forget last night in the usa, page-6

thanks, not even close to a guru.

i know my limitations. i speak to a LOT of fund managers in my job (funds management) and these guys are smart as. i'm on the sales side, i won't even kid myself. but, i can tell you what they are thinking and know when they are going to buy and sell, and what are the key themes that drive this game. i travel a lot presenting to groups of financial advisers whats going on and get invited back so maybe there is some elemnt of resonance to what i "regurgitate".

note what the fund managers say is not exactly what alan koehler, malcolm maiden and the tom petrovski's of the industry say . they do a great job, but are mum and day oriented, and very simplistic. plus they just have to com eup with words to speak every day. the guys i sell really do have tens and tens of billions of dollars at their fingers and wont talk to the media because there is no benefit to them and they feel they will only be remembers if they get it wrong, plus they don't want to get into the talking head game. there are a few fund managers that a true presstitutes, and their performance stinks. they are about marketing not alpha. i put the big name fund managers (ie big in Oz, ie owned by banks, own a group of 1000 financial advisers, onw a wrap or master trust) in this category as well. they just manage market risk. if the market does 10% and they do 12% they won't get any new clients. if they do 8% and the mkt is 10% they might lose 20% of their 100,000 clients, so they are closet index huggers. i can tell you the top performing International equities funds and top performing Australian Equities funds and they aren't household names, but they are always there on top. boutiques.

what i do know is that mum and dad, and the day traders are cannon fodder for the guys who buy and sell the insto packets, and the analysts who make the information and then disseminate it.

by the time the info gets to the market, its pretty old, but, then it becomes self fulfilling

there is just too much bad debt out there in the system that has to be written off.

whether the govt (meaning the US govt) reflates it by printing, collatorialise, it, subsidise, it, nationalise it, monetise it, we don't know.

what will happen is that the US is a long term 1 way bet. the dollar will be worth less. and borderline worthless. they have relied on china to recycle the US home equity debt back into US treasuries which funds the govt fiscal deficit which is being used to fund foreign actions which are about securing the supply (not newcessarily ownership) of oil. Oil, (and to a lesser extend water) are THE play at hand for the next 30 years.

Never mind the slowing economy or recession in the USA. Never mind this trillion dollars of repackaged sh*t sold off out there, IF the USA can somehow produce and export (to whom we ask?) its totally immaterial. The USA has an aging population with high cost of labour relatively, and by 2025 their medicare & social security requirements will bankrupt them.

what we have is a China emerging, as with other newly emerged countrie , brazil, russia, india et al.

the play at hand is can china be self sustaining without US demand? If so, then its game on for us because we have stuff in the ground. if not its game over .

id say hedge your bets, invest in energy, gold stocks, miners. consider financials, but avoid banks. what, they are gonna cut more branches, raise ATM fees, bouce checque fees? and that is going to offset the losses they have to write down soon. we think that theres gonna be no more rubicons, allco, ABC, MFS? we haven't seen the half of it. and the banks own a LOT of this paper, and they haven't marked it to market.

if we can get through april audits and reporting its nice, but long term, i can't see how we can get out of this mess.

unless th US govt does som efancy rabit out of a hat, then go hard and long until that balloon goes pop. then buy a spade, a rifle, a water purifier and a tent. because there will be NO financial market left if they double up this time.