Quote Originally Posted by Lyle View Post
Kirkland I tell you this almost every day but once again you're full of shit.


Today the Dow is UP and OIL is DOWN
You're wrong about everything as much as I'm right about everything. It's uncanny. It's like you're my defective-brained mini-me. The Dow is down almost 20% from its previous high and at the height of the current bear market will be 30-50% down. Oil is up 72% from this time last year.

It's amazing that so many people are conditioned to see the stock market as indicative of their personal wealth. The median working US household has $20 000 in personal savings, roughly enough to pay for a few nights in hospital for a family member should the family lose its health insurance. In New York, one out of five people needs to be given charitable food donations regularly. But somehow the Dow presses peoples' buttons, it's like they're all millionaire investors or something. The real indicator of wealth is median income, the income Joe 150 Million out of 300 million Americans earns, and that's down slightly from how much he was earning in 1970.

This is why things are so out of whack right now, with so much wealth going to a tiny bunch of people at the top that there isn't enough being spent in the economy, it's all being invested. Until a bigger share of the wealth is given to low/middle income earners, where it gets spent instead of invested (71% of US GDP is consumer spending) then economic growth is going to remain as rubbish as it has so far this century.