31 Days to Total Financial Hell - Gas Up Now!

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing



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A friend of mine manages a multi-million dollar fund and sometimes I think he is afraid to admit the truth to himself. Days like today wring him out like a dishrag. We have previously discussed what happens when days like today happen. What happens when you get two in a row? Three? Five? After five days, other feedback loops might kick in because that is a 2000 point loss in 5 days, other fears and factors are put in the mix which all put downward pressure on the market.

A clip from today's disaster:

Stocks tanked Friday, with the Dow industrials shedding 395 points, after oil prices spiked more than $11 a barrel and the May jobs report showed a big jump in the unemployment rate.

Bond prices surged, as investors sought safety in government debt, while the dollar tumbled versus the yen and euro.

The Dow Jones industrial average lost 395 points, or 3.1%, its biggest one-day decline on both a point and percentage basis since February of 2007, at the start of the subprime mortgage crisis.

My friend was unwilling to speculate when you are faced with more than a week of downturns. Other than "full economic collapse" you can't really project how bad it will be.

I see these guys on CNBC still reading rosy days ahead in their financial tea leaves so I did the math. With a drop like today's, you only need 31 in a row for the Dow to hit zero. With so much of the government in debt, I don't think a collapse will be a pretty picture.


SPECIAL REQUEST FOR TCD FANS: The San Francisco Chronicle is pondering the addition of new cartoons for their paper - a process that seems to be initiated by Darren Bell, creator of Candorville (one of my daily reads - highly recommended). You can read the Chronicle article here and please add your thoughts to the comments if you wish. If anything, put in a good word for Darren and Candorville.

I am submitting Town Called Dobson to the paper for their consideration. They seem to have given great weight to receiving 200 messages considering Candorville. I am asking TCD fans to try to surpass that amount. (I get more than that many hate mails a day, surely fans can do better?)

This is not a race between Darren and I, it is a hope that more progressive strips can be represented in the printed press of America.

So if you read the San Francisco Chronicle or live in the Bay Area (Google Analytics tell me there are a lot of you), please send your kind comments (or naked, straining outrage) to David Wiegand at his published addresses below. If you are a subscriber, cut out your mailing label and staple it to a TCD strip and include it in your letter.

candorcomment@sfchronicle.com

or

David Wiegand
Executive Datebook Editor
The San Francisco Chronicle
901 Mission St.
San Francisco, CA 94103

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The Looting Of America

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing



click to read more Town Called Dobson



There are a LOT of explanations as to why the stock market has been up while the impact on the middle and lower class has been largely negative and ignored. Somehow it is the fault of Democrats and the rich paying too many taxes.

Remember back in the 2006 elections when the Republicans used the meme "investment class?" That was probably the best way to say "rich, white men" they could find.

For the rest of America, little improvement has been seen. Manufacturing has disappeared from America and that was the engine that drove the economies of Middle America. Thanks to NAFTA and other associated trade "deals," we no longer balance our trade policies with tariffs to offset things like SLAVERY or environmental destruction. Nope, now it is a "free market." I guess you get what you pay for.

Illegal immigration is another problem that is abused by the aforementioned "investment class." There are some jobs you just can't export so the best way to replace the wage slave workers overseas is to bring them here. America has an over-abundance of unskilled and undereducated people who will work below minimum wage and those workers have diluted the pay base for those jobs to UNDER what Americans can afford to work at. PLUS, many of these illegal aliens are working in construction - further driving the insane overproduction of housing that is bottom-feeding on sub-prime lending rates.

We are down to skilled workers. That's safe. Right? Nope. Welcome to the land of H-1B visas! I remember back in 1995 and 1996, someone could go to a tech school and get a degree in IT Systems Administration and within a few years be making 50k - 60k a year. A very decent wage. Not shabby at all. That is gone now. With H-1Bs, companies harvest IT workers from India, Pakistan and elsewhere to come to the United States to replace American IT workers at half or a third of the cost. The same thing is happening with nurses. The dichotomy here is when we have an alleged "skilled worker" shortage, instead of building new colleges or funding more scholarships, we import talent from abroad and ignore the workers that are already here.

So we have cut working wages to the bone during the last six and a half years and moved what production we could offshore. The offshore production was the cheapest we could buy and we really didn't pay too much attention to product safety or worker safety - just the bottom line. The domestic labor costs was forced down by using illegal workers and when that wasn't enough, we imported workers and under-payed them.

The synopsis is this, Corporate America has done everything in it's power to avoid paying Americans living wages. That way they can extract the last bit of money from personal savings and retirement funds. It then gets funneled into their corporate accounts - thus driving up the stock market.

So why is the stock market so high? That is America being looted and thoroughly milked dry.

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