To make things worse... our president is practicing protectionism to close down world markets.
Once our markets outside the US close up, the matter will be ten times worse.
Why is TheStreet.com (Jim Cramer’s puppet bully pulpit that no one reads because they know watch his entertaining-only but not meant for serious investing advice act can be caught for free on CNBC) giving these conspiracy theories a somewhat legitimate home on the web?
There is so much crap bandying out there about how the Federal Reserve is purportedly owned by foreign banks in London. Isn’t the Bank of New York and 11 other DOMESTIC banks members of the Federal Reserve? Which means there are no foreign interests in the Fed. Duh?!
The Fed was instated for a reason. Before the Fed, individual banks would issue their own bank notes that could be used as currency. This obviously was an utter mess which is why the Fed was founded almost one century ago. But sure, let’s argue about how we should go fix something that isn’t broken just because we have a financial system that is in financial tatters because people (home owners and real estate investors) bought off more than they could chew, and the actuarians at AIG severely underpriced the derivatives that insured the sub-prime loans (because somehow they couldn’t envision that housing price might go down 10, 20, 30% or more — I mean this is after housing prices went up 50%, 75%, 100% or more in the last ten years — these dimwit mathematicians/computer programmers could not see some sort of correction coming?).
I had a relatively smart (and rich) accountant talk to me about how his neighbor at the shore had seen the value of his house go down by $100,000 or $200,000 (this was back in 2008, and so he was probably making a comparison of the drop in price from 2007 to 2008). So I asked him but how much would his neighbors house have sold for in say 2005 (or even 2003 — five years prior)? And the accountant had to admit that the one-year drop was probably about the same as the run-up from 2005 to 2007, and the drop (although large in total dollar terms) was still probably much less than the run-up from 2003 to 2007. And of course house prices appreciated from 2001 to 2003 at a ridiculous rate, too.