CHESSNOID

Today was a wild day on Wall Street. I can’t remember when we started off the year on such a down note. What is even weirder is that it is an election year. This is the time when we hear all the candidates tell us how they are going to improve the economic outlook that our current President has created.

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I think in a nutshell the political unrest in Nigeria and Pakistan is helping to drive the price of crude to over $100 a barrel. The first time ever it has hit that number. The federal reserve is definitely in a panic and already declaring they will continue to lower interest rates in the future.

I wish I had something new to say on this matter. The housing bust is magnifying the credit crunch with a skyrocketing number of loans defaulting and what seems to be millions of homes being foreclosed on. There are some people who speculate this will be worse than the Great Depression. I don’t know how this will play out but it definitely is bad.

Most people forget we are at war in Iraq against terror. This is the source of all this negative environment. We are spending resources in the billions of dollars, lowered rates in the past and now attempting to do the same now in an attempt to manipulate the market into doing something it can not do. The exaggerated low interest rates fueled housing prices to impossible limits and now it is plummeting back to reality. Everyone is getting hammered in this downturn of the business cycle. Doesn’t matter if you own a house or rent because everyone will be affected by higher energy costs. People in many industries are being laid off with many more to come as the economy continues to contract. Our government created this situation and now they are truly in a panic mode, because people will vote not only on their beliefs but in their current living condition.

Many people, including me, are getting prepared for the worse of the fall out of the housing bust and the cost of our invasion to Iraq. Most of those billions of dollars are being stolen by the War Profiteers. There are only a few candidates who want to withdraw from Iraq. If we elect someone who wants to continue this war with borrowed money from generations not yet born, then we really may be in something worse than the Great Depression. Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago ( gas was below $2 a gallon) and what about 8 years ago ( gas was closer to $1 a gallon than to $2 a gallon)? I wouldn’t be surprised if gas at the pump breaks the $4 a gallon barrier in the first quarter and closes in on $5 a gallon by the end of the year. At that point, the federal reserve will run out of rate cuts to give out since you can’t have 0% mortgage rates. You wish