You can toggle back to previous entries at the bottom of this page. If you go back to the entry for 9-23-08 you will find my final eradication of 95% of the equities in my portfolios. If you go back to the entry for 5-18-08 you will find the notation about the first bailout of the first big piece of my equity investments. It was the first time I wrote about divesting, but I did make a downward adjustment to equities in March. I’m not crowing about being right, I’m just pointing out that it’s really hard for someone who has been a life-long optimist to become so bitterly pessimistic. It took real conviction. It was a crisis of confidence based of my years of experience as an executive and trying to make a fair assessment of our future.
If we turn the corner on this, I will acknowledge I was wrong. Right now, I can see nothing that would motivate me to do that. I’m on the sidelines and I’m staying there until I can be convinced we have some leadership that will stop taking us down the drain. There is none on the horizon.
We are in big, big trouble. It is going to take some strong experienced leadership to get us back on the right road. We have a lot of that in this country, but precious little in Washington. Trillions of dollars of wealth, some on paper, some already lost, have been frittered away from the public by Washington. Equity in houses and financial markets. Gone. It will take a long time to get that back. Confidence is nil. People are angry.
If the U.S. were a corporation touting stock for sale right now, would you buy shares? Your emotions say yes, but if you are a non-emotional investor, your brain would say no.
Somehow we have to fix this. We all have too much invested in this great country to let it continue on this road. The anger that is growing will eventually be directed somewhere. I just hope it’s in the right direction.
