Post by jeffolie on Mar 23, 2012 19:57:40 GMT -6
my jeffolie' The BIG PICTURE OF STOCKS: S&P 500 going 1500...then 800 (SWAG)
I. "Secular Bear Markets" www.thestreet.com/comment/investing/10260656.html
First I want to define "Secular Bear Market" as not just a single bear market decline of 20%. Rather I define "Secular Bear Market" as one lasting 10 to 30 years. For examples: 30 years of 1870 to 1900; 26 years of 1929 to 1955; 16 years of 1966 to 1982; and, now, 13 years+, 1998 to now still in progress.
"Secular Bear Markets" are long, volite, big swings for years lasting 16 to 30 years where declines exceed 20%.
"Secular Bear Market" have 1 industry leading the top, the different tops usually have different industries leading each top and each bottom. This industry switching is known as 'industry rotation'. Often some hard, materials oriented industry is one of the peaks such as Oil, Metals, Real Estate and bottoms. The current "Secular Bear Market" industry rotations include the tech stocks in 2000, Financial stocks in 2007, and now Apples leads the techs up in 2012 with other techs related to the coming soon Facebook IPO.
Here is one site's chart " ... 16-Year Trading Range
On the 100-year chart, take a close look at the bear market prior to the most recent bull. It's the 1966-82 trading range. On the long-term chart, it looks like a fairly benign flat range. In reality, it was a volatile, dangerous period: www.thestreet.com/comment/investing/10260656.html
II. Where are we now
my jeffolie opinion: The current "Secular Bear Market" industry rotations were tech stocks in 2000, Financial stocks in 2007, and now Apples leads the techs up in 2012 with other techs related to the coming soon Facebook IPO.
III. Where are we going: S&P 500 Index to 1500 May 2012 then down to 800 Oct 2016
my jeffolie opinion: another leg down is coming after the peak this May to June period. The next decline by definition will be 20% or more with the potential to break below the recent "Secular Bear Market" low set at S&P 500's 666 mark, but the difficulty may be if inflation or devaluation changes the benchmark's value from a significantly declining Dollar in 2014 and/or beyond. Some "Secular Bear Markets"do not have a capitulation or last great stock collapse, but rather end with a meager bear market that merely returns to the long term moving average of slightly below in nominal Dollars. Nothing is certain about the last leg down. For a different example, see a 25 year in progress "Secular Bear Market" in Japan's stock market from 1988 to now.
When is the next bottom? About 4 years out from the coming top most likely if the past patterns hold true to form, 2016 often in the Fall in August to October with Sept & Oct 2016 more likely than not. Nothing is for certain in SWAGs (Speculative, Wild, Ass, Guess' s) such as this. I favor a Mark Twain attribute on using the past as predicting the future: “History doesn't repeat itself - at best it sometimes rhymes”.
IV The Banks and Financials
The Banks and Financials usually participate in "Secular Bear Market" as a leading industry that usually is 1 of the tops and one or more of the bottom industry extremes as well.
Bart presented the Financials using now the Philadelphia Banking Index (see below). Today the financials using the Philadelphia Banking Index have jumped about 50%, in part by investing in stocks like a mutual fund would do including Apple. Financials other than in the Banking Index now include the sub category of big investments vehicles called Hedge Funds which often are vehicles for institutions such as pension & insurance portfolios to 'juice up' their investment portfolio's returns. 509 Hedge Funds now own Apple which alone jumped 20% in the new year 2012 (from breaking over 500 to now as I post about 600 = 20% gain).
Hating banks and investment corporations such as Goldman Sachs is popular as a villian for many groups including Occupy Wall Street. They are greedy, unworthy, evil villians aptly characterized by opponents. None the less, the financials are a useful tool to observe 'industry rotations' at tops and bottoms during a "Secular Bear Market".
Below is a piece very bearish on the fundamentals of the Banks and Financials. (see below "Secular Bear Market to Grip Wall Street") trashing the future earning potential of Financials and Banks. None the less the Index jumped 50% but is not the current 'Industry Rotation' super star which now has Apple ... the tech stocks.
V. The big volume players: HFT High Frequency Traders, algorithms.
"... By 2010 high-frequency trading accounted for over 70% of equity trades taking place in the US and was rapidly growing in popularity in Europe and Asia. Aiming to capture just a fraction of a penny per share or currency unit on every trade, high-frequency traders move in and out of such short-term positions several times each day. Fractions of a penny accumulate fast to produce significantly positive results at the end of every day. High-frequency trading firms do not employ significant leverage, do not accumulate positions, and typically liquidate their entire portfolios on a daily basis. ... " en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading
Banks, financial investment departments, financial participate in the cash cows of HFT. Strangely, location...location...location real estate to house the HFT computers closest to the trading floors determine significant time advantages in nano seconds that make or break HFT profits.
===============================================
Bart's Dow Jones Industrial Average prediction www.nowandfutures.com/forecast.html#predict_dow
Our prediction is based on the inflation definition of "more money than goods" and therefore when more money is created (or people think its being created) than goods, it goes into things like financial assets or real estate. For the prediction below, we use many different money measures from the Federal Reserve, and then add a varying time lag since it takes time for the money to get fully into the economy after it has been created.
Also Donald Coxe, US Portfolio Strategist within the Research Department of BMO Nesbitt Burns, had this to say in early April 2005: "Virtually all severe stock market setbacks are preceded by underperformance of financial stocks, and the selloff tends to continue until the financials start to outperform. 1987 was a classic example of this phenomenon. The sharp underperformance of the NYSE Financials was the warning of coming horrors. ... Regrettably, the NYSE Financials Index was discontinued some years ago; it had a nearly perfect warning record. Its successor, the Philadelphia Banking Index (in place since Aug 1994), seems to have filled its shoes admirably."
stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=$BKX&p=D&b=1&g=0&id=p32331465551
UP about 50% in the last 6 months ... 33 in Oct. to 50 now
========================================================
Secular Bear Market to Grip Wall Street
March 23, 2012 (MarketWatch.com)
Commentary: Big financial firms will get a taste of own medicine
By Howard Gold
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Stocks are hitting post-crisis highs, unemployment is falling and even housing sales are putting up their best numbers in years.
On Wall Street, however, it’s still the winter of their discontent. The giant firms that were instrumental in causing the financial crisis (they had plenty of help, of course) were saved from themselves by taxpayers’ money and zero interest rates, courtesy of Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke.
Reuters
They had spectacular years in 2009 and 2010 and paid out huge bonuses to their undeserving minions, just as if nothing had happened. The public, suffering through the worst recession since the 1930s, was understandably outraged.
But, oh ye of little faith, justice and retribution are at hand. Market forces and a regulatory tidal wave are bearing down on these Masters of the Universe. The big firms are slashing bonuses, laying off workers and getting out of markets they had no business being in in the first place.
In coming years, these firms will earn less and shareholders may put more pressure on managements to improve profitability — the same kind of heat Wall Street puts on everyone else.
It all points to a secular bear market for Wall Street, no matter how the rest of the economy does. In financial speak, secular means caused by structural forces rather than the normal ebbs and flows of the market cycle.
Last week’s public resignation by Goldman Sachs Group /quotes/zigman/188479/quotes/nls/gs GS +1.15% vice president Greg Smith in the New York Times was more than just a take-this-job-and-shove-it message. It was a symptom. These things happen in bear markets, when rats jump off sinking ships. In this case, the rat ratted out his employer.
The former Goldman employee called the environment at the firm “toxic and destructive” and wrote, “It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off.”
Read Howard Gold’s previous take on conflicts of interest at Goldman Sachs on MoneyShow.com.
Big changes on Wall Street
Roy Smith, a former Goldman partner who now teaches finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business, isn’t sympathetic to Greg Smith because “he made it seem like Goldman Sachs could and did rip clients off all the time.” But “the clients Goldman serves…have the opportunity and do shop their business around,” he said in an interview.
That aside, Prof. Smith acknowledges there have been big changes at Goldman and throughout Wall Street as “seat of the pants” traders were replaced by quants and Ph.Ds brandishing sophisticated mathematical models. Competition has intensified across all businesses.
After the dot-com bust and the Eliot Spitzer investigations, Wall Street appeared chastened. But then the Fed’s low interest rates under Alan Greenspan sparked the blow-off stage of the decade-long housing boom.
Firms like Goldman, Morgan Stanley /quotes/zigman/182639/quotes/nls/ms MS +3.78% , Merrill Lynch — now owned by Bank of America /quotes/zigman/190927/quotes/nls/bac BAC +2.60% — and others, like the late and unlamented Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, jumped in to package, sell and trade AAA-rated securities backed by rotten mortgages. And with regulators’ complaisance, these firms levered up those bets by 30 or 40 to 1.
Result: Financial firms’ earnings catapulted from 19% of all U.S. corporate profits in 1986 to a whopping 41% in 2006. It was all based on funny money, though, so when the inevitable crash came it almost took the rest of us with it.
“This whole business was … in a rocket ride from the 1980s until now, but in doing so, it created a systemic threat to the world,” Prof. Smith told me.
But now those markets have been decimated, and the Street has been forced to compete for a shrinking pie. Equities? Individuals have abandoned the stock market, leaving it to high-frequency traders making fractions of a cent per unit on each trade.
Mergers and acquisitions are way down, and so are initial public offerings, traditional paths to big fees on Wall Street. Even Facebook, the IPO of the decade, won’t be a bonanza for the firms running the offering, who are reportedly taking in only a 1.1% underwriting fee. They usually make 6%-7%. Sorry, bankers, it’s grilled cheese sandwiches instead of truffles on this one.
Business is so bad, Prof. Smith told me, that the Street’s return on investment has been less than its cost of capital for the past three years, for a negative economic value added (EVA), a critical metric. I’ve always thought these firms subtracted value, but now it’s official.
“That means we have to admit these firms have structural problems,” Prof. Smith said.
And these problems are about to get much worse as regulators tighten their grip.
Are there too many psychopaths on Wall Street? Read Howard Gold’s view in The Independent Agenda.
Tougher regulation
After the crisis, governments around the world passed new laws and guidelines to control the crazed speculation that nearly wrecked the global economy. The U.S., U.K., EU and Switzerland all toughened capital requirements, reduced leverage and put systemically risky institutions on a very short leash.
The most important rules are Basel III, drafted by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, and the Dodd-Frank Act, signed by President Obama in July 2010. These will force banks to hold a lot more capital in reserve against losses, pass periodic stress tests, change compensation practices and, in the case of Dodd-Frank’s Volcker Rule, divest themselves of riskier operations like proprietary trading.
Congress made a mess out of Dodd-Frank, dropping on regulators’ laps the unenviable task of writing dozens of new rules. Banks and securities firms are lobbying furiously to stave off the most draconian of those regulations, but the law already has changed how they do business.
“All these things are going to require banks to hold considerable amounts of capital,” Prof. Smith told me. “These guys may as well say goodbye to their business models of 2007, the kind of swashbuckling attitude that’s showing up in the Greg Smith article. My guess is, we will see some of the firms making drastic changes.”
Job No. 1 must be cutting the fat bonuses which analyst Mike Mayo has called an entitlement rather than an incentive. “Compensation follows the economics of these businesses,” Prof. Smith said.
Already New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli has forecasted Wall Street compensation will drop 14% this year. Industry profits, however, have been cut in half. I hope shareholders will pressure banks to get their compensation ratios down. What other industry besides Wall Street pays its employees half its revenues before the companies’ owners see a dime?
Firms already have restructured compensation to pay employees over a longer period and force them to keep more skin in the game. At Morgan Stanley, cash bonuses reportedly have been capped at $125,000. You or I would grab that in a nanosecond, but that’s what Wall Streeters used to spend each year to light their cigars.
Responding to complaints, Morgan Stanley’s CEO James Gorman said: “If you’re really unhappy, just leave.” Nice. Especially when some 200,000 people in the financial industry worldwide lost their jobs in 2011.
Read Howard Gold’s piece on why no bankers are in jail after the financial crisis on MoneyShow.com.
Now I rarely indulge in schadenfreude, the German word for taking pleasure in other people’s misfortunes. And I don’t wish ill for the thousands of office personnel, IT people and other average folks who work for these firms.
But I can’t help but smile at the angst overpaid Wall Streeter bankers face in this new world. Little by little they’re getting their deserved comeuppance, and there’s more to come.
“We’re going through a dark, dark tunnel,” said Prof. Smith. And there’s no sign of light on the other side. Hallelujah.
Howard R. Gold is a columnist at MarketWatch and editor at large for MoneyShow.com. You can follow him on Twitter @howardrgold and catch his political commentary at www.independentagenda.com.
www.marketwatch.com/story/secular....23?pagenumber=2
Read more: unlawflcombatnt.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=financial&thread=10472&page=1#ixzz1pzleTjzE
I. "Secular Bear Markets" www.thestreet.com/comment/investing/10260656.html
First I want to define "Secular Bear Market" as not just a single bear market decline of 20%. Rather I define "Secular Bear Market" as one lasting 10 to 30 years. For examples: 30 years of 1870 to 1900; 26 years of 1929 to 1955; 16 years of 1966 to 1982; and, now, 13 years+, 1998 to now still in progress.
"Secular Bear Markets" are long, volite, big swings for years lasting 16 to 30 years where declines exceed 20%.
"Secular Bear Market" have 1 industry leading the top, the different tops usually have different industries leading each top and each bottom. This industry switching is known as 'industry rotation'. Often some hard, materials oriented industry is one of the peaks such as Oil, Metals, Real Estate and bottoms. The current "Secular Bear Market" industry rotations include the tech stocks in 2000, Financial stocks in 2007, and now Apples leads the techs up in 2012 with other techs related to the coming soon Facebook IPO.
Here is one site's chart " ... 16-Year Trading Range
On the 100-year chart, take a close look at the bear market prior to the most recent bull. It's the 1966-82 trading range. On the long-term chart, it looks like a fairly benign flat range. In reality, it was a volatile, dangerous period: www.thestreet.com/comment/investing/10260656.html
II. Where are we now
my jeffolie opinion: The current "Secular Bear Market" industry rotations were tech stocks in 2000, Financial stocks in 2007, and now Apples leads the techs up in 2012 with other techs related to the coming soon Facebook IPO.
III. Where are we going: S&P 500 Index to 1500 May 2012 then down to 800 Oct 2016
my jeffolie opinion: another leg down is coming after the peak this May to June period. The next decline by definition will be 20% or more with the potential to break below the recent "Secular Bear Market" low set at S&P 500's 666 mark, but the difficulty may be if inflation or devaluation changes the benchmark's value from a significantly declining Dollar in 2014 and/or beyond. Some "Secular Bear Markets"do not have a capitulation or last great stock collapse, but rather end with a meager bear market that merely returns to the long term moving average of slightly below in nominal Dollars. Nothing is certain about the last leg down. For a different example, see a 25 year in progress "Secular Bear Market" in Japan's stock market from 1988 to now.
When is the next bottom? About 4 years out from the coming top most likely if the past patterns hold true to form, 2016 often in the Fall in August to October with Sept & Oct 2016 more likely than not. Nothing is for certain in SWAGs (Speculative, Wild, Ass, Guess' s) such as this. I favor a Mark Twain attribute on using the past as predicting the future: “History doesn't repeat itself - at best it sometimes rhymes”.
IV The Banks and Financials
The Banks and Financials usually participate in "Secular Bear Market" as a leading industry that usually is 1 of the tops and one or more of the bottom industry extremes as well.
Bart presented the Financials using now the Philadelphia Banking Index (see below). Today the financials using the Philadelphia Banking Index have jumped about 50%, in part by investing in stocks like a mutual fund would do including Apple. Financials other than in the Banking Index now include the sub category of big investments vehicles called Hedge Funds which often are vehicles for institutions such as pension & insurance portfolios to 'juice up' their investment portfolio's returns. 509 Hedge Funds now own Apple which alone jumped 20% in the new year 2012 (from breaking over 500 to now as I post about 600 = 20% gain).
Hating banks and investment corporations such as Goldman Sachs is popular as a villian for many groups including Occupy Wall Street. They are greedy, unworthy, evil villians aptly characterized by opponents. None the less, the financials are a useful tool to observe 'industry rotations' at tops and bottoms during a "Secular Bear Market".
Below is a piece very bearish on the fundamentals of the Banks and Financials. (see below "Secular Bear Market to Grip Wall Street") trashing the future earning potential of Financials and Banks. None the less the Index jumped 50% but is not the current 'Industry Rotation' super star which now has Apple ... the tech stocks.
V. The big volume players: HFT High Frequency Traders, algorithms.
"... By 2010 high-frequency trading accounted for over 70% of equity trades taking place in the US and was rapidly growing in popularity in Europe and Asia. Aiming to capture just a fraction of a penny per share or currency unit on every trade, high-frequency traders move in and out of such short-term positions several times each day. Fractions of a penny accumulate fast to produce significantly positive results at the end of every day. High-frequency trading firms do not employ significant leverage, do not accumulate positions, and typically liquidate their entire portfolios on a daily basis. ... " en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading
Banks, financial investment departments, financial participate in the cash cows of HFT. Strangely, location...location...location real estate to house the HFT computers closest to the trading floors determine significant time advantages in nano seconds that make or break HFT profits.
===============================================
Bart's Dow Jones Industrial Average prediction www.nowandfutures.com/forecast.html#predict_dow
Our prediction is based on the inflation definition of "more money than goods" and therefore when more money is created (or people think its being created) than goods, it goes into things like financial assets or real estate. For the prediction below, we use many different money measures from the Federal Reserve, and then add a varying time lag since it takes time for the money to get fully into the economy after it has been created.
Also Donald Coxe, US Portfolio Strategist within the Research Department of BMO Nesbitt Burns, had this to say in early April 2005: "Virtually all severe stock market setbacks are preceded by underperformance of financial stocks, and the selloff tends to continue until the financials start to outperform. 1987 was a classic example of this phenomenon. The sharp underperformance of the NYSE Financials was the warning of coming horrors. ... Regrettably, the NYSE Financials Index was discontinued some years ago; it had a nearly perfect warning record. Its successor, the Philadelphia Banking Index (in place since Aug 1994), seems to have filled its shoes admirably."
stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=$BKX&p=D&b=1&g=0&id=p32331465551
UP about 50% in the last 6 months ... 33 in Oct. to 50 now
========================================================
Secular Bear Market to Grip Wall Street
March 23, 2012 (MarketWatch.com)
Commentary: Big financial firms will get a taste of own medicine
By Howard Gold
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Stocks are hitting post-crisis highs, unemployment is falling and even housing sales are putting up their best numbers in years.
On Wall Street, however, it’s still the winter of their discontent. The giant firms that were instrumental in causing the financial crisis (they had plenty of help, of course) were saved from themselves by taxpayers’ money and zero interest rates, courtesy of Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke.
Reuters
They had spectacular years in 2009 and 2010 and paid out huge bonuses to their undeserving minions, just as if nothing had happened. The public, suffering through the worst recession since the 1930s, was understandably outraged.
But, oh ye of little faith, justice and retribution are at hand. Market forces and a regulatory tidal wave are bearing down on these Masters of the Universe. The big firms are slashing bonuses, laying off workers and getting out of markets they had no business being in in the first place.
In coming years, these firms will earn less and shareholders may put more pressure on managements to improve profitability — the same kind of heat Wall Street puts on everyone else.
It all points to a secular bear market for Wall Street, no matter how the rest of the economy does. In financial speak, secular means caused by structural forces rather than the normal ebbs and flows of the market cycle.
Last week’s public resignation by Goldman Sachs Group /quotes/zigman/188479/quotes/nls/gs GS +1.15% vice president Greg Smith in the New York Times was more than just a take-this-job-and-shove-it message. It was a symptom. These things happen in bear markets, when rats jump off sinking ships. In this case, the rat ratted out his employer.
The former Goldman employee called the environment at the firm “toxic and destructive” and wrote, “It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off.”
Read Howard Gold’s previous take on conflicts of interest at Goldman Sachs on MoneyShow.com.
Big changes on Wall Street
Roy Smith, a former Goldman partner who now teaches finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business, isn’t sympathetic to Greg Smith because “he made it seem like Goldman Sachs could and did rip clients off all the time.” But “the clients Goldman serves…have the opportunity and do shop their business around,” he said in an interview.
That aside, Prof. Smith acknowledges there have been big changes at Goldman and throughout Wall Street as “seat of the pants” traders were replaced by quants and Ph.Ds brandishing sophisticated mathematical models. Competition has intensified across all businesses.
After the dot-com bust and the Eliot Spitzer investigations, Wall Street appeared chastened. But then the Fed’s low interest rates under Alan Greenspan sparked the blow-off stage of the decade-long housing boom.
Firms like Goldman, Morgan Stanley /quotes/zigman/182639/quotes/nls/ms MS +3.78% , Merrill Lynch — now owned by Bank of America /quotes/zigman/190927/quotes/nls/bac BAC +2.60% — and others, like the late and unlamented Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, jumped in to package, sell and trade AAA-rated securities backed by rotten mortgages. And with regulators’ complaisance, these firms levered up those bets by 30 or 40 to 1.
Result: Financial firms’ earnings catapulted from 19% of all U.S. corporate profits in 1986 to a whopping 41% in 2006. It was all based on funny money, though, so when the inevitable crash came it almost took the rest of us with it.
“This whole business was … in a rocket ride from the 1980s until now, but in doing so, it created a systemic threat to the world,” Prof. Smith told me.
But now those markets have been decimated, and the Street has been forced to compete for a shrinking pie. Equities? Individuals have abandoned the stock market, leaving it to high-frequency traders making fractions of a cent per unit on each trade.
Mergers and acquisitions are way down, and so are initial public offerings, traditional paths to big fees on Wall Street. Even Facebook, the IPO of the decade, won’t be a bonanza for the firms running the offering, who are reportedly taking in only a 1.1% underwriting fee. They usually make 6%-7%. Sorry, bankers, it’s grilled cheese sandwiches instead of truffles on this one.
Business is so bad, Prof. Smith told me, that the Street’s return on investment has been less than its cost of capital for the past three years, for a negative economic value added (EVA), a critical metric. I’ve always thought these firms subtracted value, but now it’s official.
“That means we have to admit these firms have structural problems,” Prof. Smith said.
And these problems are about to get much worse as regulators tighten their grip.
Are there too many psychopaths on Wall Street? Read Howard Gold’s view in The Independent Agenda.
Tougher regulation
After the crisis, governments around the world passed new laws and guidelines to control the crazed speculation that nearly wrecked the global economy. The U.S., U.K., EU and Switzerland all toughened capital requirements, reduced leverage and put systemically risky institutions on a very short leash.
The most important rules are Basel III, drafted by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, and the Dodd-Frank Act, signed by President Obama in July 2010. These will force banks to hold a lot more capital in reserve against losses, pass periodic stress tests, change compensation practices and, in the case of Dodd-Frank’s Volcker Rule, divest themselves of riskier operations like proprietary trading.
Congress made a mess out of Dodd-Frank, dropping on regulators’ laps the unenviable task of writing dozens of new rules. Banks and securities firms are lobbying furiously to stave off the most draconian of those regulations, but the law already has changed how they do business.
“All these things are going to require banks to hold considerable amounts of capital,” Prof. Smith told me. “These guys may as well say goodbye to their business models of 2007, the kind of swashbuckling attitude that’s showing up in the Greg Smith article. My guess is, we will see some of the firms making drastic changes.”
Job No. 1 must be cutting the fat bonuses which analyst Mike Mayo has called an entitlement rather than an incentive. “Compensation follows the economics of these businesses,” Prof. Smith said.
Already New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli has forecasted Wall Street compensation will drop 14% this year. Industry profits, however, have been cut in half. I hope shareholders will pressure banks to get their compensation ratios down. What other industry besides Wall Street pays its employees half its revenues before the companies’ owners see a dime?
Firms already have restructured compensation to pay employees over a longer period and force them to keep more skin in the game. At Morgan Stanley, cash bonuses reportedly have been capped at $125,000. You or I would grab that in a nanosecond, but that’s what Wall Streeters used to spend each year to light their cigars.
Responding to complaints, Morgan Stanley’s CEO James Gorman said: “If you’re really unhappy, just leave.” Nice. Especially when some 200,000 people in the financial industry worldwide lost their jobs in 2011.
Read Howard Gold’s piece on why no bankers are in jail after the financial crisis on MoneyShow.com.
Now I rarely indulge in schadenfreude, the German word for taking pleasure in other people’s misfortunes. And I don’t wish ill for the thousands of office personnel, IT people and other average folks who work for these firms.
But I can’t help but smile at the angst overpaid Wall Streeter bankers face in this new world. Little by little they’re getting their deserved comeuppance, and there’s more to come.
“We’re going through a dark, dark tunnel,” said Prof. Smith. And there’s no sign of light on the other side. Hallelujah.
Howard R. Gold is a columnist at MarketWatch and editor at large for MoneyShow.com. You can follow him on Twitter @howardrgold and catch his political commentary at www.independentagenda.com.
www.marketwatch.com/story/secular....23?pagenumber=2
Read more: unlawflcombatnt.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=financial&thread=10472&page=1#ixzz1pzleTjzE