Thanks, Buddy, for that link above. Went to it on a work break this afternoon and I feel more encouraged and hopeful.

The DJIA today reflects looming crises of liquidity in foreign markets and countries. I crunch the numbers of the BANKS and retail companies I follow, and right now the price to free cash flow numbers are astonishingly a bargain. Anecdotally, I cannot see around me signs where I live that people are jumping down into bunkers. More than anything else what has really caused the economic slowdown is ENERGY PRICES. Yes, there is a definite backlog of homes up for sale and have been for more than a year. But I think New Hampshire is less hard hit than some other parts of the country. Will we have a recession? I do think we will. Will we have a depression? No. There are factors which mitigate this that were not in place in the early 1930′s. There is no Smoot-Hawley Act. There is no gold standard preventing the Fed from injecting adequate liquidity into the system. We have FDIC.

Europe, on the other hand, is in big trouble. They have high interest rates, strong currencies, and falling exports. In several countries there have been housing bubbles too, which are in earlier stages of being put on the wall.

Asia has a problem with inflation. In China, for a long time there has been almost an insatiable demand for precious metals. That happens when people lose confidence in the worth of their currencies and/or banking systems.

Above all else, it has been the enormous tax of energy prices that has put the global economy in a weakened condition. It eats into discretionary income like nothing else, save the government take on your earnings. There have been too many unexplainable reductions in oil production in places like Russia and Venezuela simultaneously for me to pass that off as an unrelated event. I have my own thoughts about what it really was, what it means, and its purpose.

Could it be that extremely wealthy Russians put some of their money into the oil futures markets to juice things up a bit? Get it going and then get out when the party starts to heat up? The aim: make the economy a big factor in the upcoming U.S. election? The big prize: a POTUS who, with his party, will end the ballistic missile defense program.