I just came across this interesting article and wanted to share it with you as this is quite disturbing on what is going on with this whole bailout crap.
Published on Sunday, March 22, 2009 by Rolling Stone
At a time when my personal investments are the last things that I want to think about, I think it’s critical to make sure that I am positioned well for a recovery. Trillions of dollars and other currencies are pumped out by governments into our economies around the world, companies trimming down costs and they are going trough restructuring cost cuts, exactly the same as it was last time when we were in trouble, companies letting people go like crazy, mortgage rates are finally dropping, they are at around 5%, it’s a great time to invest I think. Problem that I can see is not to many people are confident with investing, people got burned so many times, I can say that from the bottom of my heart, but now, if you do not invest in such time you will eventually miss the opportunity. Rich people, they invest and they make killing, so many people made millions on recent bounce, Citi bank was for less than a $1, few days later it was over $3, that’s 300% profit gain, to bad I cannot invest in banks and other such institutions what are being bailed out, if government made such position of not letting those institutions to go under there is slight chance that they would fail, you can still lose money on investment in such shady institutions but risk is much smaller compared to Enron or MCI collapses in my opinion.
Anyway usually in times like this, I do not have money to invest and I always miss on opportunity, which sucks, and I do believe a lot of people are like me. Not only that, if you do not have a job last thing on your mind is investing, which is so wrong, but then yet again, investing is like gambling so I am not saying you should do it, playing safe it’s always a good bet, but then again, the riskier it gets the most rewards you can get at the same time.
Before stocks started to go down in 2007 I did make around 50% of my 401k into cash, so when stocks were failing I was able to lose not that much money as otherwise, now when S&P is around 60% lower since its peek I do believe its time to rethink my investment a bit, so few days ago I did take 15% of my cash and I did reallocate it towards other funds that lost lots of money, I don’t know if I did the right thing but I did allocate more to investments that lost more money and fewer dollar amounts to investments that did not lose that much. I did not want to risk too much because I heard different people saying it can go down even further, so I just wanted to play safe. For next few weeks I do believe market will go slightly higher, but then it might still go down, but eventually it will rebound and companies will start reporting profits. What’s kind of bad is that wall street always compares last year’s quarter to this quarter results, they do not compare that much year after year, so of course after you have low interest rates, banks lending money, banks making profits again, companies restructured and finally starting to turn around, all of a sudden there is uptrend. Banks like a Citi bank already said they made billions this year, so is it a recovery time? A lot of politicians FED chairmen said we will rebound in 2009, and hey, I think it might happen, all we need is for companies’ say we making profits and our quarter is better than last year’s one.
One last comment that I wanted to make is the fact that investing on a regular basis is a great thing; 401K is best example of it. I used to invest trough my companies that I did work in the past with, they were taking money out of my paycheck every time I got one, over time it did accumulate. Make sure you invest at minimum what company is matching, this way you getting 100% return on your money, even if they matching like 50-80%, it’s worth it, that’s all free money for you. Then when you invest every month, every paycheck, you just keep buying funds/stocks or whatever, at high and low prices, but over time you are the winner. I am not a day trader, I cannot buy and sell stocks daily, so I am looking for long time investment, and that is great opportunity to do that. Over all with all the investments in my 401k plan, with all the interest, dividends and other returns which were reinvested, I am way ahead of what I would have otherwise. I believe this is great investment if you asked me. So over a year ago I did open an account at vanguard for my son, and I do put on a regular basis monthly few dollars to his funds, right now after all this market collapse I am actually below what I did put in into this investment but I am very confident that this will eventually start paying off. That’s exactly what happened in 2000 when I started to work at Sotheby’s, stock market was at its peak, everything was so expensive, so when I started to put money into 401k there I did see investment shrinking like there is no tomorrow, but eventually it did rebound and I did end up with much more than what I did put in. It’s worth to invest this way rather than just play market like a day trader.
Yahoo had article on their website which is so disturbing in my opinion. Someone is making such a big dope of money. Mark my words, banks will be the biggest threat to humanity in the near future. Look at the following:
1) Banks are buying other banks for nothing, or very little $$$, JP Morgan for example, they got some institutions with FED’s help for nothing, seriously nothing. Multibillion dollar company sold for fraction of a cost, which is insane.
2) Banks are getting loans from FED in billions of dollars.
3) Money that we are “giving” away to AIG is ending up at banks anyway in form of insurance payments from AIG. According to yahoo $90 billions of bailout money went towards banks on top of what we did bailout already.
Have you ever lost luggage? Was anything ever been taken from your luggage without your knowledge? Was it ever opened by someone other than you while it was in flight? All those issues are quite valid and a huge concern and no one is doing anything about this. I am seriously sick and tired of whoever is behind handling our luggage’s that they would be punished for stealing or tampering with our private property. I am happy that this 21 year old Yalle student who was flying on December 17th between New Heaven and Cincinnati, who arrived at the destination found his luggage but Xbox 360 was missing and now is suing US Airways for $1 million dollars. He suing airline carrier for damages for loosing his Xbox 360, it certainly did not get legs to just walk on its own, that’s pure stilling. They should have cameras all over the place and they should put people behind bars for stealing… I do understand that there is a security concern but that’s why there are all the checks at the airport, after that luggage should never been open. We as a passengers should have a right to insure our luggage’s for any amount we want, and airlines should not have limits. If I am unable to take luggage with me into cabin and I do need to transport something in the luggage compartment it is a responsibility of an airline to take good care of it and to make sure it will arrive safely with me at the destination. That should be given… Way to go Jesse!!! Sue their ass off, and I hope this will put stop to all luggage stealing that is going on… TSA workers should be also responsible for this type behavior as well…
My itouch every now and then gets its date screwed up, it is so annoying but I found a way to fix it. Fix is quite simple, all you have to do is open itunes, go to preferences menu and remove your backup file. Next time you sync your itouch or iphone it should get corrected date.
Ah, when we are on a subject, why the hell apple does not let programs access internal clock and be able to modify it? There are some nice clocks, one of them is atomic clock, if it only could set system’s time. Apple is freaking control freaking company, I hate this about apple since forever, that’s why I never got apple/mac before. Years ago, Apple, the same like Commodore Amiga wanted to control their market share, Commodore Amiga did not survive such idiotic path, and to be honest apple also almost did not survive, all of a sudden they did turn around and today they are quite strong, but what made them able to do so was to open up their systems a little and not sell proprietary stuff. Its so funny people do argue that if Apple wanted they could make chip and inexpensive desktops and laptops but they do not want it… that’s why they do not have big market share… Apple is making money still, well because they have fanatics buying those systems, I am not saying that systems are not nice, they are actually very very nice, but for me they are way to expensive… Ehh, it is just a matter of taste and choice… 
Apple, give people cut and paste already, freaking everyone is complaining about this. I have my itouch since what November? How many times since then I’ve heard complains about this? Ah, on the same tone, why the hell there is limit of 140 apps only? That is so damn stupid. I did fill up my limit of apps, I wish I could jailbreak my itouch, but its 2nd gen so hack is not possible at this moment, but I would hack it just for being able to install more applications. As I said Apple is so stupid, because if I had more space for apps I would purchase more of them, if I have no space I am limited to what I can buy, that’s like shutting yourself in a foot… Apple get your act together and do those simple things, make people happy, after all that’s why people are buying your stuff because it suppose to be amazing experience….
What the heck is going wrong? I am so afraid of the future. Stock market went down to the lowest levels in 12 years. AIG reported biggest quarter drop in the corporate history, 62 billion dollars, FED is now giving additional 30 billion dollars to AIG and people saying it’s not over, they already received over 160 billion and they might get as much as 250 billion or quarter of a trillion if you will. Concept of millions vs. billions and trillions just is the same for people now days, when did this concept change? I can’t even image a million dollars and they are talking about billion of them, or trillion.
So why are we bailing out AIG? Well AIG is an International Insurance Company; they are in very risky business of insuring different things against different kind of odds, one of which was home mortgage insurance. AIG has 74 million insurance policies in 130 countries worldwide and it covers everything, it insures major airlines against catastrophes, it insures big Hollywood movies against injuries to their stars, it even insures oil companies against hurricanes wrecking their offshore rigs. All pretty standard stuff but here is why company is tanking. AIG insured millions of mortgages that were repackaged and resold to investors and lost billions when home market collapsed and housing bubble bursted and now it has to pay out on those policies. So question is why? We all need insurance for everything in our lives, that how it became a standard in American we are just forced to take insurance for everything. What would happen if AIG would fail? Nobody knows, no one can predict or even is trying to predict it. In my opinion we should let it fail. What pisses me off is the fact that our government is so selective to whom we bailing out and whom we not bailing out. We did let ENRON, MCI/WorldCom fail, we did let small banks fail, we do not care about small businesses to fail, but we do care about big banks not to fail. That is so screwed up; it seems to me like friends help friends survive and who cares about others. Approach, that it seems to me as a motto of the game where FED is helping big banks to survive and let others under, you either with us or against us, play by our rules type mentality. If FED was lending our money to the big banks to give them liquidity to help people refinance their homes or turn around home sales not to drop so much further then why the heck banks don’t lower mortgage rates to make them affordable again? Why banks such as Citi or Chase are slamming us customers with any possible fees? Why those banks giving us such low interests and keeping all money to themselves and in particular rewarding themselves for failures with big bonuses? Banks are afraid to lend to each other? Why? What is wrong with them? What’s so shady that they do not trust each other? So big deal, today City announced that it will help out people to lover their mortgages by $500 for 3 months if they lost their jobs. City bank, I have few words to you, screw you, too little too late to make such gesture after so much pressure and after such big screw-up, your reputation in my mind is all broken. I am pissed about this whole situation because I am so afraid of the future of our country. $1400 is how much each American is bailing out AIG so far. How about other costs of other bailouts?
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