Market comments for Aug. 4th

Lots of commentary this morning on CNBC by a guest economist, David Gerstenhager, President of Argonaut Capital Management, who says the real threat to the economy is deflation, not inflation and that it is already here in the Housing Sector and the Auto Sector. He was joined by another Chief Economist and former Consultant to the Treasury. They both said the best investment is 10 year Treasuries and that 30 year Treasuries are even better. He sees deflation affecting Corporate earnings negatively, as well. That was an interesting long term view and especially on the super positive cable channel, CNBC, which tends to hype up the market. I agree and have been saying that Deflation is the problem and has been for a while.

Today's chart is on the Dow Gold Ratio from Chart of the Day with my own modifications based upon Monday's close. As you can see the Dow/Gold ratio is 9.0 currently and it continues to go down as the trend shows.

Capitalism has failed and so should the Republican's mantra

With the bailouts of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae yesterday, and the recent bailout of Bear Sterns, there is no Free Enterprise system. We are slowly becoming a socialist state without the benefits of socialism for the general public such as healthcare for all. Discussions this morning on CNBC focused on whether the next sector to get bailed out would be the Auto sector or the Airlines. The guests said that the Government has already partially bailed out the auto industry giving about $40 billion to bring it back to life.

Do you know what a bailout really is? It is when the Federal Reserve prints more paper money. They have the printing presses and all they have to do is start them up and run the machines as long as they need to generate cash. What the effect of doing this is, that our real net worth as a country drops, our currency can't buy what it use to, and we are poorer as a nation. It may look as though you still have so many dollars in the Bank. But the result of printing more money is that outsiders want more dollars for their goods and that causes inflation to rise.

All this is a result of the last 8 years of the Bush/Cheney Administration and the Republican brand of government. What ever happened to letting bad investments fail? Oh, I know as long as those investments belong to the middle and lower class, it's OK if they fail. But if those investments belong to the wealthiest of Americans and Corporate leaders, we have a duty to bail them out using our tax money to pay for the bailout.

Shame, shame, shame!

The Free Enterprise system isn’t so free as the Republicans claim, is it?