The US Consumer is critical to any turnaround and the reality is that the U.S. consumer has been propped up since the last recession by low interest rates and mortgage equity withdrawals. In fact, GDP growth since the last recession would have been – at best – 1% were it not for MEW. See http://www.wikinvest.com/wiki/Mortgage_Equity_Withdrawal_(MEW)

Now MEWs are non-exisitent and many homeowners are under water. What’s going to drive consumer spending and corporate profits now? Anybody? Anybody?!

He does some berry berry good stuff…….

the missing piece? we live in a bubble culture. there is no cultural shift toward sustainability, conservation or downsizing. there is no forward looking accountability. babies continue to spew out of the gonads of apes. ape egos continue to pivot on the opinionated consumption of disposable things. the fundamental global mechanism of wealth generation through cheap money and resource depletion is still intact. the current market behavior only suggests to me that a new bubble is trying to form, and as volume increases it will soon begin its inexorable rise. ape wealth wants to breed just like ape gonads do.

posters here point to this or that theory, or this or that “economic fundamental” to predict a market crash. hello! what the hell did fundamentals have to say about the past three decades of bubble on bubble?! where were fundamentals in the dot com years, or the subprime years? and how about those friedman/greenspan theories of free market money! fundamentals and theory have shown themselves to have a very weak connection to the bubble mechanism. probable explanation: bubbles have little to do with fundamentals or theory.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/05/28/business/AP-Visteon-Bankruptcy.html?th&emc=th

Stories of zombies originated in the Afro-Caribbean spiritual belief system of Vodou, which told of the people being controlled as laborers by a powerful sorcerer…

…our President has decided that the best course of action for America is to create ZOMBIE BANKS and ZOMBIE CAR COMPANIES, ZOMBIE INSURANCE COMPANIES

In short…he is turning us ALL into ZOMBIES…That’s change you can believe in…

Action like that certainly wouldn’t surprise me…

I think it would take another GOING DOWN HARD event to precipitate what you describe…

It was posted earlier in this thread that Americans recovered too quickly from the FEAR & PANIC they felt in the economy just 6 months ago…Someone equated it to 9/11…After 9/11 everybody was all patriotic for a short time but the action to CHANGE THEIR LIVES didn’t live on…

In this economic crisis…the second the market bottomed in March, next thing you know it’s an all out media blitz talking about green shoots…In two short months NOTHING HAS FUNDAMENTALLY CHANGED with regards to the economy, but people are almost starting to act as they always had before…

But I think they’re hiding something…It’s like every individual KNOWS he or she is on borrowed time, but they have nothing in their power to change their own fortune…So they hope someone will bid up stocks, or buy their house, or not fire them…the clock will run out when the clock runs out (when they get that pink slip, or foreclosure notice, or call from the collection agency)…

So the WEIGHT of everything is just going to grind them down…I’m not really sure anymore that there is going to be a “hair on fire” panic, just a slow agonizing grind…