Originally Posted by
KC10 FATboy
I personally don't see 2010 being a good year for us (DAL or the country). Just as bad as the housing market hit our banks, the commercial real estate market rears its ugly head starting this summer. Already, nearly 50% of those loans have defaulted (or so I heard on the news this morning). This will put a tremendous strain on the already fragile financial system. Many banks will not survive it because they are too far leveraged into these bad loans. This can very easily be the tip of the iceberg for a double-dip recession. Don't forget, we still lost 400,000 jobs last month.
There could be a few other triggers starting in Europe. Who knows how they will deal with the impending problem. That alone will determine how the world economy fairs.
Just as the experts are divided on a "double dip" so are many corporations. We have held ground on the Dow and other indexes. (A lot better than I would have thought)
Any one major thing will send it up or down. Most are just waiting.
Finally, what's scary is that our federal government can not, and is not taking in enough money to pay the interest on the debt they've created. Considering they can print money, they probably will. But China has warned use officially three times now not to do that. Equally worrisome is that China recently decided not to finance as much of our debt as they usually do.
Foreigners cut Treasury stakes; rates could rise - Yahoo! Finance
That's going to put our currency in a tailspin when the federal government starts printing money in order to pay the debt that we owe.
That is one theory.
US government goes and asks for more loans, China and other say no, US government tells Fed to print money, Fed says no, then the Executive branch takes over the Fed and prints away. Far fetched, but anything is possible.
Johnso,
Many need to beleive in the human spirit, but people also need to understand the state of the worlds overall financial health.
If you want to point fingers on spending and getting us to 14 plus trillion in debt you need to look back over the history of your life and the administration that was more than likely in office the day you were born. Everyone has played a part in getting here. It is fun to run the credit card bill up knowing that you will have moved or died by the time it comes arrives. America and many other countries need to realize that the debt needs to be paid, or allow the currency to devalue to the point that our debt is worth pennies on the dollar.
Inflation allows for the latter.
To tie that in to us, that is why I prefer a COLA bump each year versus a standard percentage. That or min % or COLA whichever is greater. If you want to go crazy, you could also write in the PWA a secondary currency.