A Tough Decade for NASDAQ

Chart of the Day:

As the first decade of the new millennium rapidly comes to a close, today's chart takes a look back at the decade that was. Today's chart begins shortly after the stock market as well as the nation was partying like it's 1999 (i.e. dot-com boom). The proverbial punch bowl was taken away early in 2000 and the Nasdaq suffered its 2 1/2 year dot-com bust. The market eventually bottomed and began a five-year rally thanks in part some infamous financial innovations (i.e. Ninja loans -- No Income, No Job, and no Assets). Then as it became apparent that those financial innovations weren't quite as innovative as first hoped, the system went into near meltdown. Over the past nine months, the Nasdaq has been rallying (albeit at a pace that is slowing over time) and is currently testing resistance. All in all, a tough decade.

On Capitalism

J.T. Young on capitalism:

Capitalism straddles today's globe. Every economic competitor has fallen before it - predecessors, feudalism and mercantilism, and would-be successors, communism and socialism. It is the greatest wealth generator in history, and it has done, or is doing, so on every continent and in every culture.

In the broad span of its ascendancy, the current economic crisis is barely a blip. Yet many on the left seek to advance the dubious argument that capitalism precipitated this crisis. Even more preposterous is their assumption that planned economies are devoid of crisis.

Those systems choosing planning overcapitalism exist in perpetual disequilibrium. They are distinguished not only by their reliance on the state, but in an inability to right themselves. As a result, they move to ever greater disequilibrium.

As with a body, the fundamental health of an economic system lies not in never getting sick, but in its response to contagion. The current financial crisis apparently has ended in less than two years. Compare that to the continuous degeneration of communist and socialist systems.

[...]

Communism's response to capitalism offers two versions of the same tale. In the late 1980s, communism imploded across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The rot of communism sapped the economy, the state collapsed, and capitalism rushed in.

[...]

The West, having first received capitalism, now faces its own reckoning as its entitlement societies increase their tax and debt burdens and decrease their competitive advantages. The first nation to resolve this will reap an enormous advantage. Those that fail or that deny the necessity to resolve it need only look back to the history that is rapidly gaining on them.

Barone's Nutshell

Michael Barone on the Theft of Chrysler:

Think carefully about what’s happening here. The White House, presumably car czar Steven Rattner and deputy Ron Bloom, is seeking to transfer the property of one group of people to another group that is politically favored. In the process, it is setting aside basic property rights in favor of rewarding the United Auto Workers for the support the union has given the Democratic Party. The only possible limit on the White House’s power is the bankruptcy judge, who might not go along.

[..]

Obama’s attitude toward the rule of law is apparent in the words he used to describe what he is looking for in a nominee to replace Justice David Souter. He wants “someone who understands justice is not just about some abstract legal theory,” he said, but someone who has “empathy.” In other words, judges should decide cases so that the right people win, not according to the rule of law.

Today's Wild Ass Conspiracy Theory

Is this formula the work of a Chicom agent sent to the US years ago to bring down capitalism?

You decide.