Lad. FWIW, I read more financial posts than alien ones, although I'll note that one of the big contributors to SETI is the Gordon Moore Foundation
I appreciate you raising all of the issue you've raised over this year. It is forced me to dig deeper if only to prove you wrong
.
I've been less aggressive about buying financial stocks, because I've realized after reading your and others post that it is possible (but not probable) that "this time
maybe different". So I have recently resisted the temptation to buy with both fist the 30-40% sale on stocks we have been having. I think there are benefits to diversification, but I don't think it is useful to worry about financial Armageddon.
If the SP drops to 400-500 as RockON says
MAY happen, having 10% of my assets in oil or gold just isn't going to help out enough even if they double or triple in price. Or worse yet if we see deflation as you've discussed, nothing is going to help.
My portfolio has been battered, and it is hard to get used to watching 100+ year old banks like Wells Fargo, or Bank of America move up and down 10-30% in a day. Still I focus on dividends and interest. This year I've have had 21 companies increases dividend vs one (soon to be 2) which cut. So despite lower interest rates my income increased this year even while my net worth decreased.
Yes, I am by nature fairly optimistic. Perhaps because I study history a lot, I try to maintain an historical context, so while the world looks more scary now than in the mid 1990s, compared to virtually any other period in the last 100 years, it looks pretty good. We are not looking at double digit unemployment rates, inflation rates, widespread deflation. hundreds of banks aren't failing, the rest of the world is enjoying higher living standard.
Modern country ruled by madman aren't trying to take over the world, Communism is almost dead, we aren't being threatened by 10,000 nuclear warheads, AIDs isn't going wipe out the human race, race rights aren't burning our cities, our political leaders aren't been routinely targeted for assassination. We even have two much better than average guys running for President.
