Changes to the Cara Global 100 list, Jan 3, 2009

I like those, especially: "once the stop loss is in place, it becomes the law, no matter how much I "like" the stock".

A couple more I'd like to add:
- ONLY trade with the trend
- Greed is not your friend. When technical indicators say the run is over, sell.

Although the opportunity was there for me to learn I did not learn enough. Bill, you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink really applies in my case. I was able to turn a 40% loss into a 15% loss overall, because of SLW and GG, thanks to Bill. 60% in cash and looking for some buying opportunities. Lost big on NOT (took my eye off the ball as it was falling and did not sell early enough and still holding. My love affair with Juniors is finally over! 2009 is looking good though and the lessons are finally starting to sink in. This horse will be doing some serious drinking this year. Cheers to all and a Happy New Year!

ALOHA !!

Nothing gives one perspective on current crisis than to look back at past crisis. While they are never the exact same they often rhyme very well!

READ ON:
In effect, Germany had embarked on a Keynesian policy: government spending became increasingly important in guiding the economy into the military channels that Hitler wanted. John T. Flynn noted that Franklin Roosevelt followed a parallel policy, after his programs of domestic spending failed to extricate America from the Depression.

Here he [Roosevelt] was with a depression on his hands [with] the pressing necessity, as he put it himself, of spending two or three billion a year of deficit money, and most serious of all, as he told Jim Farley, no way to spend it … Here now was a gift from the gods … Here now was something the federal government could really spend money on: military and naval preparations. (The Roosevelt Myth, Fox & Wilkes, 50th Anniversary Edition, 1998, p. 157.)

Keynes himself viewed the Nazi efforts with favor. In his preface to the German edition of The General Theory, dated September 7, 1936, Keynes indicated that the ideas of his book could more readily be carried out under an authoritarian regime:

Nevertheless the theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of the production and distribution of a given output under conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire.

As Donald Moggridge points out, the published German version (but not Keynes's draft) also said,

Although I have thus worked it [Keynes's theory] out having the conditions in the Anglo-Saxon countries in view — where a great deal of laissez-faire still prevails — it yet remains applicable to situations in which national leadership is more pronounced. (Donald Moggridge, Maynard Keynes: An Economist's Biography, Routledge, 1995, p. 611.)[2]

Once this program had begun, the dynamic to which Mises called attention developed in inexorable fashion: one intervention led to another, until the entire economy was brought under government control. Businesses who were reluctant to follow the plans of the New Order had to be forced into line. One law allowed the government to impose compulsory cartels. By 1936, the Four Year Plan, headed by Hermann Goering, changed the nature of the German economy. END

From: Nazi Economic Policy by David Gordon

ITS THE MONEY STUPID!!!

Here he goes into the part that I see happening right now. Right now we have the "invisible hand" of the US FED with the tacit approval of the US government intervening(via Presidential Executive Orders)in every market from futures to mortgage rates. What is the difference between that and what Hitler did? As long as a printing press rules the supposed FREE MARKETS then we sink closer and closer to socialist markets where there is the appearance of private property, yet all pricing is ultimately government controlled. With the printing presses of the US FED banks, insurance companies and car manufacturers that have failed terribly at risk management are allowed to live on, simply because of their proximity to political power. Literally "trading prices" as Rome burns! Nevermind the fiddle, Nero!!

READ ON:
No longer could the economy be described as a capitalist one. True enough, the forms of private ownership were preserved. The government did not nationalize the means of production, as in Soviet Russia. But the ostensible owners could not set prices on their own volition. The government made all essential decisions. As Mises said,

The second pattern [of socialism] (we may call it the Hindenburg or German pattern) nominally and seemingly preserves private ownership of the means of production, and keeps the appearance of ordinary markets, prices, wages, and interest rates. These are, however, no longer entrepreneurs, but only shop managers (Betriebsführer in the terminology of the Nazi legislation). These shop managers are seemingly instrumental in the conduct of the enterprises entrusted to them; they buy and sell, hire and discharge workers and remunerate their services, contract debts and pay interest and amortization. But in all their activities they are bound to obey unconditionally the orders issued by the government's supreme office of production management. This office (the Reichswirtschaftsministerium in Nazi Germany) tells the shop managers what and how to produce, at what prices and from whom to buy, at what prices and to whom to sell. It assigns every worker to his job and fixes his wages. It decrees to whom and on what terms the capitalists must entrust their funds. Market exchange is merely a sham.END

From: Nazi Economic Policy by David Gordon

ITS STILL THE MONEY STUPID!!!