» The Great Boom Ahead lundin1.com: Comments on every-day economical and political events, mixed up with anything else I feel like writing about.

Posted in October 13th, 2008

The 11-12% jump for the Dow and Nasdaq today shows how ridiculously short-minded the American investor has become. We are way past the quarterly reporting period addiction and so deep into instant gratification that we go into an insane buying frenzy on a daily or hourly notice. And I’m not talking about Wall Street investors now, I’m talking about regular Joe’s that is trying to time the market with their 401(k) funds. What do you think will happen tomorrow?

Remember the post “Credit Crisis passing? Stock market bottom? Prepare for reentry.“..? One can almost think that nobody out there read that blog posting :-). What we need is trust, and an up and down roller coaster on Wall Street will not give the rest of the world any more confidence that the we Americans, that got us all into this mess in the first place, have learnt anything at all. Anyway, to make it easier to find information, here are some links (compare to historical rates):

1. LIBOR rates

2. Treasury Bills (Fed Statistics, Buy Treasury bills here)

3. 30-day commercial paper (A2/P2 non-financial) (Explanatory Article from Financial Week)

So, if you missed out on today’s craze, don’t worry. Look forward instead; slow and steady wins the race. The next few months are going to be interesting. Speaking of cycles, check out Harry S. Dent Jr’s book “The Great Boom Ahead” where he discusses the concepts of Generational waves (or cycles). In particular, he points out that most people reach the peak of their spending power at the age of 46. And guess when 80 million baby-boomers will reach this age? I’ll let you think about it and comment.

Cheers,

-mag

1 user commented in " The Great Boom Ahead "

Dr Unreal said,

in October 14th, 2008 at 8:38 am

You make a common mistake when you talk about the short minded Joe. It’s not Joe at all! By the time Joe wakes up in the morning Wall Street have already milked the cow, yes indeed. Together with an infinite number of financial investors managing billions for the billionaires. Joe never makes a penny, never had and never will. Joes bi-weekly retirement is easy money for the Wall Street sharks. Long term investing strategies is propaganda created to disillusion Joe so that he thinks that 3% growth a year is really good because it’s more than the 2% inflation. Meanwhile Wall Street is laughing all the way to the bank depositing 6% a day milking the retirement money from Joe. That’s the truth, and as long as Joe doesn’t figure it out that’s how it’s going to be, forever.