President (To Win Colorado)
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(D) Kamala Harris
(R) Donald Trump
80%↑
20%
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
(R) V. Archuleta
98%
2%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
(R) Marshall Dawson
95%
5%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(R) Jeff Hurd
(D) Adam Frisch
52%↑
48%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert
(D) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Jeff Crank
(D) River Gassen
80%
20%
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
(R) John Fabbricatore
90%
10%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) B. Pettersen
(R) Sergei Matveyuk
90%
10%
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
60%
40%
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
February 27, 2009 08:04 PM UTC
75 Comments
Look at his website. He has a poll. Most people who have bothered to fill it out have voted for updating technology and messaging as the two biggest issues for the party. Talk about denial. So all they have to do is update technology and put lipstick on a pig. I just can’t stop laughing. They’re doomed.
I looked at his website too. Its all about changing technology and updating how the Republican Party communicates the message. The problem is the substance of the message. I don’t know Mr. Stone. He is probably a nice man but he needs to look at the ‘message’ the likes of Renfroe and Schultheis have been spewing for the past several days to see what is wrong with the Republican message.
On his website, he indicates the party must broaden its base with different racial and eithnic groups without changing it’s principles. That is precisely the problem. The principles of the Republican Party are anti-gay, anti-Hispanic and in many instances bigoted. The principles are driving people away and the Party’s destroy the government message regardless of the consequences is driving the moderate Republicans and the independents away.
Without real substantive change, the Republican party is on the way to oblivion.
Thanks to Obama’s major missteps, the GOP has a chance to come back.
The issue is, can Wahdams or any other party chair bring himself to recruit potential winners, or is he so stuck on the divisive social issues that he’ll continue to go with some of the nutcases that are making it impossible for independents and conservatives who are liberal on the social issues to vote GOP?
This site is gleefully hyping the errors of the radicals, but they have a lot of supporters. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be in the general assembly.
The Dems are driving people into the poor house, dumbing down the whole country, and that will cost them votes.
Only hard right free-market-uber-alles types think Obama’s made any missteps. That’s not a broad cross-cut of either Colorado or the USA at large.
Every time Obama says something, the market dives. It’s been crashing for months in fear of his big spending and tax increases.
Public opinion follows the money. There’s no more money to lose, and pubic opinion will crash soon.
40% approval by September?
Point to an irrelevant source to support your point.
Smart people don’t look to the stock market to prove their point.
AS has a point-
Dealing with the markets as I do, when Obama makes speeches or announcements, the market does drop by a large amount.
Again, in all fairness: The reason isn’t because of the specific proposal, if anything it’s the opposite. The major complaint that has lead the market to tank further after these speeches is Obama’s lack of details. There has been no specific proposal.
When Obama gave his speech this week, he clearly wanted to improve confidence. A vaugue speech to the public is one thing, but he didn’t follow up with any specifics and the market reacted negatively.
Once Obama learns this, he might be able to start fixing things. But what he is doing now isn’t helping.
Trying to read political messages into the daily movement, especially while ignoring other events that happen (like the lower-than-expected GDP estimate that just came out) is like predicting weather from entrails.
The only difference is that weather prediction usually happens BEFORE the weather happens, so it’s sometimes wrong. Attributing stock fluctuations to Obama’s actions always happens AFTER the stocks move, so there’s always the perfect explanation no matter what. But it’s just as stupid.
Try making money off stocks on an Obama speech: actually put money down whenever he gives one, for a short sell on an index fund, if you really believe this theory.
There is usually a reason for market fluctuations
Bernanke says the economy could recover this year, the market goes up 3.5%forget the fact that he attached his statement with some big “ifs”-Obama gives a speech or makes a proposal without sufficient details and investors get spooked and the market drops. Actions do have consequences, and the market just doesn’t act on its own.Is it a serious problem? No, not really. I think Obama is learning that his words matter more now and that campaigning and governing take different approaches. I suspect that the next couple of proposals will have details coming out of the ears, and if it’s good changes, the market will respond positively. If it’s social agenda programs and not market reforms, the market will tank. And I think that if for no other reason, Obama is pragmatic enough to hear the critiquing of what he’s done so far and make a change.
“The market” is a bunch of people, many of whom are motivated by different things. Those individuals react to news in various ways, and an Obama speech is not the only source of news.
Add up all those various transactions made by various people with various motivations, and you get essentially RANDOM FLUCTUATIONS.
If you think they’re not random, try making money off them.
I think you just exposed your lack of understanding of the market. Things just don’t happen for the sake of happening. News drives it one way or the other.
To say that a sub par proposal can’t hurt the market is also to say that there isn’t anything that Obama can do to help it. Is that what you really think?
I don’t think there’s any speech Obama can give to affect the market. No. That’s just silly.
I also don’t give a damn about short-term market fluctuations, so even if Obama could single-handedly make stocks higher on Tuesday at the expense of something I cared about, I’d think it was an absurd idea.
Higher stock prices on Tuesday benefits day traders and stockbrokers, not anybody else.
But you know what they say: if you have to explain your joke it wasn’t a good one. Sorry.
But really, there are some things here that you don’t understand. Steve Harvey below helps illustrate this point. The market does matter. If a company’s stock is tanking, it means that they have to cut expeneses. That means jobs.
Workers from teachers to union folks to small business employees by and large invest in some sort of retirement account. Hard working people, whether they be R’s or D’s have seen their retirement savings take a 40% hit because of the market conditions. If the market is heading up, that benefits the guy who retired last year AND was forced to take an RMD.
If the market goes up, that means that investor confidence will improve and people who still have jobs won’t horde their money and start spending. That means people eat out, tip waiters, buy cars, go on vacations, etc.
All of this stuff is tied together.
This week health and medical stocks were tanked by just the outline of what Obama and Dems want to do with health insurance market regulations and laws. Obama wants to take $20 billion from drug makers, and their stocks are down sharply. He wants to reduce payments for Medicare Advantage to insurers. Their stocks are down big time.
There are some 500 publicly-traded health and medical stocks, including insurers and providers. When that many stocks fall together with only a few exceptions, they pull the market down with them.
Further, bank stocks are being devastated because of very disappoint lack of details in speeches by Treasury Sec. Geithner and then by Obama on Tuesday.
Then Obama reaffirmed his intentions to bloat the budget and budget deficit. He targeted the “rich” for tax increases. Both discouraged investors who voted with their dollars by selling and refusing to buy stocks.
If you don’t think the drop in the Dow since early Jan. to about 7000 from about 9000 is changing spending plans by consumers and businesses, you know nothing about how markets and the economy work.
And if you think this is a short-term thing, you haven’t been reading Paul Krugman or any other economists. The market is still falling, and because it fell some more today, we’re probably headed another 500 to 1000 points lower.
What is scary is that once the market bottoms out, it may not recover for years. Not months, but years.
While Obama’s only been president a few weeks, his alarmist talk, which was designed to create the sense of crisis the cram his proposals through Congress, has helped depress consumer confidence to dangerously low levels.
I suggest that if you haven’t paid attention to the markets or the economy, you’d better brief yourselves, because you’ve got a tough row to hoe, especially with Obama in the White House and Reid and Pelosi in charge of Congress.
and disregarding this stupid crap that Skeptic is posting (I read three words of it, and that’s my limit, there’s only so much idiocy I can stand),
the main thing is that on any given day, the fluctuations are essentially random. Over a period of three or six months, you have genuine effects. But if you ask why is the DJIA higher on February 26 than on February 24, there’s no real answer for that.
Over the long term, market values mean something, since over the long term real people are affected. Over the short term, retirees and such are NOT affected. Coincidentally, fluctuations over the short term don’t really affect anyone except people who need to cash in on the fluctuations. That’s a tiny minority, and thus I don’t really care about them.
What I am saying is that the fluctuations aren’t random, they’re driven by the news. To kill two birds with one post, I want to touch on the point about the market going up 3.5% on the same day that GM announced loses. That wasn’t random, the reason why that happened was because of what the Fed Chair said, so his news trumped GM’s news. If anything is random, it is the news…and if the news of the day is “Obama announces plan, lacks details” that news will drive the market down…but that news is preventable. Obama could wait until the details are in place, then the news would be “Obama announces plan, boosts confidence”, then the market goes up.
You are way off base about the market not affecting retirees in the short term. Selling shares at a lower price to cover living expenses locks in one’s loss. You can’t wait around for the market to recover if you need money now. It’s not a “tiny minority”, I deal with them everyday. Maybe if you heard their stories you could find room enough to empathize a little bit. Goodness.
If someone is literally paying their living expenses on stock holdings, that’s unbelievably stupid. Does that really happen? I would have expected that a typical strategy is to keep money in stocks or something over many years, then when you retire, you take that money out and put it somewhere safer.
Someone’s actually paying rent based solely on whether GM’s share price goes up on Tuesday? I doubt that very much.
I believe AS is making the case that, since the stock market is (or maybe is not – see The River’s comment below) going down after an Obama speech or other public statement, then that’s the first step to Bush-like popularity.
I think that’s absurd, even if the market is, in fact, reacting to these statements and speeches. The market is not a good gauge of these things. They went up, up, up when the most fundamentally unsound business trend in decades came to be in the late 90s. They punish the stocks of profitable corporations if their earnings are a penny short of expectations. It’s not a rational place, and looking that as a clue to how the general electorate feels is absurd.
Yes, the market is a strange place. At times it seems reacts in strange ways.
For a brief example, when Bernanke said that the recession could end this year, but it would take x, y, and z to accomplish, I thought the market would tank since it sounded pretty pessimistic to me. Go figure, it went up 3.5% even as GM announced serious loses.
But the market is an indicator of investor confidence. Historically speaking, the market swings up a few months before a recession ends. So the fact that it is heading in the wrong direction isn’t a good sign.
Remember that when Obama named Geither as Treasury Secretary the market went up 2% in a day. Investors have as high of hopes for Obama as anyone does and they would rather see him succeed rather then fail. Their negative reactions to his lack of detail shouldn’t be so easily cast aside.
the actions of prominent political figures? And that theory is not supported by data? Yet you continue to hold the theory anyway?
Why are you doing this thing that you are doing?
Look at the market history. And I have supplied data. It’s not my fault if you refuse to connect the dots.
That sounds like data that contradicts the thing you’ve been saying.
Silly me, looking at inconvenient data as well as convenient data.
But when it does, it moves sharply.
The data show that a news event about a particular stock usually doesn’t move a stock. But in the last 24 months, the news has been so bad that earnings announcements, bailouts and other developments have caused stocks to move sharply not only the next day but for weeks and months.
Just look at charts for auto, banking and retail stocks. And watch the health and medical stocks. You can watch them for free at finance.yahoo.com, Google.com, etc.
Tune into CNBC or Fox Business News between 5 and 9 a.m. Or listen to Kudlow on CNBC at 5. He’s obnoxious and a permabull, but he’s a very credible economist.
Millions of very smart and some not so smart people trade stocks, bonds and commodities. Their collective opinions are reflected in the markets. And I can assure you that they’re as sophisticated about politics as anyone who posts here.
Markets fluctuate as new info appears, and it appears by the minute. Watch the markets and you’ll know what the smart money is thinking. It gets things wrong, of course, but it quickly admits its mistakes and corrects them.
Good luck.
Remember when the House orginally rejected the first trillion dollar economic stimulus? The market dropped over 600 points. That erased almost a trillion dollars in people’s money.
The pressure that it created was a large factor to the bill passing with some changes the next week.
when the market responded really badly to the bank bailout not being passed, and then the bank bailout passed, and the market responded, um, really badly?
Sounds to me like “the market” doesn’t give “a shit” about “the bailout” or any other short term policy. It might just be that the economy is doing kind of crappy, and has been for a while, and so a lot of investors are going to want to sell stocks, and that’s going to keep happening on average despite the occasional fluctuation upward on Tuesday.
and don’t discount the whole thing out of hand.
But the market – the people who act in trading, which excludes a large number of investors with money in things like pensions, 401(k)s, and the like, since they trust the managers to take care of that – is really a small number of people. They tend to be fiscal conservatives, which make them biased toward the GOP and against the Dems. There’s value in observing how they react, but that value doesn’t apply to forecasting that the whole nation will collectively respond the same way.
You are wise to not reject it out right. I’m not saying that Obama’s speeches are the sole reason the market has tanked the last week, but they have played a role. That role is that investors are not happy with his lack of details.
Having said that, I think you would be surprised about the attitude of investors. I work with many Republicans and Democrats. While there is a concern that the money being infused into the market will cause inflation, there are a fair amount of people on both sides who are looking forward to a cash infushion because they are hoping it will help the market and their investments recover. I have found it interesting how some have changed their tune when they have lost money.
Notice who the “investors” with Madoff are.
Heavily Jewish. How do most Jews vote?
Listen to the biz talk shows. They have no problems finding liberals to comment on market developments.
I know plenty of liberals who are good investors.
Warren Buffett, by the way, is a big backer for Obama.
I know that you didn’t just say what I think you said.
Take your anti-Semitic drivel somewhere else. You disgust me.
I’m talking demographics and pointing out what happened to Madoff’s victims, and that’s anti-semetic?
Your ignorance and bad manners are showing.
So you would know!
I’m just glad this blog isn’t “heavily Jewish” though it is fairly liberal, and we do know how those Jewy jew jews vote.
specialize in Jewish investors, especially rich and famous ones. I’m Jewish and I think AS is a jerk but not willing to call this citing of fact anti-Semitic.
Unfortunately many Jewish people trusted him because he was Jewish and a big supporter of Israel. And it’s also true that most Jews vote Democratic, even rich ones.
Perhaps AS is just pointing out that not all rich people are Republicans. I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt on this one.
There are plenty of rich liberal Dem investors, too. They apparently differ from the rich Rs in not being freaked by the idea of Clinton era taxes.
that nothing AS says is worth taking seriously?
We’ve got “towelheads,” we’ve got “sluts,” and now it’s all about the Jews.
Any decent thing one might think AS ever said is canceled out by these posts, in which he reveals his true nature. He’s a racist, he’s a sexist, and he’s an anti-Semite. In short, he’s an asshole. Not someone you really want to talk to in a rational manner.
You might be surprised to learn that I’m a liberal investor.
Nonetheless, the average investor and businessperson leans conservative. The GOP has long been their party.
It’s funny you bring up Buffet. I recall when conservatives loved him. But then he started talking about tax and how he and his fellow wealthy people weren’t paying enough. ZING! Suddenly he was “irrelevant,” as some pundits and GOP politicians said on the record. I’d say his record makes his comments worth listening to.
The market reactions are not a good gauge as of yet; you don’t pull a day, a week or a single month’s data and lay the blame at Obama’s feet; as we all know the market’s freefall began well ahead of that and the outlook is bleak as long as the economy is. If Wall Street, in it’s typical shortsighted nature, wants a quick fix then they’re bound to be disappointed.
Greedy Wall Street speculators don’t like being under the microscope.
About time we got back to investing in companies and away from day-traders and short-selling hedge funds.
It’s a good thing anyway. I got my money out in early October. Lost a little, but it could have been worse. I want it nice and low when I get back in.
Smart folks got out two years ago.
This is why your party fails. Money buys lots of things. It can buy hacks to go on TV and spout messages, it can buy commercials, it can buy fraudulent data and the media outlets in which to print them, but it can’t buy people’s thoughts.
You may have the rich on your side, and the basement-dwellers with Bruce Wayne fantasies, but you don’t have anyone else anymore. The rest of us think you’re incompetent morons. That won’t change any time soon.
On a side note, maybe you should have that Obama Derangement Syndrome looked at by a trained professional. It doesn’t normally melt your brain in two weeks. I think that’s a sign there’s something wrong.
After you’ve paid attention to the markets for awhile and traded some stocks, you’ll be able to comment with some credibility.
Me neither, you stupid asshole.
the arguments against which you always conveniently ignore, while constantly returning to your little mantra-of-ignorance.
It’s remarkable that you and those like you are so deeply drugged by your own absurdities that you fail to recognize a brilliant, talented, hugely admired, and, so far, amazingly successful statesman, simply because he is so emblematic of how horribly your ideology has failed, both in terms of its appeal to the popular imagination and its ability to provide for the common good.
The Republican Party is deeply, perhaps mortally, wounded by its own ineptness and idiocy, and by the simultaneous appearance of a brilliant and talented Democratic president, and yet you, always confident that the Mother Ship is about to arrive, have the chutzpa to declare the Republicans on the cusp of a comeback “due to Obama’s misteps!!!”
My god, man, are you absolutely and completely nuts??!! You’re talking about a young man who, a mere four years after rising to national attention and national office, became the first African American president in US history, and within a month of taking office succeeded in passing the largest single piece of legislation in US history, and you manage to perceive political failure in those facts??!!
Maybe, just maybe, if you made something that vaguely resembled a well-reasoned, empirically supported, rationally defensible argument, you would be something other than the droning fool that you are, babbling to himself in public, but doing so with such earnestness, and so certain that the the phantoms of his imagination are responding in rapt agreement, that he just keeps on going, while every one around gives him a wide berth and a concerned sideways glance.
Gullibility will get you nowhere.
You didn’t address the criticisms of your use of market fluctuations as proof of the value of policies, or the problem that you never bother to apply reason to evidence in your posts, but Kudos, you did a marvelous job of calling me “gullible.” I wish I had such rhetorical skill.
On Wednesday, the day following Obama’s speech, the Dow dropped 80 points (1%), which is slightly less than what it fell today. The fact is the market is preforming abysmally, and Obama’s actions are not the cause. You’re confusing correlation with causation.
The market was down 2.5% the day after the speech, but other news allowed it to recover to a degree.
There is a cause and effect to Obama’s proposals. The overall reaction has been that Obama has been saying nice things but hasn’t presented details. As I have noted above, Obama can fix that problem and not be a drag. Or he can listen to advice like yours and at best not help, or at worse make things…well, worse.
But that does not tell us anything about the value of Obama’s policies.
1) The market was already in free fall long before Obama took office. It has the jitters (or, rather, investors do), and would react to probably any assertive attempt to regain control of financial markets in pretty much the same way.
2) The market tanked, primarily, because some uber-wealthy CEOs of financial institutions decided to line their pockets even more extensively than usual, and to do so at the expense of the stability of our financial markets. Wealthy investors are now worried about policies which may rein in their ability to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else, and the market is reacting to that prospect.
3) The president’s job is not to make sure that the stock market is performing to the optimal advantage of investors, even when many people nearing retirement depend so sensitively on its performance. The president’s job, rather, is to balance a multitude of considerations, not attending to one at the expense of others of equal or greater importance to the common good, but rather attending to all as a single systemic whole. Maximizing the stock market’s short term performance is a relatively low priority in that context, and is not one which trumps the overriding urgency of effecting systemic change.
I think that I have a better understanding of these things then some, but I really respect what you have to say about these matters.
You and I agree in that Obama’s comments/speeches/proposals can drive the market, but they are not the sole driver.
As to your points:
1) The market was in a free fall. But like it or not, I believe that many investors had extremely high expectations that Obama could fix it. Many investors want some sort of government intervention. Honest investors recognize the fact that there has to be some government involvement in these things, they just don’t want too much. The problem for Obama is that a) people had unreasonably high expectations of him and b) he has tried to calm the market with his words and not details. I view what Obama needs to do as a joint attack-it’s better when you combine air power with ground forces. Right now, Obama is just using one and not the other.
2) I disagree to an extent; not on the part as to what caused the problem but the resistence to the solution. Geither was nominated for Treasury Secretary and the market jumped. It wasn’t because they thought he would let them continue to jack things up.
3) I agree. The only thing I would say is that while Obama shouldn’t need to focus on improving the market, it would be nice if he weren’t making things worse. He should do no harm. A simple tweaking of his message, or waiting until he had everything in place would at least do no harm.
1) a) The creation of high expectations was not, at the time, such a bad idea: Confidence was in short supply, and desparately needed. Obama was walking an impossible tight-rope: Needing to reassure, and simultaneously to prepare people for difficult times. My Congressman, Mike Coffman, complains that Obama hasn’t done enough to raise confidence, while you complain that he had at some point done too much. Rock, meet Hard Place.
b) Yes, this is possibly a legitimate criticism, especially of Geithner. A very explicit detailed plan was announced to be forthcoming, and never came forth.
2) I oversimplified mightily on this point, but I do think that it is a part of the dynamic. Yes, there was some theoretical receptiveness to increased, ahem, “attention” to the problems with our financial markets, but it would have been very difficult to give them the kind of attention that Obama reasonably feels is in order without spooking the markets. The concept of government attention to the problem was tentatively reassuring; the reality was reflexively frightening. I don’t believe that government or the people that government represents should be held prisoner by the reflexive responses of financial markets to regulatory policies.
3) Nor, as I said, do I believe that maximizing market valuation, or even GDP, is an imperative in isolation of consideration of what trade-offs are involved. Markets, as I know you know, are to some extent smoke-and-mirrors: The value of the last share sold is neither the value I can get for the next share I want to sell, nor is it a stable measure of the corporation’s “objective” value. I agree that it’s not arbitrary, but it is a bit like the weather: Rainfall does not mean that there is no drought, and a cool day does not mean that there is no global warming. Markets, like temperature and precipitation, fluctuate rather robustly, and the fluctuations are not good indicators of long-term trends or deep structural realities.
In a sense, market fluctuations are epiphenomena, symptoms of either psychological hicups or authentic misvaluations. Sure, there is some feedback looping involved, and the effect creates ripples through the system. But, on balance, market fluctuation is more effect than cause. Smart policy does not address epiphenomena, it does not focus on the symptoms, but rather on the deeper causal factors.
Steve,
For future reference, If I don’t reply to you or anyone else, its because you haven’t said anything that deserves a reply.
But you’re a law student, I think, and as you go through contracts and other corporate and bankruptcy law courses, you’ll learn more financial theory and how to ask intelligent questions.
You don’t get a feel for markets from books. You get a feel for markets by watching them daily and by trading.
Someday you’ll understand that markets not only react to new facts and speeches but also to the hidden meanings in the news. Whether it’s a long term investor or a day trader, speculators interpret the news for better or worse.
Their collective opinions determine stock prices, which are the actual values of companies at a given point in time. Over the course of an hour, day, month, or decade, buying and selling ebbs and flows in terms of which drives the price up or down. Eventually, trends develop and speculators ride those trends or try to trade against them.
An important aspect of trading is the capacity of a human mind to deal with a certain quantity of information. Most people can deal with only two to five facts when making decisions. Physicians, lawyers and professional traders become skilled at dealing with many more facts and opinions when making big decisions and small.
What happened in February is that the market decided that Obama and Geithner don’t have their acts together, don’t understand markets very well and have anti-business and anti-investor agendas that will drive the prices of stocks down.
When investors and speculators anticipate that politicians will depress prices of stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies, they sell and refuse to buy. They anticipate more bad news, which often follows bad news.
Politicians watch the markets like a hawk. They know the power of markets to change their political prospects, and the smart ones respect the markets even if they don’t like them.
I’m speculating that Republicans will be encouraged by the market’s reactions to Obama’s policies to oppose them. And I’m betting that Dems in Congress, if not in the WH, will back off on their support for some of Obama’s radicalism. I’m also expecting that as a result of the market’s reactions, Obama and his team will shift priorities and change their tones and attitudes a bit.
Again, it’s all hard to predict, and only time will tell. Buy and hold “investors” are losing their shirts hoping Obama will come to his senses. Speculators are shorting stocks and ETFs, making a fortune on the bad news just as they do when the news is good and we’re in bull markets.
Professional traders care less about the direction of a market. What they really want is volatility, and Obama’s giving them that in spades.
to deign to share this primer with Steve and the rest of us. See, you can use your brain and maybe gain some credibility or you can be your usual immature self and not do so.
Just an FYI, since I answer your absurdities with rational and reasonable (if not respectful) replies, you’ll have to excuse me if I continue to interpret your non-replies the way I always have – as a silent admission of defeat.
You know from experience that I can back up my statements even though I usually don’t waste my time.
Well, if such self-delusion makes you happy…
your condescension is misplaced, and you overlay some factually accurate discourse with a number of enormous and ideologically-motivated assumptions.
First, the misplaced condescension: Before law school, and before writing a novel, I was a grad student focused on the application of microeconomic theory to social institutional phenomena. In other words, I spent years studying market dynamics. This “real world teaches you more than books” bullshit is a convenient way to insulate an ideology from empirical research, and little more. Though I have never been an avid trader (I have, of course, been an active investor in the stock market for over 20 years), I score high on most “real world” measures: Army infantry, work on farms, in factories, in offices, as a nursing home orderly, doing child care and teaching from infants to adults, tons of time abroad, and so on. And despite the richness and intimacy that real world experience bequeeths on one, it doesn’t offer any data or empirically sound understanding that can’t be garnered from books. It’s value lies elsewhere. The fact is, you would probably understand markets better than you do now if you had studied them more, even if you experienced them less.
Second, as always, you are merely assuming the causes of market fluctuations. There is no data to support any of your specific conclusions, and no sound basis in reason to support most of them.
Normally, it’s just not worth it to respond to the self-inflating nonsense generated in such quantity by posters such as yourself, but you are so far out there that it’s hard to resist. You’re telling a 49 year old army veteran who is in his 13th year of post-Bacheler’s degree education, who has taught college (and high school) and has lived, worked, and traveled abroad for 8 years of his adult life, that in time I’ll learn how to ask intelligent questions???!!! Is it humanly possible to be more of a complete and utter putz??!!
You obviously have a high opinion of your own intelligence, and even more obviously not with a great deal of justification. You try so hard to arrogate to yourself some imagined gravitas, that you inform us that if you don’t reply to most of what we’ve posted, it’s because you simply can’t stoop to that level. You lack both humility, and any justification whatsoever to have any thing but humility. But, please, by all means, enjoy your delusions. With a level of charm such as you display here, there all you’ll ever have.
I’ll second that!
Denial will get you nowhere.
Because the Wall Street brokers and robber barons see the end coming closer and closer for their ridiculous excesses and illegal conduct.
And fingers in your eyes.
Very recent major polls found that MOST REPUBLICANS are supportive of Obama’s efforts. We are talking voters, not the rapidly sinking AS types.
Also found that voters DON’T WANT BIPARTISANSHIP! They see through the crocodile tears of the Republican congress. Fuck ’em.
I”m sure Obama will lose some steam and some will be dismayed. But that’s very normal.
And like FDR, he will be reelected. Because unlike Bush/McCain, he is doing things for the average voter.
Destroying jobs.
Talking down the markets, i.e., pension funds and 401ks
Raising taxes overtly and hidden
Lying and misleading in almost every speech, making Clinton look honest.
Promising what he can’t deliver and what he has no intention of delivering.
The public will catch on to this phony so fast it will make your head spin.
Whatever…
Do you have ANY conception whatsoever about the “average voter”? Or just the wingnut point of view?
They have diverged, in case you hadn’t noticed.
Compassionate conservatism, no doubt.
There are not adequate adjective to describe you or your ideology.
When companies lay off a lot of employees, the markets take that as a sign of weakness and the price of the stock falls.
Pay some attention and you’ll learn.
Are you that warped? Layoffs always equal stock prices going up! Less costs, more profits.
Gawd you are a whack.
It depends on the company. It used to be an automatic boost to a company’s floundering stock price, but investors have since learned that all the layoffs in the world won’t save a company with very unsound fundamentals. Layoffs became such a kneejerk reaction to underperforming stock that investors learned that it might mean that management really didn’t know what they were doing.
My experience is “Smarthog Computer has announced that 5,000 employees will be let go in the next year. Smarthog common stock closed 38 cents higher.”
I’ve never heard lower.
Layoffs haven’t proven to be a boost to stocks lately, if anything it reinforces the fact that we’re in a real mess. On the flip side, being a major company that hasn’t done layoffs because we got our costs under control hasn’t helped ours, but layoffs might (please don’t let it be so…I don’t want to have more time to post here!), but then again, it could scare people more. Our investors like the fact that we haven’t had to do layoffs.
The short of the matter is, you’re right. If companies need to do mass layoffs, were they really planning correctly? Are they more worried about corporate trips rather then their balance sheet? It raises good questions now, and I think that is a positive thing.
Have you seen any polling data? This is just the type of Republican response that is the problem. The “true believers” are not connected to reality. Continue your dream. Maybe when you wake up in 40 years there won’t even be a Republican Party around. LOL.
I lived in Beaver Creek for two years and Tom Stone was “my” commissioner. He’s not that bright and there’s no way the GOP is going to pick him over Wadhams.
What will be interesting is if the GOP ends up with a choice between a moderate and Dick “play to the base” Wadhams. Because that will give us a clear measure of where the party is going over the next 2 years.
He’s not a moderate by any stretch of the imagination.
Always has been and always will be. He’s just a political whore as well.
but the state chairman is not in control of the party ideology. He has no power to dictate whether the party nominates moderate or right-wing candidates and in the present Republican Party only fanatical extremists are allowed but that was the situation before Wadhams returned from Virginia.
In order to remedy what ails the Republican Party, a complete restructuring of almost the entire organization needs to begin. That means throwing out and replacing almost all of the precinct committeemen and women along with county executive committees. I don’t believe that is in offing because the radicals have an iron grip on the organization and most of the moderates, including myself, have withdrawn from active participation. We look for Democrats to vote for.
I don’t think that it’s a secret that I wasn’t impressed with Wadhams. Sure, I had high hopes when he took over…but state seats weren’t targeted, he took on Schaffer’s campaign, and spread himself pretty thin. Granted, the grass roots organization contacted more people, etc. but I don’t see that Dick Wadhams can really claim credit for that.
On the other hand, I don’t see how Tom Stone is a natural successor to Wadhams. I am interested in learning more about him, but hearing this news didn’t initially create the “a-ha! This is it!” moment that some other challengers would have inspired.
Did a discussion about the next chair of the state GOP turn into one about what affects the market?
As to what does, Haners has it better than anyone else here. For the next several years, like it or not, we’re a socialist economy. And so what the federal government decides has more impact than anything else.
There you have it…..an endorsement of Dick Wadhams for re-election as state chair by O.Q.D.
Because he’s done so much for my party. You’re doing a heck of job there, Dicky!