curmudgeon 2 wrote:

If you are not in the stock market your investments will barely keep up with inflation.

That's baloney. My investments have been in fixed income only funds since 1997 and have kept up with inflation nicely. "Inflation" is a broad term and varies highly amongst products and services. Some will tend to purchase a certain spectrum of products for which inflation runs 5-8%. Others for which it will run lower (1-2%). Same with services. In my own case inflation has barely made a dent, but then I am not a "consumer", nor do I extract many services. (Medical - yes, occasionally - but no one is making out ahead of those, the answer is simply to save more)

The market can be a win-win situation, as opposed to gambling, because good companies increase their real value over time.

The problem, as a Financial Times report noted three yrs. ago, is that such companies can also "bleed red" and an ordinary investor wouldn't know (until too late) because it's not on the prospectus. Thus, one only obtains the most generic and general feedback and hence cannot make the correct investment decision when the time comes - as M. Skapinker has noted.

I also detest the Fed stepping in and cutting either the discount rate or the fed fund rate (as they are likely to do next month by 0.25%) to help speculators. If people wish to speculate in markets, fine - but take your goddam medicine (as in major corrections or downturns) without "Nanny Fed" coming in and helping your asses out.

When we in fixed income funds get slagged, as if the Fed lowers the main fund rate to assist you lot -we have to make do with less yield- and we can't piss and moan. We have to accept a lower return, even perhaps in an inflationary atmosphere. We get this without the Fed suddenly bumping up our rates. The speculators, having chosen to partake of the Wall street genie should take their medicine like men too. And NOT expect help from ANY quarter - especially the Federal Reserve.

Had the Fed not hit the chicken switch and cut the discount rate there's a good chance the Dow would have tumbled another 500 -800 for its full correction. And this is the price you pay for dabbling in the markets. But with the artificial boost given- now you can all get back to partying in your leveraged (on debt) bubble, while you leer and mock those of us in the fixed income investments.

All it tells me is you all are a bunch of molly-coddled babies.

IF a company is truly "good" and "increases its value over time" - then it will pay DIVIDENDS. To me this is the only certain way to assess company value. No dividends paid, then likley little or no value or they would deliver the goods each quarter.

The only genuine stock payoff is and remains dividends. Unless one is regularly receiving those one has no firm feedback on how well any enterprise or company is doing. Plowing money 'back in' is often what the scheisters want you to do, in order to disguise their own red ink.

Make 'em pay dividends or put the money into CDs.

The drawback to the "Greenspan put" is that it qualifies as what economists like to call a "moral hazard." It gives traders an unwarranted sense of security that encourages them to take unjustifiable risks with their money, because they know that the Fed will always bail them out.

That's what really, really hacks me off. How often the Fed protects the little Mama's boy stock traders. As a fixed income investor, I had to wait over two fucking years for interest rates to get to the point I earned a decent yield (now 5% in a money market). This is with taking inflation and other risk.

Meanwhile, the little stock speculators suffer an itty bitty correction and they start bawling for Nanny Fed to bail their slimy asses out. WHY? You play the market, you need to take the bad with the good - just like me with CDs, money markets etc. Point of fact, that damned over-inflated, leveraged (on debt) market ought to have fallen at least another 800 maybe more.

But oh no, nanny Bernanke had to rush in like that crapper Greenspan before him, to give an artificial boost by lowering the discount rate to 5.75%. And next he plans to lower the main fund rate by a quarter percentage point on Sept. 18 which will affect ME!

Screw you fucking Maul Street stock scheisters. I hope you all get clobbered with a correction or downturn of at least 1200 pts, and so fast, Bernanke won't have time to get his jammies changed, far less meddle with interest rates to help speculators again!

Whiny little shits that like to brag when their bubble hits "14,000" but can't take the downsides when it tumbles into the shithole.

Yes me and my communist computer

Are hoping for the economic destruction of the US

No, just the economic destruction of Scheister Street speculators. Starting maybe with all the hedge funds. Btw, my computer and I are SOCIALIST, not communist, but you probably wouldn't know the difference.

Speculation has NO part in building real wealth in the end. It is merely the transference of money on paper based on hype, disinfo and misrepresentation. As Kevin Phillips notes, in Arrogant Capital, the financialization of a nation defines its phase of collapse and ruin. So true.