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A little housekeeping
Just wanted to let you know that I've started a blog roll, which you can find on the Scratch Pad page. It's a list of some places around the web that I like to read and that you might enjoy as well. Also, my latest After the Bell podcast is available.
You can subscribe to that here, through I-tunes or whatever you use. It's free. Each Friday, I look back on the top economic stories of the week and try to make sense of what happened and where we stand.
We've tweaked the format, and for one thing, it's shorter. It's about 15 minutes. It includes clips from the Marketplace shows, but it has a unique podcast voice and style, which includes an opening essay from me. I begin this week, "Forgive me, Mr. President, for I have sinned." I won't spoil the rest. But Homer Simpson is involved.
I hope you can check it out, and your feedback/input is always welcome.
Here's hoping next week will be better than this one. Enjoy your weekend.
Okay. Maybe this isn't a reasonable question, but here goes anyway/ Let's assume that the housing bubble never happened, and the economy didn't swell up like a souffle on nothing more than air. So the buying binge didn't happen, at least not the one that resulted from the mortgages and mortgage slicing and dicing of the last 5-7 years.
Where do you think the stock market would be today? Do we just look at where we were in 2001? I'm trying to figure out how much "real" value we've lost in the last six months. Because, if the era of easy mortgages resulted in false home appreciation, and all those companies were making money without actually adding value to the economy, maybe things aren't as bad now, as they seem. I don't read broadly enough that I have seen someone analyze things this way. Or maybe its completely nuts TO analyze it this way. But maybe We aren't too far off from where we would be if the predatory lending stream never happened. Is that possible? Signed, looking for a shred of a hint of anything like a silver lining in Silver Spring MD
Jane, this is a very interesting question, and I don't blame you for looking for a little silver. I'm not sure I have any. It depends on where you're searching for lost "value." In the housing market, sure, I think you can make a case that prices have deflated to where they might be if there was slow, steady climb instead of a balloon. Of course, value has popped elsewhere in the economy too.
If you take the Dow, on July 1, 2002, it was at 7591, only a thousand points higher than it is now. But I saw a chart this morning that adjusted for inflation, the Dow is at 1966 levels. The loss of real value is significant and on par with the most dramatic kind of recession. We have a boom and bust economy and it's busted.
Sorry, I guess that's more of a tin foil lining.
I like the new podcast format. The shorter length works better for me and I enjoy down-to-earth style. Keep it up!
Regarding the market, my approach is to have a simple asset allocation plan and stick to it. Buy index funds and don't try to time the market; just rebalance annually. I would not touch very many individual stocks these days.
