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Financial Crisis - lets hear the GOOD news!!
Media is only reporting the bad news about the economy, but there ARE some good news stories such as lower gasoline prices.
Date: 10/26/2008 7:44:49 PM ( 16 y ) ... viewed 1945 times Saturday, October 25, 2008
Good News in the Crisis
Where is the good news in all of this economic upheaval? Surely, with all the bad news we are being told lately, there must be an appetite for the little oddities that end up helping the average person!!
Hmmm, like WHAT you scream at me, through your furrowed brows...
Well, like the fact that gasoline prices are dropping with the price of oil going down - last spring the price of gasoline was the major headline for several weeks, right into the summer. Was that only because it was bad news? In fact, right now we are seeing the price of grocieries and other goods go down because transportation is costing less - the opposite of when gasoline prices were going up last spring. Also, airlines are removing the "fuel surcharges" and the city busses are not losing as much money either. Also, lower interest rates are generally a good thing for most of us, since most of us have some debt ; certainly there are more people who borrow money than lend it or who live off interest income, so lower interest rates are a good thing.
Those stories are not making the news at all though, are they?
Regulation, as a concept, is another potential benefit of this mess. Regulation of pollution might start to be taken more seriously, and for most of us, thats a very good thing. After all, it was "the corporate culture" who has been lobbying governments to do away with regulations of all kinds, not just financial, and as a result we have more toxic goods in the markeplace and more toxic pollution in our air and water. No "mechanism of the free market" is going to make polluting go away unless consumers were aware that certain products came from certain places that polluted, and then only if the consumers were willing to buy a different brand, and only if a different brand was available - that is not going to happen where coal-fired power plants or cement kilns or mines are concerned. No, that kind of regulating has to be done by governments who are free from the lobbyists powerfull influence. And now that "regulation" is being seen as a saviour of the financial world, and not seen as a dirty word, regulation of pollution might occur.
Also, the price of houses is going down, and although that creates real trouble for anyone with a mortgage that ends up being worth more than the house is worth anymore, lower house prices is good news for all those people who do not own a home - I wonder if there are more American adults who DO NOT own a home than do own a home? - because if there are more "non-owners" then the lowering of house prices is good news indeed. Only people who have enough money to have bought one of those expensive homes is put out, and that isn't really a factor unless they were trying to sell right now - house prices will probably go up again in the future and if they just wait it out their mortgages and their house values will equal out again at some point. Meanwhile, lower prices will allow more poorer people to buy one. One more thing about those [formerly] high house prices - new homes are worth so much more than the price of land, building materials, and labor add up to - so why don't new home buyers just build their own houses [through a contractor]? I never could figure that one out.
As for stocks and the stock market - they will probably rise again and if we just hold onto them then there is no harm done. Just don't do the one thing that makes no sense with stocks, the one thing that only a true fool would do - sell low and buy high. It is a sorry lot who does that, and surprisingly it happens often. One reason it happens is that investors are forced to sell low to cover some "spread game" {like taking out loans on the basis of stock values and then having to come up with money to cover the difference if those stock's values fall} but again, that is purely "a greedy fool's game" that should not be played unless you have lots and lots of extra money to cover those spreads. And Boo Hoo if you are in trouble for that reason, go live off your money and quit asking for a bailout.
We are being fed full up with news about how bad things are, but in reality the credit crisis isn't hurting as many people as we might think. Some of the big corporations are being forced to lay workers off, and that is a terrible thing, but most of us are not feeling one bit of trouble in all this, despite the nightly news stories about the average person having to do some "belt tightening" - that is only true for those who are living off their stock portfolios [a very risky strategy for pensioners that hopefully fewer people will fall for in the future].
As for other corporations, I have to point out that some are really going great guns right now. For example, a solar panel manufacturing business in B.C. [Canada] is expanding because they have so many orders, and that is generally true for all the "renewable energy" corporations - there is a worldwide 3 year waiting list to get the big wind turbines!! Some of the commodity outfits - gold, silver and other metals especially - are seeing their stock prices RISE in recent days, and they never did fall much. Also, many nations are turning to the US dollar because they see it as stable compared to other global currencies, so how bad could things be? Canada's dollar has fallen over 30% compared to the U.S. dollar, and Canada is basically immune from the credit crisis due to their government regulations that require substantially more backing for loans on the part of lenders. Its not as if there is going to be a "devaluation" of the U.S. dollar because there are too many of them being printed up, so keep printing them. Devaluation of currencies is usually what happens when economies fail - it is not happening in the USA now, because the reality is that things are just not so bad!! We are being told that things are bad, but they are not. It is another "manufactured crisis", like terrorism.
A "good-news bad-news story" story is that the "dirty energy" companies - oil, tar sands, drilling rigs, pipelines - are not doing so great, and so maybe they will be replaced with cleaner energy!! Their fortunes hinge on the price of oil, and it has dropped a lot, but I think that $60/bbl oil is about right. Dirty energy should have been on it's way out by this late stage anyhow... we could have begun to phase it out in the 1980s. Its pretty late on the timeline of global warming to be still burning this much oil and coal.
Car makers too - they didn't produce electric cars, and now they have a lot of hummers and trucks and big vans that are not selling, and their large vehicle plants are closing down. Boo Hoo - the bad news just isn't all bad!!
In many ways, this "crisis" is more like a correction. Thats what they used to call it when they didn't WANT to scare us when stock markets took a tumble, so we gotta ask ourselves if they ARE trying to scare us right now.... something about the election maybe? A reason for Bush to declare he won't step down as President, due to the "crisis"? Will we hear that some morning in a special Presidential announcement in December? No, I think they are just telling us how bad things are as a way to justify the bailout, the $750Billion that is not going to help average people at all, but that is partly being used to pay the financial services industry CEOs their mammoth bonuses for the good jobs they did in the past year. Hmmm.
Yes, this is a correction. Correcting the experiments they were playing with money that didn't exist ["derivities"] ; correction in the stock prices that had no real basis for being as high as they were; correction for the oil industry and their "record breaking profits - did you realise that the amount of money that Lehman Brothers lost in 3 months was the same amount that Exxon made in 3 months? [$33billion] ; and that BOTH of those ended up costing the American taxpayers [in bailouts, and in higher gasoline and energy costs respectively - but not respectfully, lol]. The overall stock market index - the "Dow Jones average" and NASDAQ and so on - went to such high levels based partly on the "derived" [contrived] money that the financial services industry "geniuses" were pretending existed, so those are certainly corrections.
I say we sit back and enjoy watching it all take place. By next summer, things will be more or less "corrected" and we might end up with better regulations, more realistic house prices, lower interest rates, and cheaper gasoline. And, renewable energy and electric cars!! Maybe, if we all pray real hard, we might have a new American President too!!
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