Yes, ICantSeeYou

Alert : Market has put in a bottom.

As we speak the market has just put in a "technical" bottom.  After being down a record amount this morning we just went POSITIVE and the dow is rallying.  If we can close positive that will be a very positive sign of a bottom being put in.

If it were my money I'd be a buyer here.

Scott

Post Close Update :

Dow Down -107, Nasdaq up 5.  Five minutes after the close we are still seeing the numbers change which indicates the heavy volume and trades are still being sorted out.  Right now it looks like -126 Dow and +4.39 Nasdaq but that could change.

The worst week in the entire 112-yr history of the markets.

However the good news is that we indeed went positive after being down huge today and that is an excellent indication that a bottom has been put in.  After such a HUGE losing week if indeed this is true then we should see some nice rally's next week.

This shows that there were plenty of people on the sidelines waiting for someone to step up and buy, and when that happened they ALL jumped in.   So now instead of the fear of the market going down you have the fear of missing buying the market bottom.

Make sense?  I hope so - feel free to comment.

Americans Flunk Frugality Test With Disappointing Average Score Of 62

Americans Flunk Frugality Test With Disappointing Average Score Of 62

A failing average score of 62 out of 100 on a frugality test highlights the significant need for Americans to change how they think about money. Just 48% say they live on less than they make each month.

In an online test created to determine just how frugal Americans think they are, the average score was a disappointing 62 out of 100 according to Jeff Lehman, author of the upcoming book 'The Frugal Millionaires'. "We scored a 'F' on this test and that 'F' does not stand for Frugal," says Lehman.

The Frugal Test uncovered some interesting statistics about the money habits of Americans:

Just 48% say they live on less than they make each month.

29% pay bills first and then see what's left over for other things, instead of putting away money for themselves upfront.

27% make only the minimum monthly payment, plus a little more, on their credit cards.

38% don't make an additional principle payment on their mortgages each year.

39% buy bottled water or a prepared beverage more than three times a week.

50% dine out more than three times per week.

38% save just 5% or less of their take home pay.

Only 27% have an emergency savings fund.

Only 19% partner up with a financial advisor to manage their money.

Only 21% who qualify for health savings accounts take advantage of them.

Only 32% who could use educational savings accounts do so.

37% don't have a will.

60% don't have a revocable/living trust.

In a question about American's most favorite things to spend their money on, investments came in at 10% which was tied with hobbies, and entertainment. Only two categories ranked higher, travel (14%) and home improvements (13%), while buying shoes and clothes came in slightly lower (9%).

"We will have a hard time personally surviving this tough economy if we don't start practicing frugality. But being frugal is not the same as being cheap," says Lehman. "There are plenty of reasons for the current financial crisis we are in, but ultimately we have to take some personal responsibility for our actions. We can fix our financial problems, but we have to be smarter about money sooner than later," he adds.

There are plenty of reasons for the current financial crisis we are in, but ultimately we have to take some personal responsibility for our actions. We can fix our financial problems, but we have to be smarter about money sooner than later

Those who want to know just how frugal they are can still take The Frugal Test by visiting www.TheFrugalTest.com. It consists of 25 multiple choice questions, takes less than 10 minutes to complete, and all the results are privacy protected.

The Frugal Millionaires is available for pre-sale now at Amazon.com. On-sale date is October 15, 2008. Visit www.TheFrugalMillionaires.com for more information.

Crude Oil made a top today. The bubble has burst and is going to deflate now.

I won't claim to be an expert in technical analysis but I do know a bit more than the average person about it.  I also know the classic signs of a top.

Crude oil futures swung wildly Monday, rising to a record and then tumbling as investors wrestled with whether they should put stock in Saudi Arabia's promise to boost production. Retail gas prices rose to a national-record $4.08 a gallon.

Light, sweet crude for July delivery fell 25 cents to settle at $134.61 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange after earlier soaring to a trading record of $139.89. Earlier, it dropped as low as $132.84.

What we have here is an important technical milestone - $140.  We hit it and immediately retreated and closed at a loss for the day.  This is usually a classic indicator or a top when you are talking about a speculative instrument.

From here we should drop more - but it will be choppy.   Many traders will sell any rally here and every time oil rallies the speculators will jump on board thinking we go higher.  The reason it's a top is that the ones that jump back in will lose money because the others are taking profits on every pop.  After the speculators who jump in on the pops lose enough times they will stop buying every move and start shorting every move up.

Of course outside events such as an event with Iran can make it go way higher - but that's considered a news move rather than a technical move.  And what we've had here for a long time is technical speculation.

There is only so long a bubble can last - look at how the stock bubble popped, the money moved into real estate and then that bubble popped - and finally moved into oil.

My opinion only - please don't invest based on it.

The Housing Crisis Is Over

 

The dire headlines coming fast and furious in the financial and popular press suggest that the housing crisis is intensifying. Yet it is very likely that April 2008 will mark the bottom of the U.S. housing market. Yes, the housing market is bottoming right now.

How can this be? For starters, a bottom does not mean that prices are about to return to the heady days of 2005. That probably won't happen for another 15 years. It just means that the trend is no longer getting worse, which is the critical factor.

Most people forget that the current housing bust is nearly three years old. Home sales peaked in July 2005. New home sales are down a staggering 63% from peak levels of 1.4 million. Housing starts have fallen more than 50% and, adjusted for population growth, are back to the trough levels of 1982.

Furthermore, residential construction is close to 15-year lows at 3.8% of GDP; by the fourth quarter of this year, it will probably hit the lowest level ever. So what's going to stop the housing decline? Very simply, the same thing that caused the bust: affordability.

The boom made housing unaffordable for many American families, especially first-time home buyers. During the 1990s and early 2000s, it took 19% of average monthly income to service a conforming mortgage on the average home purchased. By 2005 and 2006, it was absorbing 25% of monthly income. For first time buyers, it went from 29% of income to 37%. That just proved to be too much.

Prices got so high that people who intended to actually live in the houses they purchased (as opposed to speculators) stopped buying. This caused the bubble to burst.

Since then, house prices have fallen 10%-15%, while incomes have kept growing (albeit more slowly recently) and mortgage rates have come down 70 basis points from their highs. As a result, it now takes 19% of monthly income for the average home buyer, and 31% of monthly income for the first-time home buyer, to purchase a house. In other words, homes on average are back to being as affordable as during the best of times in the 1990s. Numerous households that had been priced out of the market can now afford to get in.

The next question is: Even if home sales pick up, how can home prices stop falling with so many houses vacant and unsold? The flip but true answer: because they always do.

In the past five major housing market corrections (and there were some big ones, such as in the early 1980s when home sales also fell by 50%-60% and prices fell 12%-15% in real terms), every time home sales bottomed, the pace of house-price declines halved within one or two months.

The explanation is that by the time home sales stop declining, inventories of unsold homes have usually already started falling in absolute terms and begin to peak out in "months of supply" terms. That's the case right now: New home inventories peaked at 598,000 homes in July 2006, and stand at 482,000 homes as of the end of March. This inventory is equivalent to 11 months of supply, a 25-year high – but it is similar to 1974, 1982 and 1991 levels, which saw a subsequent slowing in home-price declines within the next six months.

Inventories are declining because construction activity has been falling for such a long time that home completions are now just about undershooting new home sales. In a few months, completions of new homes for sale could be undershooting new home sales by 50,000-100,000 annually.

Inventories will drop even faster to 400,000 – or seven months of supply – by the end of 2008. This shift in inventories will have a significant impact on prices, although house prices won't stop falling entirely until inventories reach five months of supply sometime in 2009. A five-month supply has historically signaled tightness in the housing market.

Many pundits claim that house prices need to fall another 30% to bring them back in line with where they've been historically. This is usually based on an analysis of house prices adjusted for inflation: Real house prices are 30% above their 40-year, inflation-adjusted average, so they must fall 30%. This simplistic analysis is appealing on the surface, but is flawed for a variety of reasons.

Most importantly, it neglects the fact that a great majority of Americans buy their houses with mortgages. And if one buys a house with a mortgage, the most important factor in deciding what to pay for the house is how much of one's income is required to be able to make the mortgage payments on the house. Today the rate on a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage is 5.7%. Back in 1981, the rate hit 18.5%. Comparing today's house prices to the 1970s or 1980s, when mortgage rates were stratospheric, is misguided and misleading.

This is all good news for the broader economy. The housing bust has been subtracting a full percentage point from GDP for almost two years now, which is very large for a sector that represents less than 5% of economic activity.

When the rate of house-price declines halves, there will be a wholesale shift in markets' perceptions. All of a sudden, the expected value of the collateral (i.e. houses) for much of the lending that went on for the past decade will change. Right now, when valuing the collateral, market participants including banks are extrapolating the current pace of house price declines for another two to three years; this has a significant impact on the amount of delinquencies, foreclosures and credit losses that lenders are expected to face.

More home sales and smaller price declines means fewer homeowners will be underwater on their mortgages. They will thus have less incentive to walk away and opt for foreclosure.

A milder house-price decline scenario could lead to increases in the market value of a lot of the securitized mortgages that have been responsible for $300 billion of write-downs in the past year. Even if write-backs do not occur, stabilizing collateral values will have a huge impact on the markets' perception of risk related to housing, the financial system, and the economy.

We are of course experiencing a serious housing bust, with serious economic consequences that are still unfolding. The odds are that the reverberations will lead to subtrend growth for a couple of years. Nonetheless, housing led us into this credit crisis and this recession. It is likely to lead us out. And that process is underway, right now.

Mr. Moulle-Berteaux is managing partner of Traxis Partners LP, a hedge fund firm based in New York.

Lenders Swamped By Foreclosures Let Homeowners Stay

Banks are so overwhelmed by the U.S. housing crisis they've started to look the other way when homeowners stop paying their mortgages.    

      

The number of borrowers at least 90 days late on their home loans rose to 3.6 percent at the end of December, the highest in at least five years, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association in Washington. That figure, for the first time, is almost double the 2 percent who have been foreclosed on.    

      

Lenders who allow owners to stay in their homes are distorting the record foreclosure rate and delaying the worst of the housing decline, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com, a unit of New York-based Moody's Corp. These borrowers will eventually push the number of delinquencies even higher and send more homes onto an already glutted market.    

      

``We don't have a sense of the magnitude of what's really going on because the whole process is being delayed,'' Zandi said in an interview. ``Looking at the data, we see the problems, but they are probably measurably greater than we think.''    

      

Lenders took an average of 61 days to foreclose on a property last year, up from 37 days in the year earlier, according to RealtyTrac Inc., a foreclosure database in Irvine, California. Sales of foreclosed homes rose 4.4 percent last year at the same time the supply of such homes more than doubled, according to LoanPerformance First American CoreLogic Inc., a real estate data company based in San Francisco.    

      

Reluctant Banks    

      

``Some people stay in their houses until someone comes to kick them out,'' said Angel Gutierrez, owner of Dallas-based Metro Lending, which buys distressed mortgage debt. ``Sometimes no one comes to kick them out.''    

      

Banks are reluctant to foreclose on homeowners for a variety of reasons that include the cost, said Peter Zalewski, real estate broker and owner of Condo Vultures Realty LLC, a property consulting firm in Bal Harbour, Florida.    

      

Legal fees and maintaining a vacant property while paying the mortgage, insurance and taxes can add up to as much as 15 percent of the value of the home, and it may take months for the foreclosure to work through the legal system, he said.    

      

``The end result is taking back a property that the bank will have to manage, rent out and or sell,'' Zalewski said.    

      

In many cases, lenders also have to foot the bill for fixing up vacant homes that have been vandalized.    

      

Empty Houses    

      

Real estate broker Georgia Kapsalis is offering a home for sale in Birmingham, Michigan, a Detroit suburb, where the owner last wrote a mortgage check in July. He still lives in the house, she said.    

      

``Some of the banks just don't want the houses to be empty, especially if it's in an area where there's a lot of theft or there are five other houses empty on the street,'' said Kapsalis, who works at Added Value Realty LLC in Livonia, Michigan, another Detroit suburb. ``They'll lose toilets, plumbing, appliances, everything. Banks are getting wise and allowing people to live there longer.''    

      

Alexis McGee, president of Internet database Foreclosures.com in Sacramento, California, said she toured a property where the departing resident tried to make off with the outdoor air conditioning unit by sawing the metal legs off its concrete apron.    

      

``People take what they want to take,'' McGee said. ``They feel that they're owed.''    

      

Flooded Market    

      

With home sales dropping and national inventories rising, the lenders have another reason to delay foreclosures, said Howard Fishman, a real estate investor based in Minneapolis.    

      

``What are the banks going to do?'' Fishman said. ``They don't want the house. They have a mortgage for $1 million and the house is worth $750,000.''    

      

In February, 5 million existing homes were sold on a seasonally adjusted, annualized rate, down 31 percent from the peak of 7.25 million in September 2005, data compiled by the Chicago-based National Association of Realtors show. More than 4 million existing homes were on the market in February, 53 percent more than the 2.6 million average of the past nine years, the Realtors reported.    

      

``Excess inventories pose the biggest risk to the market,'' Michelle Meyer and Ethan Harris, New York-based economists at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., wrote in a report last month. ``As long as inventories are high, home prices will fall.''    

      

New Foreclosures    

      

Growing inventory pulled median home prices down to $195,900 in February, a 15 percent drop from the peak of $230,200 in July 2006, the Realtors said.    

      

New foreclosures rose to 0.83 percent of all home loans in the fourth quarter from 0.54 percent a year earlier, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.    

      

The civil court in St. Lucie County, Florida, is getting about 44 foreclosure cases to file every day. That's the same number it averaged in a typical month in 2005, said Clerk of the Circuit Court Ed Fry.    

      

``It's pretty overwhelming,'' he said.    

      

Fry said he has 12 full-time employees and two temporary workers he just hired handling nothing but foreclosures. Still, the 50-page filings sit in cardboard boxes for three weeks before the court staff can process them, Fry said. Then it takes another two months to get a date on the court docket, he said.    

      

Mortgage servicers, who collect monthly payments and are responsible for starting the foreclosure process, also were caught short-staffed, said Grant Stern, a mortgage broker and owner of Morningside Mortgage Corp. in Miami Beach, Florida.    

      

`Moral Hazard'    

      

``The most experienced people you can bring in are origination people,'' Stern said. ``But for a bank it's a moral hazard to have the same people who originated the loans now modifying those loans. That wouldn't be desirable. Once around is enough.''    

      

The five largest servicers -- Countrywide Financial Corp., Wells Fargo & Co., CitiMortgage Inc., Chase Home Finance Inc. and Washington Mutual Inc. -- together manage more than half the home loans in the U.S., according to New York-based National Mortgage News, an industry publication.    

      

While more than 100 mortgage originators have suspended operations, closed or sold themselves since the beginning of 2007, mortgage servicing units are expanding.    

      

Chase Home Finance, a unit of New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co. and the fourth-largest U.S. servicer, expects to spend $200 million more servicing loans in 2008 than it did last year, said spokesman Thomas Kelly.    

      

Delayed Foreclosure    

      

Kelly wouldn't say how many Chase borrowers have quit paying their mortgages and remain in their homes.    

      

Efforts to keep borrowers paying their bills have slowed the foreclosure process, Mark Rodgers, a spokesman at CitiMortgage, a division of New York-based Citigroup Inc., said in an e-mail message.    

      

``In a number of cases, we have delayed foreclosure proceedings to allow our loss mitigation teams additional time to explore potential solutions to keep distressed borrowers in their homes,'' Rodgers said.    

      

Joe Ohayon, vice president of community relations for Wells Fargo Home Mortgage in Frederick, Maryland, a unit of San Francisco-based Wells Fargo, said trying to modify loan terms case by case adds time to the foreclosure process.    

      

``Foreclosure is only a last resort after all available options for keeping the customer in the home have been exhausted,'' Ohayon said in an e-mail message.    

      

Affordable Payments    

      

Olivia Riley, a spokeswoman at Seattle-based Washington Mutual, said in an e-mail that the company's goal is to keep customers in their homes ``with payments they can afford.''    

      

Representatives for Calabasas, California-based Countrywide, the biggest U.S. mortgage servicer last year, didn't respond to requests for comment.    

      

Few mortgage companies will admit they allow homeowners to stay in their homes without paying their bills.    

      

``No servicer will say you can live rent-free for six months, go ahead,'' said Paul Miller, a mortgage industry analyst at Friedman Billings Ramsey & Co. in Arlington, Virginia. ``Eventually, the servicers will clear these guys out.''    

      

Homeowners usually get 90 days to resume paying before foreclosure proceedings begin with the filing of a complaint or notice of non-payment.    

      

State laws determine the length of time between the filing and an auction of the house. In most states, it's two to six months, according to Foreclosures.com. In Maine, it can be up to a year and in New York, 19 months; in Georgia, it's as quickly as one month, and in Nevada, it can be 35 days, according to the database.    

      

Borrowers in California who fight foreclosure can stretch the process to 18 months, said Cameron Pannabecker, chapter president of the California Association of Mortgage Brokers and president of Cal-Pro Mortgage Inc. in Stockton.    

      

That doesn't take into account the woman he knows who hasn't made a mortgage payment in eight months and hasn't heard from her lender, Pannabecker said.    

      

``Now she's afraid to mail in a payment for fear it'll come to somebody's attention,'' he said.    

Brunettes bag moneyed men

Brunettes bag moneyed men

Brown hair raking it in

Blondes are said to have more fun but it seems brunettes steal the hearts of billionaires.

Brunettes such as Microsoft boss Bill Gates' wife, Melinda French, (pictured) are more likely to marry a successful man than their blonde sisters, a study today said.

Experts checked the hair colour of the wives and girlfriends of the world's top 100 billionaires. Most – 62 per cent – were brunettes.

 

Fair-haired women came in a poor second with 22 per cent of the world's top billionaires marrying blondes.

Raven-haired women enticed just 16 per cent of the world's wealthiest men, while not one of top billionaires is married to a redhead.

The report was for Lycos, which runs dating site www.love.lycos.co.uk. Sam Kayum, Lycos director said: 'It begs the question whether Carla Bruni would now be the first lady of France if she was a blonde. Perhaps Sarkozy felt that, as a brunette, Bruni would be taken more seriously by the voting public.'

Time is right to start home improvements - Slump means more contractors and lower costs

Time is right to start home improvements

Slump means more contractors and lower costs

Good news if you're planning home improvements: You have your pick of contractors, many of them are willing to deal on price,materials are readily available and the wait for permits is short.

The housing slump and shaky economy have led to a shortage of jobs for people in the construction industry, including general contractors, carpenters, painters, plumbers and electricians. They say they are so eager for work they are taking on smaller projects they might have rejected a year or two ago when there was a glut of jobs.

"We're wheeling and dealing because we all need the work," said Bill Adams, an owner of Plantation-based Superior Pools, Spas and Waterfalls Inc., which does work in Broward and Palm Beach counties. "Compared to last year, this is the worst year pool contractors have had that I can remember."

Two years ago, in the aftermath of Hurricane Wilma, homeowners needing new roofs typically waited months to get a roofer to give them an estimate. Then they waited months more for roof shingles and up to a year for tile. Today, it takes only a few weeks to install a new roof. And costs are down.

A new shingle roof on a 2,000-square-foot house costs $8,000 or less, about 50 percent less than the $12,000 you would have paid two years ago. A new cement-tile roof on that same house will cost about $10,000 today, much less than the $15,000 to $25,000 two years ago.

"Now really is the best time because you're going to get the best prices on labor and materials," said Joe Pace of Pace Roofing Inc. in West Palm Beach.

Carol Waddell, of Atlantis in central Palm Beach County, agreed and hired Pace to replace her 42-year-old roof, which could no longer be cleaned because of broken tiles.

"The beauty of this is I'm getting exactly the same tile I have now," she said. "I'm thrilled about how the timing worked out and the price and everything."

Despite the better prices and availability of contractors, even the most reputable businesses are having a hard time attracting new work.

"People are nervous and wondering if this is the time to make a major investment in their home and price themselves out of the market if they decide to sell in a year or two," said Kermit Baker, an economist at Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies. "A lot of people are sitting on their hands."

After Wilma struck, homeowners seeking shutters paid about $6,300 and waited as long as eight months to get them installed. Today, they'll pay about $4,800 and wait about three weeks.

The price of screen enclosures has also dropped, going from as much as $25,000 two years ago to $9,000 today. The wait is about a month, compared with as much as six months after the hurricane. And the enclosures are built under new regulations adopted after the storms.

"Our prices are back to where they were and people are getting a much stronger enclosure that is more resistant to wind," said Glenn Cummings, owner of Sunshine Screen and Patio in Hollywood.

During the construction frenzy, city building departments took up to several months to issue permits because of demand. Those numbers have dropped dramatically. Pembroke Pines, for example, issued 41 percent fewer permits between July 2007 and February 2008 than from January to July 2007.

"Clearly we're all seeing a slowdown," said Michael Goolsby, past president of the South Florida Building Officials Association.

Rick and Lois Josepher decided "the timing was perfect" to add 1,400 square feet and update their 14-year-old Parkland home, so they hired Cannatelli Builders in Pompano Beach.

"We waited until the Hurricane Wilma repairs were done and prices had come back down, so we had a good experience," Lois Josepher said of their eight-month, $200,000 job.

Although the price of some construction materials, such as lumber, has gone down in response to sluggish home construction, costs have increased for concrete, steel and petroleum products such as fuel, PVC pipes and asphalt. But contractors say they can't pass along the expense because of fierce competition for work.

"We're seeing prices are down, lower than they've been in several years, but our costs are constantly going up," said Broward roofer Billy Cone, owner of RoofTech and president of the statewide roofers association. "Most of us are down at least 50 percent of gross sales."

Consumer complaints about licensed and unlicensed contractors are down slightly in South Florida, regulators say. They attribute that to fewer jobs.

Joel Metter, supervisor of consumer protection for Broward County, and Kurt Eismann, director of Palm Beach County's Contractor's Certification Division, said consumers should not let down their guard if they plan to add on or renovate.

Their advice: Be sure to obtain three written estimates from licensed contractors specifying the quality and type of materials to be used and how long it would take to complete the work. Remember that an occupational license is a business license, not a contractor's license. Ask for proof of insurance and never give a large sum of money upfront.

Why the economy is in trouble

The US economy has been in trouble for some time.  One of the major reasons has been the subprime crisis (lending to people who can't afford the mortgages).   You may think that this is just bad for the lenders but that couldn"t be further from the truth.  The problem is that the lenders packaged the bad loans together and sold them to funds.  So your bank, mutual fund, hedge fund etc... is holding all of these horrible mortgages. 

Add to this that real estate prices are falling hard, and everytime someone defaults whoever holds the mortgage ends up with a property that can't be sold - and one that has been devalued.

What we are seeing now is nearly the entire financial sector of the market holding billions of losses that they haven't even disclosed yet.  The firms that insure mortgages are also in huge trouble and will go belly up unless they are supported by the very banks they are supposed to protect.

Then as you've seen the Federal Reserve is lowering interest rates in a very late attempt to save us from a recession that we are already in.  They should have taken this action in mid 2007 and it's simply making things worse by lowering rates as fast as they are as late as they are.

Every time they lower rates they decrease the value of our dollar.  (no one wants a currency that is paying less and less).  With the devalued dollar guess what happens?  Inflation.  And inflation is what the fed is afraid of.

So why are they lowering rates so fast?  Well with the subprime crisis you have adjustable rate mortgages that are linked to these rates.  So lower rates are thought to help everyone who owes money.  Unfortunately as I said it has a huge detrimental effect on our dollar which means our goods will sell for much less around the world than they have been. (which means our corporations make less money and have to raise prices - leading to inflation.  Killing inflation means RAISING rates not lowering them).

On a recent trip to Las Vegas I had a very interesting conversation with someone from Britian.  We were at one of those GIANT Nike stores and was telling me that the British pound was worth TWICE what the Dollar was.  That meant that he could go and buy shoes for half the price we can buy them since his currency is worth twice as much as ours.  It gets worse... in Britian Nike shoes sell for MORE than they sell here.  So in effect he was buying them for about 30% of what he would pay at home.

I'm sure you've also heard that the Canadian dollar (whatever they call them now... loonie toonie?) is now worth about what our dollar is worth.  Going to Canada usually meant paying about 70% less for us for a LONG time.  Now they are coming here to vacation.

What else is happening?  Overseas buyers are coming and buying our falling real estate because they can get it at a discount and because as with the Nike example they are getting twice the value of our currency.

I could go on and on but I'll finish with a some somber facts.

We entered a Bear Market in the stock market November 23, 2007.  Of course this hasn't been widely reported but anyone who follows the market knows it happened.  We were in a Bull market from June 1, 2003... and it's over.  The last bear market lasted about a year and a half.

So if you do have money where do you invest it?  In a falling stock market or in interest bearing instuments that are getting lower every time the Fed lowers rates.  Yes... it's a terrible situation.

Add that we've been in a recession at least since fall of 2007 and we have a very scarey situation.

Of course if you go over and review history you will see that this cycle of good and bad economies has been going on since our country started.. so we will get our of this.  The question is how painful will this be and how long will it last... and finally...

When will the government admit that we are in a recession and a bear market?