[wind_magic]

Originally Posted by chucklesR

Here's some positive news.
I'm just fine. Not one of my friends or acquaintances is considering a foreclosure and I have lots of friends and acquaintances in my community.
In fact, I don't know anyone who has been laid off or is suffering in any way shape or form from this 1930's type depression. Even my real estate agent friend is busier than ever selling houses.
Every time I get a negative link on this thread I simply go to google and do a five minute search and sha-zam the other side of the story pops up, with the vast majority of the objectively reported and researched links being positive.

Numbers can be twisted, real life if more objective.

Even if this is/were a 1930's style depression, it's totally normal to feel it isn't that bad in the beginning, and to only see the full magnitude at the end. That is what defines a bottom. In 1929 when the market took it's first initial dramatic hit most people actually bought the dip thinking that it was a good opportunity, that prices would come back, and they did for a time. The market went into the 1930's in a series of moves down, recoveries, and further moves down, until it finally hit bottom in the Great Depression. It wasn't until then, at the bottom, that everyone was in agreement that it could never turn around, that prices would do nothing but fall, that everyone was losing their jobs, businesses were closing, people were being foreclosed on, etc. In the early states of the Great Depression there was little effect on the average American, it was mostly just a credit crunch and a loss of price in the stock market. Like today the bank runs were slight at first, it wasn't until later that people really started running on the banks in greater numbers, and it wasn't until much later that the full effects of the Depression really hit home for most people. In 1929 the unemployment rate was only 3.2%, but by 1931 the unemployment rate had risen to 15.9% and peaked out around 24.9% in 1933. If it's a recession, or worse, most people won't think so until the very end of it, that's what marks a bottom and a turn-around, just like the top is marked by extreme enthusiasm and a belief that prices won't ever go down, that a "new era" where the old rules no longer apply has begun.

Below is a basic timeline for the 1930's depression, you don't see bank holidays until 1933 to stop bank runs, four years after the stock market started to tank and the first banks began to fail. Here is the 1929 entry on this link, any of this sound familiar ?

* Herbert Hoover becomes President. Hoover is a staunch individualist but not as committed to laissez-faire ideology as Coolidge.
* More than half of all Americans are living below a minimum subsistence level.
* Annual per-capita income is $750; for farm people, it is only $273.
* Backlog of business inventories grows three times larger than the year before. Public consumption markedly down.
* Freight carloads and manufacturing fall.
* Automobile sales decline by a third in the nine months before the crash.
* Construction down $2 billion since 1926.
* Recession begins in August, two months before the stock market crash. During this two month period, production will decline at an annual rate of 20 percent, wholesale prices at 7.5 percent, and personal income at 5 percent.
* Stock market crash begins October 24. Investors call October 29 "Black Tuesday." Losses for the month will total $16 billion, an astronomical sum in those days.
* Congress passes Agricultural Marketing Act to support farmers until they can get back on their feet.

Here is the link to a timeline.

I'm not saying this is a 1930's style depression, I'm just saying you can't know it's not simply because things "aren't that bad". They can continue to get bad. How everyone feels right now is how they feel right now, it may be objective, but it isn't very predictive. The only predictive value it has to a trader is actually counter-intuitive ... if people aren't that frightened, then you know it hasn't gotten as bad as it's going to get, because people by definition have to be frightened to put a bottom in and start a meaningful recovery.