Stock market bombed today.

[Renew Deal]

What say you?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=704498&mesg_id=704498&page=

[The_Casual_Observer]

1. Petrol prices up, Interest rates and inflation on the rise

Weak job numbers and announcements of mass layoffs, deficit growing daily, market below the magic 10,000, predictions of a weak 2nd half of the year. And bush is still at about 50%? I sense a strong sense of denial out there.

[tritsofme]

2. Great buying opportunity

I try and look at the bright side...

[umass1993]

3. Just As Scary As Terror Anyone Seen Our Economic Policy?

this is from the washington post.

<snip>

Even as our efforts to combat terrorism continue -- as they must -- we need to regain enough perspective to put economic issues back among our list of top priorities. Just as a National Security Strategy is mandated by law, having a National Economic Strategy should be mandated by self-interest and common sense. Failure to view these twin aspects of our security as interlocking pieces of a single whole will hand our enemies around the world the kind of victories they can't achieve on their own; it will erode our strength, deplete our resources and undercut our way of life.

</snip>

Remember how all the repubs say how gloomy and doomy Kerry is, well, it isn't just him.

[cornfedyank]

8. their accounting is a little scary also.

it reminds me of the golddust falling through the floorboards in "Paint Your Wagon".

check the rating on this article.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&e=4&u=/ap/20040730/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_audit

[rapier]

4. notes

Liquidity is drying up. That is the amount of money available for speculating in stocks is falling. In fact the amount of money available for most things is drying up as debt service becomes more and more of a drag on all sectors and most importantly credit growth is slowing. (These are two sides of the same coin. One way or another the rise of the US since WWII is at its foundation the story of the growth of credit (debt))

I've proposed, in one way or another, in this forum that we are on the cusp of a profound change as debt has risen to an unsustainable peak. I doubt there will be a 'crash', and certainly won't predict one but the chances of an upward bias in stocks for the long term are slim in my opinion. What the powers that be hope for I believe is for stocks to just keep even with inflation. They are hoping for inflation of course too, for inflation makes paying off old debt esasier. (which is a way of circling back to the systems foundation of debt. Inflation is the debtors friend) The alternative to inflation is deflation. A fate too terrible to contemplate.

Job numbers, GDP numbers, earnings, don't mean a thing. It's all noise. A story to 'explain' the world. Nice stories but they are just that, stories. Stocks rise and fall on the amount of money freely available to buy stocks. That's it.

[umass1993]

5. how do you know?

Moreover, Microsoft is giving away dividends because they have so much money and so few places to invest it. So money to buy stocks is there.

I am not sure I buy into this debt service theory, at least as you have presented it.

[Nadienne]

6. Profits aren't merely a product

of an increase in sales. Profits also come from a decrease in expenses - ie, money spent as wages to employees.

It only makes sense: there are fewer people doing the same work; productivity is up because of that. The unemployment rate is still pretty high. Corporations are not spending as much on employing people. The money they are saving goes to upper-management and stock-holders, in that order.

[philosophy77]

7. public companies

That's because with public companies, if you don't have good upper management or stock holders (investment capital) employees are moot, as in you wouldn't have a company to employ them in the first place.