Friday, March 13, 2009

Reprint...

...from January of '08.

Turns out I may have been optimistic after all.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

So,...how's the garden coming along?

I'm going to do one this year. With the garden will come deer, those wonderful, portable modular organic meat machines. Sort of a value added gardening experience. Oh, and bunnies too.

Yes, you may have been optimistic.

Tam said...

"A liberal Democrat or big-government Republican could get in the White House and, with the active help of a Democrat Congress, start pulling levers left and right trying to play FDR."

Le sigh.

theirritablearchitect said...

Bring On The Clowns ;)

Anonymous said...

Very prescient, and well-said. I've been surprised that, among other things, there's been no discussion of what role the increase in minimum wage has played in the current economic situation.

Anonymous said...

The garden is an excellent idea. You can also have lots of nice stuff in windowboxes. Some places will also let you rent garden plots outside of town. I bet Frank James would rent you a couple square feet. Maybe even let you snipe rabbits come to eat your produce.

karrde said...

Gotta give props to the anonymous commenter from that old post.

He was right about Credit-Default Swaps, Commercial Credit, and other high-finance troubles.

'Course, you were right that the climbing commodity-prices were going to hurt everyone in the near-future.

So, does your crystal ball say anything about this year?

Mine seems to be saying More of the same, only worse in certain departments, and showing question marks in other departments.

M. Derosier said...

It's a sad sign when that level of pessimism turns out to have not been pessimistic enough.

On the bright side, at least the day-traders got out of the mercantile exchange, allowing gas prices to fall back to where they should be. Now, if only Washington would back off and let the foreclosures sweep through. A market correction is like a brushfire, you've got to clear out the dead and dying on the floor every so often so that the pine cones can open and new seeds can be planted. Unfortunately, the Kalifornia liberals don't understand the nature of the free market (or the environment) very well

Anonymous said...

Well, the ugly stuff in my crystal ball includes:

Cap-and-trade, e.g., $646 Billion in new taxes, $680 Billion of which (not an error, read the budget!) goes to various Democrat clients. Ready for your electric bill to quadruple? Ready for the costs of this plus the inflation generated by the spendulus to work their way through the economy? A Coke used to be 5 cents. Before we're done... $50.00?

State/local government insolvency. We already know about California, and Glenn Reynolds has been banging on underfunded government employee pensions for some time. But I'm convenced there's a lot more imaginary accounting at the state and local level that's going to reveal itself as revenues drop. (Here in Indy, we just found out - soo-prize, soo-prize! - that the stadium/convention center authority has a "previously undiscovered" (whoops!) $40,000,000 deficit. And (guess what!) the Pacers just announced that they "can't afford" their share of the rent on the fancy fieldhouse we built for them a few years back.) As the chickens come home to roost, look for those tax-free municipals to suddenly become A LOT riskier.

Oh, and don't look to Galt down and take in a little survival money by growing food... Congress has its eye on you!


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TW: "junkieur"

Connoisseur of trash, i.e., dumpster-diver. What we're all going to become, because we won't be able to afford anything else.