CHESSNOID

I am listening to the CD of the Broadway musical Les Miserables and enjoying the great singing and old memories of the play. I saw it twice at the Ahmanson theatre in Los Angeles. That was about 15 years ago, so when I saw the Wicked play a few weeks ago at the Pantages theatre in Hollywood, I truly had a wonderful and excellent experience. Other musicals I enjoyed were Miss Saigon and The Phantom of the Opera. We have the soundtracks to all these musicals, so whenever we listen to them it brings me right back to the theater. One singer I would love to see sing live at these musicals would be Lea Salonga who I think has a wonderful singing voice. You can youtube her and listen to her sing different Broadway songs.

While I listen to this I search the internet for dream condos I would love to buy. I check them out in San Diego and Seattle. There are such great deals out there but I am still holding back just because the market doesn’t seem to have become stable yet. It is hard to predict the bottom, but it would be an awful feeling to buy one then just have the value go down. I have been in that situation before in the previous market downturn in the early 1990’s. Of course back then I was much younger and less knowledgable about the market and economy. I do a lot of reading to have a better understanding of the market forces and watch the reactions from them. After the dot com bubble burst, I was there buying stocks that were all on sale. Luckily, I didn’t buy any of the ones that bankrupted. I only recently sold them because I wanted to lock in gains. I am forecasting the market to turn down next year even though it is an election year. Most election years the stock market runs up, but I just get this feeling the market won’t follow history exactly because of certain events that have happened.
I think the weak holiday shopping activity is a good indicator of where most of us feel about the economy. The weird events that seem to keep this market from recovering is the War in Iraq which is still draining the US resources by the billions. Even when Bush leaves the office, the front line candidates don’t seem to want to leave Iraq immediately. Of course, crude oil is very high in the 90’s and our population is very dependent on it. The more people have to spend on gas just means less money to spend on other items. The credit crunch originally caused by the artificially low rates from 2001 and hybrid loan products created to make sure anyone could buy a home are now coming back to bite the banks, mortgage companies, wall street investment companies, real estate and building related industries which of course eventually have lead into massive layoffs at all of these companies this past year.