Ilargi: If today is any guide, my prediction yesterday that we might be in for a rough week looks spot on. Major corporations announced a minimum of 60.000 job losses. In one morning. The fact that this leads to stock exchanges doing happy dances, with London up close to 4%, and Amsterdam 6%, makes me lose what little faith I might have had left in our societies. As long as one man's misery is another man's profit in such a direct cause and effect line, there cannot be much of a future left.
What galls me in an equal fashion is reading about Citigroup buying a new $50 million corporate jet with its $50 billion taxpayer bail-out money. Or the ex-CEO of Deutsche Post, a semi-government institution as far as I can tell, getting a suspended sentence and a $1 million fine for sludging over $1 billion away from the German people. No jail, and an 0.1% fine. Justice, here we come. Or John Thain, who offers to pay back the $1.2 million he spent on his office while firing his employees. I think John Thain should by now be incapable of paying such amounts, period. Merrill Lynch paid out billions of dollars in bonuses when it was already clear they were going down and being bought up by Bank of America, with, there's the term once again, taxpayers' money. Confiscate it.
Yes the perverse reaction of the stock markets to mass layoffs is a harbinger of the investors' depravity. Peacenik thinks the stock markets are totally detached from reality. The markets glom onto the smallest fact and race up. Meanwhile the house of cards has completely fallen down. Wall Street is now totally occupied by a bunch of Baghdad Bobs. When will everyone finally clue in. Peacenik thinks never. They will never clue in. The Dow will trade down into the low 7000's and someone will start a rumour that Buffet is buying in. Larry Kudlow will call the bottom for the 60th consecutive week. And there will be a rally. But the rallies will be smaller and smaller and shorter and shorter. As everything falls to zero.
