User:Vtaylor/Financial stories


 * big ideas - world markets are a mess, broken, potential damage credibility of financial, legal, government, widespread moral bankruptcy
 * /follow up/

== In the beginning==

in no particular order yet
 * /Financial reality basics, common misinformation/ - inflation, deflation, broken window
 * /Saving, speculation and investment/
 * /Taxes and taxation/ - government spending
 * /Unintended consequences/
 * /Healthcare/ ? entitlements
 * /Program trading, market manipulation/ - SEC, fraud, corruption
 * /Indicators - leading, trailing and misleading/
 * /Commodities, crude and gold/
 * /Real estate, property/
 * /War, peace and the military/
 * /Money, monetary and fiscal phenomenon/ - currency, Federal Reserve
 * /Democracy, liberty and government/ - political, constitution
 * /Workers, jobs and education/

This is financial reality - the true stories of distorting financial markets, rewarding reckless lenders, punishing savers, and misallocating capital from August 2004 to the present. These are stories selected from the 2000+ blog posts by an independent investor who makes his living from the returns on the family's investments. An engineer by education, he spent most of his career as an executive in high-tech, although he also spent time in banking.


 * first post August 17, 2004 - quoting George Soros, the well-known hedge fund operator: “Economic history is a never-ending series of episodes based on falsehoods and lies, not truths. It represents the path to big money. The object is to recognize the trend whose premise is false, ride that trend, and step off before it is discredited.” Words to heed. This blog will contain my thoughts on what’s fact and what’s fiction along with editorial asides and rants that will no doubt have a decidedly libertarian and Austrian (economics) bent. Nothing in this blog should be taken as investment advice of any kind.


 * selection of "stories" from financial reality - I learned from that...


 * decline of American - degenerates to the US - sociopathic leaders in government, business, education


 * public optimism


 * Dan Arly - connection to real money


 * Robert Prechter - social climate, movies

== Historical notes==


 * August 18, 2004 Google reduced the size and price range for its IPO today.

== Editor notes==

Information from other sources that help understand the big picture and the context for Financial Reality remarks


 * Hussman
 * every P/E multiple is simply a shorthand for proper discounted cash-flow methods, because there are countless assumptions about growth, margins, return on invested capital and other factors quietly baked inside. Like price-to-forward operating earnings multiples, even our old price-to-peak earnings metric has been rendered misleading due to historically high profit margins. Of course, we knew that was happening even before the credit crisis began, and believe that numerous widely-followed valuation measures remain distorted by record profit margins here.
 * broad economic drivers and aggregate output (real personal income, real personal consumption, real final sales, global output, real GDP, and even employment growth)
 * overvalued, overbought, overbullish conditions, and other variants that capture a general syndrome of "overextended market coupled with a loss of supporting factors"


 * Socionomics - as sign of the times - books like A Game of Thrones - It portrays a chaotic and unpredictable political struggle peopled with complex characters whose morals come in all shades of gray. It visits and revisits the grisly details of such themes as betrayal, immolation, hanging, beheading, amputation, poisoning, cannibalism, incest, disinherited bastard children, deformities and prostitution, to name just a few. Thrones garnered widespread acclaim during a Primary-degree advance in the stock market. But critically, the advance has been a bear-market rally that has occurred eleven years into a historic Supercycle-degree bear market.

== Learn more...==

Additional references and sources of information about concepts and financial mechanisms that are beyond the scope of this summary (and the editor's brain capacity).


 * All hyperinflations are built on this dynamic. ... So significant inflation is ultimately not a monetary phenomenon as much as it is a fiscal one. -- Hussman