Steve Kurtz wrote,
>I'm waiting too! And governments can't make chicken salad out of chicken
But the more urgent question might be: can they make (live) chickens out of
chicken salad?
>The composition of the retirement accounts is *not* limited to stocks. The
>money can go into bank deposits, corporate, municipal, or national gov't
>bonds, real estate trusts, mortgages, commodity funds, etc.
Agreed. The appropriate term would be investment instruments. Jeremy Rifkin
claimed in 1995 that pension funds accounted for more than one-third of all
corporate equities and nearly 40% of corporate bonds. I haven't bothered to
follow up on the statistics because my point is simply that a "big chunk" of
money in the market is there because people imagine they're avoiding taxes
(and, secondarily, they expect to earn a return on the taxes they don't have
to pay).
My guess is that even without a sustained bear market, the net present value
of the imagined tax savings, including the accumulated return on investment
(of the deferred taxes) would be remarkably close to zero. Deduct brokers'
fees and the baby boomer mutual fund savants will find that they would have
been better off to pay the god-damn income tax up front and stuff whatever
was left in a mattress (or somewhere else more graphic).
Looking on the brighter side, think of all the government make-work jobs
that have been created in the securities sector. For those who don't think
governments can make live chickens out of chicken salad, consider all the
"private sector jobs" it creates with public money! Governments will even
find a way to make the extraction of energy-sink oil profitable for the oil
companies. It's called creative accounting and it's still going on in
value-subtracting firms in Russia.
There is a way out of the mess, but it's a very strait gate. It's amazing to
hear all this caterwauling about apocalypse and hardly a peep for
providence. Ray gave precise instructions -- "begins with taking a drum into
the forest, digging a hole and putting your feet where no one has ever
walked, finding the beat of the earth and then observing the adage: 'Pay
Attention to Everything.' The Old Testament stated the same principle as
"sabbath of the land" -- let the land rest and God will provide
(providence); wring every last ounce of recoverable substance out of the
land and the land will take its own rest (apocalypse).
One simple answer to the question, "what is to be done?": rest.
Regards,
Tom Walker
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