Bankster and Corporate Donations to Presidential Campaigns
Politics / US Politics Apr 29, 2010 - 09:58 AM GMTI Wish I Were Stupid
It sure sucks to be a bear right now.
I’m a bear and I can tell you from personal experience, it’s no fun. I get called a “fool” and worse on message boards. Day after day I am sent emails from folks showing me news stories proclaiming that “the worse is over” and that I’m an idiot.
In all honesty, I wish I were an idiot.
I wish I could idiotically believe that Ben Bernanke saved the world from a debt implosion by creating more debt. I wish that the systemic risk had in fact been resolved and that the world was once again on sound footing. I wish that money printing made people wealthy rather than simply devaluing a currency.
That’s not all. I wish a whole lot more…
I wish I could swallow CNBC and the rest of the mainstream media’s proclamations that the Crisis is over hook, line, and sinker. Man, I might actually enjoy television for the first time in my professional career!
But most of all, I wish everything was in fact fine in the world. I wish that saying, “the bailouts” worked made it so. I wish people were not losing their jobs. I wish the middle class was not getting the shaft while the banking oligarchs paid themselves record bonuses. I wish that we had in fact, gotten “change” in the world.
But we haven’t. The guy in office was put there by the same groups that put Bush in office (the banks).
Bush’s top donors in ‘04:
Donor |
Contribution |
Morgan Stanley |
$600, 480 |
Merrill Lynch |
$580,004 |
PricewaterhouseCoopers |
$513,750 |
UBS Americas |
$472,075 |
Goldman Sachs |
$390,600 |
MBNA Group |
$356,350 |
Obama’s top donors in ‘08:
Donor |
Contribution |
University of California |
$1,591,395 |
Goldman Sachs |
$994,795 |
Harvard |
$854,747 |
Microsoft |
$833,617 |
CitiGroup |
$701,290 |
JP Morgan |
$695,132 |
Obama actually received MORE money from Wall Street than Bush did. But then again, a Dollar IS worth less today than it was in 2004, so maybe they got the same “bang” out of these bucks.
I wish I didn’t know about the above charts. In plain terms, I wish I were stupid and didn’t think so much.
But, as old man Gustafsson says in Grumpier Old Men, “You can wish in one hand and crap in the other and see which one fills up first.”
The bottom line is that feeling that “everything is fine” does not MEAN, “everything is fine” Everyone felt fine in 2007 AND 2008 right up until the whole world imploded. Similarly, the fact that stocks have gone straight up for six weeks doesn’t MEAN that the financial markets are safe or that somehow everything has been fixed. It hasn’t.
What HAS been done is a massive transfer of garbage debt from the private sector to the public sector. Ben Bernanke bet the farm that Uncle Sam could swallow this junk and everything would be fine, just like a guy burying a nuclear warhead in a landfill hopes that the threat is gone.
This will work for a while. The fact it’s made another stock market bubble and that everyone indicates this is a sign the policies “worked” only confirms that those in charge of the economy believe that financial speculation IS the economy. Small wonder they think this way, almost ALL of them are former bankers who made fortunes FROM financial speculation.
However, at some point, this entire house of cards will collapse again. Maybe it will be this year. Maybe it will be in 2012 when the Mayan UFO zombie monsters come to earth or whatever horrible stuff is supposed to happen.
Until then, I’ll continue being called an “idiot” and writing these “ridiculous” articles. But I sure as heck won’t be wearing an “I’m with Stupid” shirt.
Good Investing!
Graham Summers
PS. I’ve put together a FREE Special Report detailing THREE investments that will explode when stocks start to collapse again. I call it Financial Crisis “Round Two” Survival Kit. These investments will not only help to protect your portfolio from the coming carnage, they’ll can also show you enormous profits.
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Graham Summers: Graham is Senior Market Strategist at OmniSans Research. He is co-editor of Gain, Pains, and Capital, OmniSans Research’s FREE daily e-letter covering the equity, commodity, currency, and real estate markets.
Graham also writes Private Wealth Advisory, a monthly investment advisory focusing on the most lucrative investment opportunities the financial markets have to offer. Graham understands the big picture from both a macro-economic and capital in/outflow perspective. He translates his understanding into finding trends and undervalued investment opportunities months before the markets catch on: the Private Wealth Advisory portfolio has outperformed the S&P 500 three of the last five years, including a 7% return in 2008 vs. a 37% loss for the S&P 500.
Previously, Graham worked as a Senior Financial Analyst covering global markets for several investment firms in the Mid-Atlantic region. He’s lived and performed research in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the United States.
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