[wideawake]

Irrational moroseness is the flipside of irrational exuberance.

Everyone who bought the dotcom snakeoil was gullible, but everyone who buys the economic doomsday scenarios these guys are peddling are just as gullible.

For 50 years our tax system has encouraged borrowing and spending and penalized saving and investment. The Washington bureaucrats are beginning to realize that.

[ThePythonicCow]

The gullible ones in the dot.com boom were not those who observed a huge runup in tech stocks and such; the gullible ones were those who saw a "new era" in which such a boom would continue unending. There was a runup, a big one. One of the biggest bubbles in recorded financial history. It just didn't last. They never do.

The analog would be predicting not that we are entering into a Depression, but predicting that it will last forever. I'd agree with you that anyone so predicting is a fool.

Neither the boom nor the bust was nor will be forever. It went up, it's going down. You've seen one. You will be seeing the other, when you depart the low state of denial in which you are currently trapping yourself.

Let me know when you finally exclaim "oh s**t - this really is a serious Depression!" For on that day I will know that we are one more investor closer to hitting bottom and starting back up again.

[the gillman@blacklagoon.com]

This author is a hopeless optimist.

In fact, we are at the start of a terminal depression that will lead to a global war unlike anything ever seen. Most of the world's infrastructure will be destroyed and the earth's population reduced by 70% or more.

The survivors will be left to struggle through a dark age of plague and famine that will last for centuries.

Nothing irritates me like a pessimist without an imagination.

[farmguy]

For 50 years our tax system has encouraged borrowing and spending and penalized saving and investment. The Washington bureaucrats are beginning to realize that.

You must have a different set of bureaucrats than I do. Mine still think that if you bust your butt and try to get ahead, you've won life's lottery.