patrick.net

Also keep in the mind that the H1N1 test was not that accurate so who knows the actual numbers. And now it's regular flu season aka seasonal flu. The number of folks who got this vaccine is high so lets hope it correlates to a mild season. Wash your hands!

More Bi-Polar economic stories in our daily news.

There will be reports of adjusted last quarter earnings, along side sales at all time low.

GDP is up, Two major auto makers go under or get acquired by Renalt.

Home prices are up and so are mortgage aps, Obama is suing the banks for not lending.

Hell I think the Fed and Banks have got their groove on now. They are just learning this new system. And you know Goddamnit they like it! This is some easy money, they've been making money hand over fist all year. And as long they can continue like this they will indefinitely. For them the economy is fixed, well actually it's economy 3.0, it's nothing they nor we've seen before. But it affords them the ability to shuttle Billions and Trillions around the globe, it might not put a penny in your or my hands. But it makes them enough to pay back debts that would have taken nations years by the old system.

For lack of a better phrase, "We're stuck in stupid"

and as long as they can get away with it, and the Fed chairman has to be "ASKED" to step down. Then this party is on!

Yea, because all of the extra doses hanging around out there don't disprove your theory that there aren't any doses available and it's all a big conspiracy. And it's "heckuva job, Brownie." In case you're not informed (evidence has been to the contrary), this was something that george bush said immediately after hurricane katrina decimated the city of new orleans - and michael brown, who was previously a director of a horse show circuit and an obvious political appointee of FEMA, and after which disaster he was replaced but given a lucrative contract by - you guessed it, george bush - bungled the rescue efforts and caused needless death & destruction. There's no similarity to the H1N1 flu crisis, which has a vaccine of which there is a surplus in many areas.

I dunno, I think a lot of people were talking about gold last year. I think the 1970's were a huge moment when a lot of things were happening at once that will never happen again. We went from a gold standard to a fiat system. Now we're at a fiat system. What's to stop the IMF/Shadow Empire from dictating the price of gold the same way FDR simply told everyone what the new price would be?

people from all parties recognize the tragic "downside" of bubbles and as a result are in agreement that to THE FED would be in all Americans best interest.

May I suggest 'End The Fed' by Dr. Ron Paul? Happy reading.

It looks more like silver is following the channel in the below picture. It bounced off of 16.80 and still holding above 17 while GLD did go to 111 and came back to 112. I am going to place a bet on SLV if it bounces from 15.90, I would unload it on 19. GLD, I will be comfortable to put my money if it touches 96-97 range. Lets see.

It's an option, you need to have a signed agreement with your brokerage firm to execute options trades. It's a riskier investment in general.

You also need to purchase contracts, which contain 100 of the $1.24 priced options. So each one should be around $125.

Just remember, come june, if they aren't in the money, they're worth nothing. It's a 100% gamble. There are two components to options, one is the time left, and the second is the value. Right now we're paying $1.24 for time because they have no value. As each day passes, the time component drops, especially if the stock isn't anywhere near it's option price.

rmm221 says

I looked up that GVJFT stock you mentioned you put $50K in…On yahoo finance it shows up as GVJFT.X

And it’s selling for 1.24 today… How does it work? Can I just buy this GVJFT.X through my brokerage firm… If i only gamble a very small amount will I still see the same 18x returns on my money?

Rofl, he bought options. I suggest you learn what a call option and put are before you blow any of your money. If Gold doesn't hit the price target of $1500 by June, he loses 100% of his investment.

At the recommendation of someone on this board, I bought "the option trader handbook". Expensive book, but very cool. Can't say it turned me into an options trader, but it cleared a little of the fog. Sometimes I just had to put the book down and take a breath, because I could feel the pressure building on the inside of my skull. As it was put to me:

The more you learn, the less you know.

I see, thanks for the clarification.

How much experience do you have with options anyways? Just curious how successful you've been.

I've read a few books on them, and in the end I walked away thinking I knew less than I had started going in. Leverage is often a dangerous game to play, and usually over time the leveraged person will lose out, as they've got a definitive time line to get in/out of, where as time is on the side of the person creating the options.

I like your gold gamble though. When you're odds are like that, it's always best to put down a good sized bet. When I looked at the number of options traded, the 150 mark seemed like the most traded, and thus a point where the market might not want to go? Is that of any concern? I would think buying in at like $140 would be slightly more expensive but more likely to hit and worst case, give you more time to sell out your options in the money, where as all those options at 150 might flood the market and drop the price to 150ish turning all the options into nothing. Maybe something akin to an insurance policy.

Just wondering why you picked such a traded value?

4:1 odds on a option seem pretty good! If you do hit, you're looking at a 40:1 return. The summer doldrums does seem like a good time to catch a bubble as well, when people start looking for action, if anything moves they'll jump on it, and a bubble like this could really take off.

GVJFT.X is trading at 0.98 right now. You bought in too early...

lyoungblood says

GVJFT.X is trading at 0.98 right now. You bought in too early…

Try telling us what's going to happen next week instead of what happened last week. Now that would be something.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/12/18/MNN51B5T8V.DTL&tsp=1

"Among the nine Bay Area counties, only Contra Costa, Marin and Sonoma counties had more people moving in from other states than leaving."

The article claims that counties with positive growth came primarily from births ... not immigration.

The bay area and east bay in particular are in for more pain. The startup model is breaking down and jobs/people are slowly on their way out.

@CBOEtrader

I think the idea was to hit it big, or not. He's basically looking at this as a very large potential win. What he's looking for in payoff is pretty aggressive, but it could work out.

I like your point on gold not having hit the bear trap, much like Katrina hit oil, Oct 08' probably hit Gold in the same way. Definitely something to consider!

Wouldn't market volatility point towards gold going higher? Anxious people tend to look for safe bets and when gold starts moving, people will jump on the band wagon. I'm sort of thinking that would be a good reason to point towards gold taking off.

I think I would personally go with a slightly more expensive option as well, even if it's a bear trap right now, there is a decent chance that it would be swinging out of it by june. Probably enough to catch the 135 calls. 150 does seem pretty aggressive.

So what happens when it comes to May and the price is up around 135? Would the option still be trading for $1.20-1.30, or would it be less becasue of the lack of time value.

500% -- You mean like a $100k house selling for $500k or a $200k house selling for $1 million? You mean like California?

I predict that someone - a normal American - will rise to greatness when he/she takes part in a reality tv show. This person will experience a meteoric rise as a celebrity, only to hit rock bottom soon after and retire into relative obscurity. Only to take part in a "where are they now" show like Big Brother, and regain his/her career.

Oh - and I predict more foreclosures.

I'm sure that no one saw either of those coming...

It will be a tough year.
I think by the time 2010 is done, Iran get the bomb and Citibank goes bankrupt.
The government continues to props up market, prices stay mostly flat, or decline slowly.
No economic recovery in sight.

Bernanke does not abandon QE but doubles down with QE2, pushing 30-year fixed mortgage rates to 2.5%.

2010 Affordable Homes Act turns mortgage interest from a deduction to a straight tax credit, raises the FHA limit to $2M, sets required down payment at 2%, which is provided directly by the Fed not the buyer.

This results in a $750,000 property having a PITI of under $3000 and thus raises 2009 values up $200,000 across the board. And the housing market is saved as nobody is under water any more, not even Casey Serin.

Unfortunately, only the lower middle class and the middle upper class need to pay income taxes any more and the $1T deficit becomes $2T.

Worst decade ever? Not for long.

Not investment advice.

In May 2000 I moved back from Japan. Not one of my smoother moves, not that Japan is doing any great shakes now.

As we stand ready to enter the 2010s, two great forces are in collision -- deflation and inflation.

It is a battle of pricing power. Some producers have it -- OPEC, doctors, lawyers, accountants, gummint workers, but J6P certainly doesn't.

Certainly every consumer goods producer has tons of surplus capacity now. The question is whether they can or will lower prices. A walk through the grocery store tells me they are quite hesitant to do so, and so their products have fewer turns.

Whither J6P's wages? It is the story of the decade. MZM more than doubled this past decade:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MZM

yet J6p didn't see any of this money. It can double again, and he prolly won't see any of /that/ either.

It's a loveless Wagon. I understand the Lefts demented thinking, but I am disappointed in the constituents. The Democrats in Washington want to ride History on Obama's coat tails, they will try to pass anything that will get their name the bill that changed America. They know with the fullest heart that this Bill in it's current incarnation is the biggest terd yet. The Dems rejected far better ideas from the Reps and Reps have refuse far better versions from the Dems. The Dems are trying to give this bill an extra punch by affording history the ability to say, "Obama got done in the first year" Now the sad pathetic part is, constituents and politicians alike actually believe that a Mandated insurance premium on the Middle class. Will actually lead to National health care system down the road. This is the same Mentality that thought House prices only go up and never goes down, and Gold will be 2000. We're a disappointing sad and pathetic lot. The past few years have helped me tremendously. I've been walking through life with a genuine disdain for most of my fellow Americans. It's like 50 years of eating paint chips has finally caught up with the gene pool. I've been told that, it is not healthy going through life with a perplexed magnanimity. But it's O.K. I'm on a deserted island.

I did support the idea, but it feels like "whatever" rignt now. The bill has been tossed a lot and I don't know what the bill is about any more.

I support Universal Health Care with high deductibles. More regulations on a broken system will break it some more. We need Tort Reform.

thunderlips11 says

Just to add, typically at the bottom of a Bear Market the average P/E ratios decline significantly, usually well below 15.

Yes, but this is obviously not the bottom anymore--stocks have risen 30+% over the lowpoint of the bear market...

And you can get an FCC enforcement team to descend on you for federal crimes if you use it!

staynumz says

Wow, the CDC recalls 800,000 swine flu shots because they are weak. CDC, is that a federal agency? I wonder why they would be recalling this? Homo? Anything?

The article pretty clearly answers your questions--did you read it?

^ LOL. You don't really seem to understand the situation of the nation's fisc last January.

From 2003-2007, we collectively borrowed $850 billion PER YEAR more on our houses than we were paying down. Most of this wasn't secured by wealth-creation but just redirected into the economy via mortgage and HELOC.

$850B per year / $50K per job is around 17 MILLION jobs directly or indirectly driven by nothing but debt drawdowns on fairy-tale home valuations. This was unsustainable -- in 2008 total mortgage debt DECLINED $100B, and it will decline a bit more for 2009. This loss of several hundred billion of fake buying consumer power is entirely why we're so screwed now.

If the gummint weren't deficit spending like Reaganites on eightballs -- the national debt has risen $1.4 trillion this year -- the economy would have imploded in a series of cross-defaults that would have made 1930 look good.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/179121-so-much-for-those-4-bad-bears

This wasn't so much a "soft-landing" as a controlled crash.

I'm not optimistic about where we go from here, but I *do* know I couldn't have done anything one bit better than the present team in office.

The situation left by the previous administration was simply parlous, as if they were intentionally trying to destroy the country's fisc.

Troy says

I’m not optimistic about where we go from here, but I *do* know I couldn’t have done anything one bit better than the present team in office.

Well put Troy, that I can believe.

Troy says

I’m not optimistic about where we go from here, but I *do* know I couldn’t have done anything one bit better than the present team in office.

I mostly agree with Troy this time except the above.

Anyway, ecomony in this year is strange. Dow went up while we're seeing people losing home, job and money. Companies make profit not by sales but by cutting costs. Banks get profit not by investing but by getting TARP and increasing fees. Retailers sell more not by regular sales but by discounts. They can't do like this forever. So what is so shocking about the news?

Nomograph says

bigger fool you make yourself out to be.

spoken like a man who knows, a load of personal experience and growing every moment. the biggest christmas miracle would be NOMO going home for the holidays to his cave and out of internet access. he works so tirelessly on this site almost like he has internet access even in that cave. More power to you, jolly holiday man.

Gotta love Ad Hominem.

AdHominem says

Gotta love Ad Hominem.

I'm glad that you love you. I guess that a good example of a recall where a public agency is involved, besides the h1n1 vaccine, would be the USDA recalling beef. http://www.fsis.usda.gov/recalls/ They didn't make the beef. They didn't go to someone's farm, kill a cow, cut it up & package it, and distribute it to the masses. But they do have the ability to recall (or order a recall) on a product that isn't up to standards. Ad hom, once again I must ask why you get your feelings hurt when someone points out that your info is incorrect and you are a reactionary conservative who asserts himself to be a victim of the liberal media per your multiple statements. You then claim that you're a victim of mine & Nomo's and that you don't have a tinfoil hat lying around to protect you from liberal thoughts & soundwaves - and claim that we're mean to you, after which you make asinine comments about Nomo living in a cave? You can't have it both ways - oh, wait. In Adhominem world, you do swing both ways. I realize that you're not happy when people disagree with you - but you must be an unhappy person. This thread is indicative of your lack of independent thinking. The more you say, the less informed you appear. We're having fun at your expense, dear Adhom. It's easy, because you give us so much ammunition.

Defending against and paying malpractice torts is a pimple on the ass of the problem of affordable health care for all in this country.

elliemae says

We’re having fun at your expense, dear Adhom.

Actually all the fun you are having is at your own expense. Unless you are on public assistance? That is what is so great about a free society. And aint it great we can expect you to waste more of your time and energy arguing with me? I like to call this experiment the waste a bunch of socialists time initiative. So far a brilliant success. Could not have done it without you. but thanks for calling me dear, I think it brought a tear to my eye. Which is pretty rare for a "reactionary conservative victim of liberal media tinfoil hat wearing, non independent thinking unhappy, and less informed appearing" one such as you describe.

Haters Gonna Hate

Arch heels have tapped out souls. I say shine it on and give them the boot for horning in on the toe jam, since they're out of step when they're hell bent for leather.