Posted on 10/14/2009 6:10:55 AM PDT by fiscon1
Yesterday was a relatively quiet day in the markets. The Dow was 14.74 points to 9871.06. The NASDAQ was up .75 points to 2139. 89, and the S&P 500 was down 3 points to 1073.18. That likely won't hold today. With earnings season in full swing, the big news this morning is from JP Morgan Chase. They crushed their estimates, mostly through investment banking business. That's not only sent the stock itself up but much of the market with it.
JPMorgan shares were up 2.4 percent in premarket trading after the Wall Street giant posted quarterly earnings of 82 cents per share, beating estimates of 52 cents per share.
(Excerpt) Read more at theeprovocateur.blogspot.com ...
The dems vote their prodigious healthcare bill out of committee (to much dancing and singing and celebration) and the market...yawns.
PESSIMISM: OBAMA’S POLITICAL ALLY
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on DickMorris.com on October 13, 2009
President Obama has won the peace prize, but nobody thinks he deserves the Nobel in economics. Despite $800 billion of economic stimulus and the accumulation of a $1.4 trillion deficit, he has been unable to lower the unemployment rate below 9.8%.
So why, after nine months of Obama, do voters, in the latest Rasmussen poll, still blame Bush - and not Obama - for the economic situation by 55-37? How can Obama skate by without having to account for the failure of his economic program?
Liberalism, particularly in economics, is usually protected by a bodyguard of pessimism. When government intervention and spending fails to yield the predicted results, month after month and year after year, the left sells the notion that these are tough times and that we need to lower our expectations.
In the late 70s, for example, the mantra that “less is more” gripped policy makers. America was in late middle age and facing its decline, inevitable (and even healthy), we were told, after its artificial post-World War II dominance.
Then came Reagan who showed us all how unrealistic were these diminished expectations and how they could be put to shame if the private sector were truly unleashed. Margaret Thatcher taught the same lesson to British pessimists, clucking at the decline in their island’s fortunes.
In the early and mid nineties, austerity was the order of the day as President Clinton and Speaker Gingrich vied with one another to eliminate the deficit by cutting spending. But when Clinton and Newt slashed the capital gains tax instead the economy soared and the deficit - once ticketed for eradication in seven years - dissolved in eighteen months.
Now Obama is succeeding in convincing us that we are entering an era of scarcity and that prosperity will remain a distant goal as we wrestle to the high unemployment that is inevitable in these tough times. The more his economic policies doom us to continued high unemployment, which inhibits the consumer spending that could cure it, the more he will peddle the mantra that joblessness is inevitable.
How long will Obama be able to get away with this shell game? For how many more months will succeed in shucking off the blame for his failed policies onto Bush?
Unfortunately, it looks like he can do so for as long as the current economic situation continues!
But the key word here is “current.” He will probably be able to escape the rap for unemployment and slow or no growth. But when the deficits he introduced trigger inflation and then stag-flation, all bets will be off.
The collapse of the dollar and the continuation of high deficits and seemingly endless issuance of new money by the Fed, make inflation very likely in the opinion of most economists. This new disease will clearly not be from the hangover of the Bush Administration, but will be Obama’s fault in the eyes of the public. Inflation will be uniquely his and his alone. He won’t be able to pretend that it was inherited from Bush. He will get his fair share of the blame, for once.
And it will probably arrive just in time to make itself felt in the Congressional elections of next year.
PLEASE FORWARD THIS E-MAIL TO FRIENDS AND FAMILY
My Chase investment wallah told me that “Money Market accounts currently pay ZERO percent interest” and if you have the temerity to keep less than $25,000 in a Money Market account “We will charge a fee on the account.”
Freepers - check yours!
The DOW will hit 10 thousand. Why? A psychological move.
So you will go out and spend for the Christmas season, thinking all is fine!
Of course the news not in the news , the euro and the yen passed the dollar! World banks that had 75% dollars now only hold 37%!
You ain’t seen bad yet, but it’s comin’.
I got’ta bad feeling ‘bout this, m’self.
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