dollar - I.e. DOW is measured in dollars and it takes more of them to "buy the DOW" as value of each drops.
What do you "traders"* think of my predictions and "6L cycle" summary of why US is in such a long term mess?
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*I'm a "buy and hold" guy - Five years now with assets in ADRs of India and Brazil, where I live. The local water / sewer company (may be world's largest as serves STATE of Sao Paulo) SBS is up 1000% and Indian Bank ICICI ticker IBN up about 750%, my two largest holdings. I foresaw all this 5 years ago - posted it at the sciforms site. GWB has made the coming depresion in US and EU unavoidable, IMHO. I became active back when it still could have been avoided by more policy like Clinton had (No war, balanced budgets etc.)
I also have stock in about 40 early stage drug developers as their risk is very high compared to dollar dropping risk and "priced in." - Most will not exist on my time scale (decades) but a few will grow 10,000% and compenstate. Several are also non-US (For example, SPHRY and NVGN, two of my largest more recent buys, are Australian and some others are in Israel and EU.) Plus generic TEVA and BRL as "big Pharma" is losing patents on big sellers now and for a few years - in bad shape - I own only the early stages high risk developers except for these two.