An Utterly Serious Warning

[ecosophia]

There's an old Wall Street legend that came to mind today...

"In 1929, at the height of an economic boom in America, Joseph Kennedy Sr. (father of JFK) was working as a stockbroker on Wall Street. As the story goes, Joseph was walking around when he decided to sit down for a shoeshine. While polishing his shoes, the young worker gave Joseph some of his favorite stock picks. When Joseph heard the shoeshine boy giving out stock tips, he figured the party was about to end, and it was time to get out of the market. Joseph proceeded to exit his positions in the market and bought short positions that bet on the market going down. Shortly after that, the stock market entered a free fall." (Source)

The reason this came to mind is that I get therapeutic massage regularly these days, and my massage therapist mentioned today that she is getting into real estate investing. She's an extremely capable massage therapist -- but then I'm sure the shoeshine boy who did old Joe Kennedy's shoes was good at his trade, too. The rule remains the same: when people who have no previous background in investing start piling into some investment vehicle, a speculative bubble is in full swing, and will collapse catastrophically in the not too distant future.

I watched this same thing happen in real estate about a year before the 2008 real estate bust hit. When that arrived, everyone I knew who'd gone piling into real estate ended up in the bankruptcy courts. I also watched it in the stock market about a year and a half before the 2000-2001 internet bust hit, and a lot of people who'd put everything they had into interrnet stocks lost it all.

So, dear readers, if you find you're suddenly thinking about putting a lot of money into real estate investment, may I offer a piece of advice? You'd be better off shredding it all and flushing it down the toilet. Don't let yourself get suckered, because the market will sucker punch you.

Oh, and while you're at it, get ready for a whopping economic crisis, possibly as soon as this fall. The Dow Jones just hit an all time record, btw, and speculative investments are soaring while the productive economy lurches further and further into dysfunction. We're probably going to be in for a world of hurt within a year or so. Brace yourselves...

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Isn't this ironic that US had an edge on software on Russia and China and not only they cannot win their war on hardware but about to lose their software edge.

Russia and China, or India or other players, will probably take a few of the very good engineers!

[open_space]

At that point I will be far away from the software world. But yeah, actually, a lot of my Indian friends returned to India in the pandemic and are not coming back. That said however, the US is still top, though it's declining, whereas China is going upwards for example, especially in military tech.

[(Anonymous)]

I think the US is declining and at some point can fall over a cliff. This desperation of putin everything in the cloud and making everything in software as a service is detrimental.

Cloud is very centralized completely opposed to the decentralized nature of TCP/IP etc.

I think the on-premise servers and private small cloud will make their way back in the near future, and with it the need for a lot of expertise and technicians, and a lot of the older folks will come back to work.

https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/google-cloud-accidentally-deletes-125-billion-australian-pension-fund-124051800606_1.html


The biggest problem of the cloud is the grid, as to my knowledge no one tried to cold reboot a cloud, I think there were already cases of race conditions, I remember on from Azure due to a UPS firmware but I am not searching for it. An the grid is in the risk in the next years because as the fracking oil goes so the fracking gas eventually goes.