Who's to blame for the stock market's decline? (POLL)

CLICK ON CNN VOTE FOR CORP AMERICA

Do you think the economy remains fairly stable, though? Compare the economy of the 20's to today. I'm interested in your thoughts...

There's nothing to vote on.

The chickens of irrational expectations have come home to roost is not on the list.

Fraud by a relatively small number of corporate leaders is not on the list.

Fraud by a relatively small number of auditors is not on the list.

Emotionally driven nitwits is not on the list.

Another spledid post, Zon. I hope people take the time to read your posts. Keep up the good work.

done.

bump for fresh freepers.

Thanks. Here's something I put together yesterday regarding sop of mainstream reporters and journalists.

Robert Tracinski, a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute, said, "People leading the hysteria about corporate crime are eager to expose and condemn any alleged fraud by private businessmen, but they ignore or excuse actual fraud committed by government officials. [That would be reporters and journalists neglecting honest ethics.]
"They demand strict accounting regulations to prevent billion dollar business frauds while they evade responsibility for a trillion-dollar government fraud," he added.
He said it's ironic that no one in Washington is demanding an end to Social Security. Social Security Called A Bigger Fraud Than Corporate Scandals

It's only ironic if the person thinks the government has high standards of ethics, integrity and honesty. Or ironic because that's the image they want people to perceive. That's where the mainstream media and academia join the party -- a government party. Honest, hard-working citizens need not apply.

Reporters are too lazy to put forth the effort. They choose to open doors wherever possible and keep them open. The very people the media should be reporting as crooks, criminals and scoundrels are the ones they praise. What a colossal hoax it is. For of course the interviewee -- the bigger the better to which politicians and bureaucrats are among the biggest with academics and "specialists" bought by the media mantra of open all doors coming in right behind -- those people/ crooks being interviewed would never open the door if he or she knew that the reporter intended expose them as frauds.

There's a large and growing cadre of articulate, well-thought-out writers on the WWW. They are the opposite of the lazy reporters that rely on the easy-to-open doors of covering for crooks. In essence, they are unreal doors that can slam back shut in their face.

For the articulate writers on the Web, their open doors are among themselves, and their readers. Their essence is that they have to honestly earn an open door policy with their interviewees and they welcome their readers feedback. Often looking for other articulate writers of integrity and honesty among the feedback they get from readers.

That the mainstream media is liberal biased is not a reflection of congress or the alphabet bureaucracies. It is with both Republicans and Democrats that the government is what it is. The whole good-guy-bad-guy betwixt political parties is a ruse. For voting for the lesser of evils still begets evil.

As Mr. Brown used to jokingly ask us neighborhood kids, "Do you want a fat lip or a busted eyebrow?" That was not lost on me. From Democrats you get one, from Republicans you get the other. There are no winners and losers in politics for they (reps and dems) are two sides of the same coin. The only losers are the citizens, their prosperity and well-being which is mostly represented by the business community. The only winners are parasitical politicians and self-serving bureaucrats. ...Hot on their heels the mainstream media and academics catering to government crooks.

Who's to blame for the stock market's decline?

SELLERS!

Right-why are sellers selling?

You're absolutely correct. Most Americans are so ignorant of how the market works - that they believed the Clinton Administration when they said they had eliminated the boom-bust cycle with a new type of economy. Stock values could only go up - never down. The really sad thing about all of this is that the people who could least afford the drop were those that waited until the bubble reached its peak before investing in the first place. The old "buy high - sell low syndrome".

Typical Liberal poll, in that "personal responsibility" is not one of the possible responses.

GWB has been in office 18 months - 1.5 years. It's his watch. It's his responsibility. Blaming Clinton isn't going to help one bit.

Bullfeathers!!

This market had it's bubble run-up under Clinton, specifically starting in 1995, ahead of his second Presidential run. It also burst under Clinton in March, 2000. The NASDAQ had already shed around 60% by the time Bush came in to office. The other markets fall into the same pattern.

The fact the pain is now being noticed only means the anesthetic is wearing off for Joe SixPack, who is now getting his 401k statements and has to have somebody to blame!

The Media and Democrats are more than willing to hang this pig around Bush's neck. Granted, Bush should have done more to rein in the freewheeling pork-barreling of this irresponsible Congress by wielding his veto pen. But he has not caused it. The Democrats and their Media allies chose to give it massive attention now that Clinton is safely out of office and the 2002 elections to defeat Republicans is coming up.

Responsiblity for this Crash lays squarely in the lap of Bill Clinton and his spending/fiscal/legal/moral policies which were - naturally enough - all about him and his future, rather than what was best for America! Bush had little to do with it, although the actual perps long to hang it around his neck.

See the following graph, and notice the run-up and when it peaked (hint: under Bubba!).

Weird choices for answers. I voted "B): Corporate America" ...close enough to accurate. President bush is currently gettin 50 percent of the blame, with 1,200 votes, Corporate America is getting 32% with 775, the media has 14% and Congress 5%.

I'll lay it on Congress. That's as close as I can come to the x42 administration.

Created: Mon Jul 15 15:57:00 EDT 2002

Who's to blame for the stock market's decline:
President Bush	49%	1204 votes
Congress	5%	121 votes
Corporate America	32%	781 votes
The media	14%	329 votes
Total: 2435 votes

HEY, I got it!! The REAL purpose of this poll is to exhonorate the media from any responsibility resulting from accusations that media propaganda helped create the Clinton bubble, and media gloom and doom propaganda IS undermining consumer confidance! It's not really about the economy at all!

I like both of your replies, with an addendum. There is a massive underlying rationale for the behavior of the equity indices in this case. The analysis is not purely technical.

The key is the very long term interest rates. As noted on other threads, using AAA corporate bonds as a proxy for interest rate behavior over the last century (yes, I said, century) shows:

1. A classic 'head and shoulders' over the last 40 years with a peak in 1981. The massive regression to the mean of these rates caused: (a) Investors to migrate from interest bearing instruments to equities as the coupons decreased, and (b) A lower cost of leveraged capital for corporations.

2. The conjunction of (a) and (b) represented the 'perfect storm' to grow equities. I can't imagine when it will recur.

3. The retreat will continue until P/E's come into line with historic levels.

4. I am furious with the manipulative media: Bush has little to nothing to do with this; Bubba Rex's contribution was an increase in the cultural corruption coefficient. Increasing levels of government growth and spending will really hurt now: bleeding capital out of the system.

5. If the DJIA (for example) goes to 6,500, the dems can make hay big time. They will/already are. I fear the truth will be buried. The media-numbed, short attention span populace will be inundated by a flood of Goebbelsian propaganda. We are in the minority.

6. Beware of two things: Rising interest rates and rising Democrats.

What do we get out of the process? Hillary Regina? Al Borg? Vladimir Ilich Kerry?

BLOAT. Blessings on Freepers Everywhere

Percentages were still the same 15 minutes later. Keep freeping.....the stupid media is to blame, who could possibly blame Bush? Talk about uninformed!

GWB's two recent speeches had zero (or negative) impact.

This might mean something if the two recent speeches were at all intended as stock market rah rah pep talks. They weren't. The only people expecting that were unsophisticated individual investors, who were told by the media that was the intended point of the speeches. And I've read or seen three separate economists/analysts in the last 24 hours say that any supposed "effect" his speeches had on causing the markets to drop were pure bunk. The indexes have been going down for some time, and nobody says a peep. But when the Dow doesn't immediately turn around and shoot up 1500 points the moment Bush gives a speech with the word "economy" in it, suddenly the entire market decline is his fault. As Gritty said, "Bullfeathers!" It was pure coincidence.

GWB's general and "fault" poll numbers are reflecting that he is heading for serious political trouble, if he can't get a handle on the economy.

There's nothing in the economy that Bush needs to get a handle on! The economy as a whole is doing just fine. Not mid- to late-90s Clintonian dotcom fraud boom great, but all the data coming out lately show steady upward trends, sometimes surprisingly strong ones. The only problem area is in the stock market itself, and that's due to two simple reasons: 1) Corporate accounting fraud. 2) The fact that even now, most late-90s boom stocks (the ones that haven't gone out of business, that is) are STILL overvalued from the Clinton go-go years. Many really need to drop by another 25-50% to be at anywhere near a rational estimate of their companies' true worth. (Note that this is not the same as saying that the Dow and Nasdaq need to drop 25-50% as a whole.) Sadly, the average voting moron is too stupid to understand that the stock market != "the economy." I'll certainly grant you that; Bush needs to hammer home this fact before the RATS start their lie campaigns in full force.

People vote based on their pocketbooks. Many older people heading into and already retired have seen their savings dissolve as much as 80% in the last year.

I'd really like to see some sort of pointer on this, because even in today's market, this is nearly impossible unless these older people are some of stupidest investors to walk the planet. I suppose if 60-year-old Bob moved his entire retirement portfolio over to Worldcom and Enron stock in 1998 or so, he would certainly be almost broke today. But if he did that, he's an idiot.

As for people and their retirement savings in general, I get tired of the media harping on the fact that all these poor middle-aged people have seen "half their life savings wiped out" (or more) by the declining markets. Sure, that's the case, if you use the absolute high water mark of around March 2000 as the comparison point. That, IMHO, is more than a big disingenuous. Say 50-year-old Investor X had a portfolio worth $500K in 1996 or 1997, when the economy was good, stock prices were generally rising, but the insanity bubble hadn't yet started. Back then, Investor X would have been perfectly happy to see his portfolio increase by 5-7% a year, and not at all surprised if there had turned out to be a few flat or even down years between then and 2002. But instead, prices exploded, and Mr. X ended up with a $1M portfolio by 2000, a 100% increase in just three years or so. But Mr. X was greedy and never sold, or moved any of his massive, bloated 401(k) over into a guaranteed interest money market fund to lock in his profits. So now, two years later, his portfolio is back around $500K, and he sits around whining about how he's "lost half his life savings" and the press eagerly gobbles it all up. What a load of crap.

The only way any of these people could have truly lost gigantic chunks of their life savings, which weren't just part of the fraud bubble that gave them paper profits they never should have had in the first place, is if they either never started investing at all until 1998 or so, or they intentionally put the vast majority of their cash into high-risk securities, something even a 22-year-old financial planner could tell you is an incredibly stupid move once you're beyond a certain age.

It's not Bush's fault. It's THEIR fault.

The thing that kills me about all of this is CNN. Last night one of their news nitwits gleefully described the decline in the stockmarket as an expression of a lack of confidence in Bush. The media is trying to pin this on him. Sadly, people are stupid enough to believe it. He's as good as convicted. Better attack Saddam, quick!

Yup. It's time to "Wag the Bull." I thought it was evil when Clinton was doing it, but that was because he was just trying to divert attention from his love of oral sex in White House bathrooms. This time, the Rats, in collusion with the news media, are intentionally attempting to destroy the President for no other reason than that they hate Republicans. So I have no qualms at all about moving up the attack on Iraq to help the GOP in the November elections (assuming the plan hasn't always been to go in long before November anyway). Iraq is a threat to us, we're going to go in eventually anyway, so if merely shifting the date up is of domestic political benefit to us, then GREAT. If the Rats and the news media hadn't declared war on the president, we wouldn't need to be thinking about this. So the hell with it, let's play hardball.