idiot. price and earnings ratio.

and it's so true what the columnist says about what if ol' George had said it - all the "what a moron" stories would be the lead items everywhere.

How insensitive, how crass, how unfeeling. Doesn't this person know there are people suffering. Doesn't he have any feelings for those that have lost their jobs?

What?...It was Obama that said that?

What stirring words of leadership, hope and optimism. What foresight. Finally, a President that understands the economy.

Wait for it...

Does PMSH get a pass from the MSM and the opposition parties for his comments last fall, now that the Obamination has echoed his remarks?

Too late Chris....none other than Katsmeat is hailing the chief in his own twisted way.

Syncro

I don't think that statement went over too well, considering the source both of it and the capital-gains tax increase.

Someone has to say it.

The US economy will not return to healthy growth until Obama isn't the president.

They will borrow and spend huge amounts, but the moment they stop borrowing $2 trillion a year, it will crater.

Every passing day this guy reminds me of Glen Clark, who was premier of BC for a while.

Derek

Given the MSM's uncritical view of Obamanomics "Money? You want money? Here, have some more". The facts are that most of the high risk mortgage scamsters are also still enjoying the ride, the Chinese are going to buy everything to dump dollars, and inflation is going to be awesome.

I would short wallet companies and go long wheelbarrows. Just like Zimbabwe.

dkite: "this guy reminds me of Glen Clark, who was premier of BC for a while."

The allure of socialism will work its charms. O will attempt to climb Mugabe's shining path of socialism, unless ....

O will not be voted off the island. He will have to be forcibly exiled; perhaps to Haiti.
There are dark(sic) years ahead.
...-

BBC NEWS | World | Africa | Robert Mugabe: The survivor
22 Jun 2008 ... Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe is seeking re-election after being in power for 28 years.
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3017678.stm

Unfortunatly the E part is falling faster than the stock prices. The S&P P/E ratios is still too high. The bear market will not end until real good values are available.

http://dshort.com/charts/SP-Composite-PE.html?SP-Composite-PE10-ratio-by-quintile

Don't worry everyone. Obama will fix the huge deficits. He and is pals at the Fed will inflate their way out of it ... oh wait ... crap!

Darn,Charles.You beat me to it! Actually,the big "O" just wants to be the 1st USA president to say he helped mint a million dollar bill!

Not a Limbaugh fan, but at least he did due diligence on Obama and reported it well before the election. Obama admits in his own book that he felt like a "spy behind enemy lines" during his brief sojourn in the private sector:

Barack Obama in His Own Words
October 10, 2008

OBAMA: It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned. People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied. They were revealed. Such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn't seem angry all the time.

RUSH: A-ha. So in his own book read by him here, he admits the trick to making himself look unthreatening. Don't display that radical temperament that all of his friends have. He's learned the trick. Finally, he says that he was a spy behind enemy lines when he worked in corporate America here.

OBAMA: Eventually a consulting house to a multinational corporation agreed to hire me as a research assistant. Like a spy behind enemy lines, I arrived every day at my mid-Manhattan office and sat at my computer terminal.

RUSH: Barack Hussein Obama admitting to feeling a spy in the office behind enemy lines in corporate America.

All Hail the Portfolio Manager in Chief!

I say all the Obama drones should go out and buy stocks now! Go follow the words of your saviour!

Well justthinkin I'm sure Mr. Bernanke will be happy to oblige. He's off to a good start.

Btw, Kevin, be careful with the "E" in your P/E formula. I'm not saying the chart is wrong, but since mark to market began in 1980, earnings have become much more volatile both on the up and downside. Last quarter earnings were negative because of writedowns (which is very different from writeoffs).

The United States duly elected a slick talking snake oil salesman and a Marxist.

Canada went that exact same route with Pierre Trudeau decades ago.

The USA under the Obama Democrats is finished as a capitalist country.

Just a guess on my part, but I bet Obama has never purchased a stock in his life (via a broker or online). He may own them via a mutual fund in a 401k, but I doubt he's ever sat down and researched and purchased a stock.

Obama has only two years to fundamentally cripple the American economy and create widespread dependence on government. If he doesn't accomplish that mission there may not be enough dependent American voters to threaten at election time and he'll be finished.

Sarah Palin is going to have a lot of work to do when she finally brings change to Washington.

Joe Molnar, have you heard of Gerald Celente?, whose predictions have been extraordinarily accurate. He says 2009 will have a commercial real estate market crash, worse than the residential one of 2008, likely depression, huge increase in crime, civil strife & revolution by 2012 and the US could become an undeveloped nation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46MEqEgdLTg

It's a great time to be in the stock market, if you are shorting stock.

Well, he said he didn't look like those guys on the money. His picture may be on the Barrack Bucks. Either it's like a shin plaster or like our Canadian Tire money. I think the Dems are starting to have had enough. I know investors have had enough. The people that elected him don't tend to be investors I'm guessing. Advisors, I don' need no stinkin' advisors, I got the Freddie and Fannie guys.

I think we've stumbled on Obama's plan: he wants to make every American a millionaire, in the only way he can -- inflation.

7 DEUCE

HMMM

I'M ALL IN!

"If Big Brother (of Orwell's 1984) comes to America, he will not be a fearsome, foreboding figure with a heart-chilling, omnipresent glare as in 1984. He will come with a smile on his face, a quip on his lips, a wave to the crowd, and a press that (a) dutifully reports the suppressive measures he is taking to save the nation from internal chaos and foreign threat; and (b) gingerly questions whether he will be able to succeed." -- Michael Parenti (1933- )

Source: "Inventing Reality" (1986)

Well, I'm sceptical of long term predictions. The economy is a complex, not a linear determinstic system and can't be predicted that accurately.

Certainly, lending money to people who can't afford to pay their mortgages isn't a complex but a linear relation. That is, it will fail. And seeing such linear relations are hardly mindboggling predictions.

Celente also, apparently, made such dramatic predictions as the appearance of gourment coffees, organic food, anti-globalization, distance learning. He says that 'innovation is going to be the key in the 21st century'.

I'm not impressed.

Divide all projected earnings by 10, all forcasted dividends by zero, subtract 10% inflation from your interest rates (just to be conservative). Now rerun the models. We're all going to be millionaires!!

Go, Obama, Go! Talk it up, man! I still have some shite I wasn't able to dump into the last rally.

Poll at CTV, is PMSH fueling separatism in Nfld

http://www.ctv.ca/news

Yeah Right.
Investing is so simple even a community organizer can tell you how!!

Just TRY and sort out the likely survivors.

First you have to pick those that will not simply be collapsed into the hole.
Then the ones that are going to go private and become untouchable.
Then figure out the ones that won't be killed off by the coming regime in regulations and anti-competitive state meddling.

Then roll the dice...

Me? I'm ready to buy up bargains any time. Any time they are not attached to some government whim.

The ONE single fact that you can count on is that the economic plague of government intervention is going to (already is) killing off the chances of recovery.

What the Democrats are doing in the US is the equivalent of using LIVE bacteria to cure an infection.

Morons.........

PS ... Tylenol, Nexium, Valium ... booze

All good investments.

That was his signal to the media to start reporting "good news" about the economy. Pretty soon, the sheeple will believe the worst is over, and start spending again. Remember, consumers make up over 70% of economic activity.

The moral of the story is that one should never talk about the stock market while wearing knitted materials.

Fortunately for many, Climate Change will make the wearing of such materials unnecessary. In fact, it may be too late to prevent that.

Time to short the sweater manufacturer, distributor and retailer industries folks. To heck with their P/E ratios, this is a good time to short warm clothing stocks.

Why do I get the feeling that "progressives" won't like a quick, early recovery? Guess that'd take away their best, if still weak, argument for wrenching, extreme change via spending trillions we don't have, on scary things like a practically-mandatory state-servitude program which sounds to me like some kind of brownshirt training thingy or something like that... And that's just Barry-O's agenda...

I agree with you ET. People make predictions all the time and inevitably someone is going to nail it. My friends and I used to do it in the spring with the World Series. I got it right 4 years running once. Problem is I haven't done it again in the last 25.

profits and earning ratio.

wow , two words wrong out of four.

if GWB had said this the MSM would be all over him like ugly on an ape. ( ears sticking out type)

Waiting for Layton and others to spin out a re-action to this ststaement.
When PMSH said it the media and Opposition parties flipped.
Obama says it ....snooze....
No surprise.

Watch for the classic put-downs with an anti-American slant:

"Mr. Obama gets his talking points from Mr.Harper; he's just Harper-lite; he just wants America to become the next Canadian Territory!!"

Don't wait too long.

"Unfortunatly the E part is falling faster than the stock price"

Kevin gets it right. Price looks forward - earnings are 2008.

The pesky inflation issue aside, we could have a huge increase in the number of millionaires! !

But they wouldn't be rich.

'Profit and earnings ratio' - the relative amount of money that "community groups" shake down out of profitable businesses

Yes, the saying, "the more things change the more they stay the same" is just strong as ever.

It was 1979 when the media wanted to crucify Clark for his 25 cent per (imperial) gallon of gasoline and praise to Pierre who said "fuddle duddle, he would never put a 25 cent tax on gasoline."

How could anyone be so cruel as to make anyone pay so much for gasoline?
Then came the aftermath of the election, and St Pierre said he will impose 35 cents per gallon instead. The news media fought over who would get to be first to lick the will-knots out of Trudeau's nether regions.

Harper says it, CBC Pravda and CTV Tass aggree with Taliban Jack that it is heartless and un-caring. Obamawamadingdong says it and the fight is on for who gets to be first to....

From above:

Time to short the sweater manufacturer, distributor and retailer industries folks. To heck with their P/E ratios, this is a good time to short warm clothing stocks.

You mean like Short Shorts?

Who would expect Obambi to know the diff between profit/earnings and price/earnings. I mean, you almost need a friggin degree to figure out the science behind it.

Besides, the p/e isn't a good indicator of when to enter the market. I prefer to use the price / dividend ratio's which are a much better indicator as anyone can fudge their profits (Bear Sterns anyone?). Anything above 17.4 p/d is a time to sell ... anything below is the time to buy.

Right now the p/d on the DJI is 33.4.

anyone can fudge their profits

I remember back in the Blue Jays' early days when Paul Godfrey boasted that the Jays had made a $5 million profit that year, and CFO Paul Beeston, in an intemperate moment, burst out with "And I can make that a $5 million loss in a heartbeat!".

My wife is CFO for a chain of auto dealerships. She often tells me that she works "magic" with the numbers to keep their lenders satisfied. But as aizlynne points out, dividends are real cash in your pocket, so short of another Ponzi scheme, they're pretty hard to fake.

But the problem is will the company continue to pay the dividend? We've seen GE and JPM Chase cut their dividends dramatically in the past few weeks. There are actually 22 stocks in the SP500 yielding more than 10% right now, but the names include Wells Fargo and Capital One, which are likely to make big losses this year, and so the dividends are suspect. However, Emerson Electric is yielding 5%, and it just announced a record 2008 profit. That might be enough to tempt me.

Rush Limbaugh has offered to debate his Obamaness on his show. no teleprompters, no cards , no aids , one on one, Mano O. Messiaho

"Sgt Lejaune: 'I would short wallet companies and go long wheelbarrows. Just like Zimbabwe.'"

Great line!

And one I intend to freely plagiarize from now on.

Thanks!

Ah, wheelbarrows and Reichsmarks...

I too agree with JJM and Sgt Lejaune, and will likely plagiarize as well.

O, I believe, has good intentions (see Milton Friedman for the end of this story).

The fastest way out of this mess, and it's not very fast at all, is to mimic the banks: save money, preserve capital, and make very prudent financial decisions. Bailing out bad companies and individuals who made poor borrowing decisions (i.e. anyone with a mortgage, which was - at the time the contract was signed - greater than 95% of the market value) will simply delay and exacerbate the problem.

The world has a problem, which is met by most individuals sometime in their lives, and that is over consumption. To improve the situation, organizations and countries must do what individuals do, reduce spending, pay down debt until you're back in the black. But this is hardly a good political path for election (or re-election).

Unfortunately, hope appears to be the best selling product nowadays, and the best selling hope - globally, it seems, is that socialism will resolve all our monetary issues. We'd have to alter some fundamental laws and theories of mathematics to achieve this - like the distributive property. I'm sure Obama can do this.

O's policies will likely help the US avoid an even deeper recession/depression (e.g. even more sudden heavy losses), but it will prolong recovery almost in perpetuity. Say hello to a 10-20 year recession!

Excuse me while I reinforce my wheelbarrow.

Obama is an expert on laughingstocks, not buying stocks, since he is one.

Several years ago I had some investments managed by a "wealth management specialist" of a major bank. I found out why they call them "brokers" because after they get your portfolio thats what you end up --BROKER. Your own common sense and research is more important - yea Kevin!