We all work for food

It's really a matter of your industry - if you're in public safety, there's plenty of work. If you're super-great whiz with all of Adobe CS3, if you can code PHP faster and better than others, if you are a hot-shot CSS/HTML/DHTML/XSL coder, there's plenty of work.

On this forum, I know of at least one person who had a forclosure, a few of us here have lost jobs, etc....

Okokok...

My fault for not including a bunch of strange men from the internet as part of my sample group

I noticed about 6 months ago that the usual chatter (VHF-FM radio) between pilots discussing the next expected pay raise......wasn't there, has not happened.

I noticed a conversation (via VHF-FM radio) about two weeks ago concerning the likelihood of a pay cut (which was deemed acceptable) vs. layoffs.

About 2 days ago, we were told by our Port Captain to expect word to come down from the "Chain of Command (executives) that we will have to tighten up our Grocery and Supply Budgets.

The dominos have started falling, albeit in slow motion, but they have started falling. At least from my perspective.

I'm surprised, not a single reply to these financial threads today. Does everyone have Columbus Day off???

Or, since the stock market has regained half of last week's losses in a single day, do we all think we're out of the woods? Is the Panic of 2008 already yesterday's news?

Maybe today is a dead cat bounce. Actually, check out the animation in this link. Who knows? Maybe the last 5-6 years since the dot-com crash is one big dead cat bounce? Maybe today's rally was just a speed bump on the way down the precipice started last week?

I've wondered for a long time now about the great bull market that started in the 80's. If you look at a chart of the stock market over time, although there's a general upward trend, the positive and negative periods always seems to balance each other out. But since the early 80's, the stock market is just way, WAY up and there's no balancing negative performace to balance it out. We've had a succession of bubbles propping up the market and the economy, plus the Fed and gov't have gotten more sophisticated as managing the economy. I don't want to sound all doom-and-gloom or anything, but unless we've truly licked the business cycle, I'm still wondering if the true adjustment isn't still out there ahead of us.

It could be sudden and extremely painful, or it could be like Japan, where the stock market just grinds lower and lower for decades. Stocks could stay down so long that when our kids grow up, they won't understand how any of us in our generation thought that buying and holding stocks was a smart way to save for retirement. But I guess that's how these cycles usually work--things go so low for so long that everyone is sick of looking at it. Only then does it suddenly boom and start the next cycle. As long as people are still bullish enough about stocks, even with last week's drop, to agree with the idea of "Buy the dips," then stocks haven't fallen enough yet. Anyway, just my random thoughts for the day.

My thoughts are that this current stock market is mirroring the stock market behavior back in 1929. It made the same bounces!!

I think you'll see a new drop after OPEC announces reduced output at the conlusion of their next meeting scheduled for Nov 18th. Lower output will drive the price of crude back upwards. That will increase pressures on the markets.

That's my opinion and y'all know what opinions are worth.

Maybe we can get back to an economy based on actual work (labor) and providing value rather than rewarding mere paper shuffling as the means to wealth.

Well said, Robert.

Wow, yesterday was another gut-wrenching 733 point drop...and not a single post. Seriously, I think this crisis has become yesterday's news already even thought we're still in it.

I fear that this global injection of gobs and gobs of money into the financial world has just planted the seeds of yet another financial mini-bubble, or just postponed the Day of Reckoning that we started to slide into last week. So, a collective "we" will still end up in the dog house...only a trillion dollars more in debt than we otherwise would have been without all these endless bailouts recently (most people only know or think about the $700 billion bailout, but there have been multiple "bailouts" this year).

I can't think of anything to say that would make the pain go away.

I think you see the markets testing bottoms and trying to find new trading ranges. Things are not stable and no one KNOWS the levels at which things will stabilize or when that will occur.

Also, I think many people who have looked at the things that have been happening think that there will be a change that's not necessarily good when things begin to improve.

Currently, business is stalled, and we are in a deflationary environment. Deflation is just bad unless you've got wads of cash and little else. Banks, investors, and almost everyone is hoarding cash, if they can, and trying to preserve the capital they have now. Government is trying to force people to stop this using the tools they have, and one of those tools is to make people want to spend money. Why would someone want to spend money? Perhaps because holding onto it as cash is going to cost you, that means government will continue to work towards inflationary policies until that happens. So, we are likely to go from deflation to inflation, but when is the big question. Timing markets is like practicing alchemy. Being prepared is to try to see that things are beginning to change and acting to place yourself and your money properly.