June 8 2009: Not by a longshot

Yes there is a stock market rally going on right now....as you read. But like the mad dentist in Marathon Man, Peacenik wonders: Is it safe? Is it safe? Ilargi doesn't seem to think so in his article below. There was an interesting comment to one of Ilargi's recent posts. Is it safe to buy an annuity or should one cash out an RRSP and pay the tax. Stoneleigh's answer was to cash out the RRSP. Thats right. Rather than trust Sun Life or Manulife will still be in business 5 or 10 years down the road Stoneleigh was saying take the cash. Is it safe?

Leo Kolovakis at the blog Pension Pulse notes some of the green shoots in his post Full Steam Ahead. The Baltic Dry Index is going up. The OECD sees some improvement in the world's economy. The markets are up. Is it safe? What do you think? Peacenik doesn't feel safe.

Ilargi: The financial mess has now gotten to a point where Wall Street veterans are starting to speak out and question why the Obama administration does what it does, and how much longer it thinks it can continue doing it.

Sandy B. Lewis and William D. Cohan make clear in the New York Times that they have no confidence in the policies conducted so far, since they are based on deeply flawed assumptions about what is wrong in the first place, and the loudly promised and much touted transparency Obama couldn't stop talking about not so long ago is nowhere to be found. Lewis and Cohan pose a series of queries. They start off addressing the part the public has unwittingly been cast in:

Why is so much effort being put into propping up those at the top of the economic pyramid — the money-center banks, the insurance companies, the hedge funds and so forth — when during a period of deflation like the one we are in, any recovery will come only by restoring the confidence of the people down at the bottom of the pyramid?

Read on...