I Lost My Rose Tinted Glasses !
Hans Christian Andersen, The Snow Queen. 
“a magic mirror that has the power to distort the appearance of things reflected in it. It fails to reflect all the good and beautiful aspects of people and things while it magnifies all the bad and ugly aspects so that they look even worse than they really are…. falls back to earth where it shatters into billions of pieces — some no larger than a grain of sand. These splinters are blown around and get into people’s hearts and eyes, making their hearts frozen like blocks of ice and their eyes like the troll-mirror itself, only seeing the bad and ugly in people and things.”
Markets have become a sorry place. Lemmings all falling off the cliff as I predicted. Yet I have not been spared. Depression is a drug and highly infectious and it has come to this. Screaming for blood everyday like zombies.
Waking up each morning to the end of the world, skeptics turn cynics and contrarians become demented, hollowed and numb lemmings, just gravitating to their deaths off the cliff.
So I have been turning to philosophy for a little consolation. And the wisdom is this … The world as it exists looks imperfect only because of our limited perception, according to Spinoza’s Ethics.
Even Keynes was a philosopher. Read this intriguing BBC article over the weekend :
Society at large “believe in a continuing moral progress by virtue of which the human race already consists of reliable, rational, decent people, influenced by truth and objective standards… We were not aware that civilisation was a thin and precarious crust… only maintained by rules and conventions skilfully put across and guilefully preserved.” Underlying this complacent faith in progress was a naive faith in the power of reason.
Source : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18923542#?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
The author, John Gray, goes on talk about the world’s certain doom.
“We face a conjunction of three large events – the implosion of the debt-based finance-capitalism that developed over the past twenty years or so, a fracturing of the euro resulting from fatal faults in its design, and the ongoing shift of economic power from the west to the fast-developing countries of the east and south.”
The conclusion is to just give up and try to work out a good life.
And I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS WAS WRITTEN IN 2006 !!! – The Pi Cycle – Martin Armstrong
“The peak for one nation may be the low for another. For within the scheme of global capital flows, not everyone can enjoy a boom simultaneously. For every gain in trade, there must be someone who loses. This is simply the nature of the global economy. The greatest booms unfold when capital concentrates in one sector. When that capital shifts, you also find the result of the greatest financial panics in history. An individual will always possess the free will to follow the crowd or strike out with his own independence to buck the trend. There will be those who believe in the business cycle and use it to their advantage just as there will be those who refuse to acknowledge its existence. As long as not everyone believes, the cycle will exist forever. The regularity of the business cycle is not determined by man alone; for within its deep calculations resides the very heart of nature itself….
The global economy to me is the same delicate system that cannot be viewed in isolation, but only through its collective integration. The failed labor policies of Europe have created perpetually high unemployment and the worst record of economic growth for the past 30 years. Instead of objectively reviewing what has happened, Europe seeks to federalize and strengthen the very controls that already exist. Communism and socialism are all political byproducts of our failure to understand the business cycle. Blaming the rich, your neighbor or a particular race are all vain quests to explain the cause of a cycle that has moved through the boom bust phase. Who knows, perhaps it is possible that if for one moment we truly understood the business cycle and worked in harmony with it, the possibility of reducing the amplitude just might result in a more stable political-economy for all mankind.”
| http://www.contrahour.com/contrahour/2006/06/martin_armstron.html |
This is What I think !
Roubini, Taleb, Soros, whoever… Yes. NOBODY DARES TO BE BULLISH RIGHT NOW !
But who says what is happening now is so bad anyway ? EUR/USD would be good to buy for some month end cheer (target 1.23 then 1.25). And if it does break under 1.20, its not too bad to get yourself a nice place in Italy to sip vino and watch the sunset than be canned up in this city here wondering how I am going to afford a new car next with prices going through the roof.
Viva la Vida !!!
http://www.fridakahlofans.com/c0680.html
Painted 8 days before her death.
It is indeed a mad world we live in, but what you have described is simply human nature. Since historic time, people are always looking for the next big thing which result in bubbles forming. There was the tulip bubbles a few hundred years ago; archeological findings discovered agriculture bubble tens of thousands years ago… I could go on. You would think that after so many cycles of booms and burst, we would have, as a species, learnt something. Unfortunately, most people are followers, following popular opinion and trend without thinking. People find comfort in moving as a herd, knowing someone else agrees with them, to be accepted as part of the herd. We are after all social beings.
Till this date, I am still amaze why we look to analyst and economist for their forecast. Historically, they have always been wrong in the long run (I think gambling in the casino gives you higher odds.=D ) How many of them recommended Apple when iTunes was launched and its share was at $7 instead of $500? How many foresaw the crashes and booms?
Wow you have just proved Greed is Nature Not Nurture !!!!