An explanation someone else wrote

[solarbird]

Oh look, here's a short article that does a pretty good job of describing why those insurer failures I posted about a little while ago matter: Seeking Warning Signs Outside Subprime Lending

The headline is stupid - we're long, long past this just being "subprime lending" - but the content is there. A complete unravelling would be $45 trillion. Yes, trillion. That's three times GDP and five times national debt. So everybody hope that's not going to happen, because if it does your best bet is to be long in things like booze, ammunition, and cigarettes - which is, in turn, a pretty good clue that it's not going to go down that badly. But the potential losses are still pretty huge.

Comments

[cubes.livejournal.com]

And y'all thought we just make our own fireworks for fun.

[solarbird]

And here I thought the personal injuries were the bonus! I didn't know you were market strategists, too. ^_^

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Hey, did you hear that Fred Thompson blamed the subprime mortgage mess on immigrants? "A lot of them couldn't communicate with the people they were getting the mortgage from," he told an Iowa audience last night. What's really scary is how the audience just ate that up, with folks claiming they were sick and tired of having to wade through Spanish-language phone robomenus.

The horror! The horror!

[solarbird]

Awesome! I just wish it had been Hucky. Thompson's campaign is dead in the water.

Oh, also, note that this is not technical trading advice because technical trading is reading tea leaves - meaning in the charitable sense an obtuse way to gauge market psychology - but if I'm reading these (not good enough for my tastes) charts correctly, the dollar has just fallen below the 50-day moving average, which was the last MA support it had. And if I understand the terminology correctly, the moving averages have also set up what's called a "death cross," which means the 50-day, which had been above the 100- and 200-day MAs, is now below it, which actually is I think reasonably indicative of market opinion.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Remember those "sin funds" that were popular around the end of the dot-bomb? Coca-Cola, Phillip Morris, A-B, etc? Time to get back into those?

[solarbird]

When I say "I'm not an investment advisor and this isn't investment advice," I mean it, but I extra mean it when it comes to picking individual stocks.

[brombear.livejournal.com]

I still can't grasp the concept of the stock market...so you're better off than I am in this endeavor...It all seems like a dangerous monopoly game to me