Thanks for the money supply link. I looked at M3 which is the combination of all three and it appears to be significantly higher. Am I not reading that chart correctly? Besides, the U.S. is not the only country who is attempting to re-inflate. The CPI is a bogus BLS number which just measures prices not monetary inflation.

ladies and gentlemen, a deep breath please.

you have to tranche sentiment by source. i’ve said the big three factors are distrust, hardship and uncertainty.

i don’t believe the hardship is depressing the market any more than it did in 1982. in fact, i think the hardship is already priced in.

what’s keeping things down are distrust and uncertainty.

distrust is usually stated as accusations of malfeasance, incompetence, collusion and fraud in or through current government policy and business practices. one third of this seems sensible to me, one third of it is stupid railing against irreducible human nature, and one third of it is politics. so the distrust is 2/3d’s cultural and one third sound economic thinking.

the uncertainty is just what it is, uncertainty. you can’t theorize, rationalize or predict uncertainty. it can only be reduced by structural factors and momentum. we less of both right now than we did a year ago. amost everything said about inflation, deflation, the dollar, gold, resource prices etc. is pointless just because it is talk about uncertainty.

we are in a recession like other recessions. we distrust policy, but mostly for silly reasons. we want to predict the future, but the future at this point has become much more unpredictable. deal with what is.

Before you get too excited about all the “monetary explosion”, take a trip over to the shadowstats site and see how M1, M2, and M3 have behaved.

The Fed has to print a LOT more credit before the toxic debt black hole is washed away, and more still before it generates significant monetary inflation. We are still in deflation mode. The CPI says so.

it’s pretty old

but, i picked it off the shelf the other day when i was needing somthing to read (waiting for BR’s book to publish and ship)

still interesting and easily transposed to recent times in the financial industry

did you read Liars Poker?

I did, many (not manny) years ago

yeah, i would say that he knows what is going on, we can add him to the list, along with Taleb and so many others….