Word to the Wise Bread
I won a $20 Amazon gift certificate in the Wise Bread Forums raffle. First, the Adsense revenue share, now this. Wise Bread is the forum that keeps giving!
I've been significantly hedged since the third quarter of last year, so I've just been shaking my head, looking in bemusement at the current market downturn. That doesn't mean I didn't have anything in play though. As always, I keep a few lowball limit orders open in order to snag abnormal variations in price. It's like going fishing for investments. At the market open, one order got filled at a price just 3 cents above the morning's low! Exciting stuff, even if the action took place before I logged in this morning. Aside from that, I was planning to do a bit of bargain hunting but I was a bit late and Bernanke's surprise rate cut had pretty much put an end to that idea. So never mind.
In my view, the 0.75% Fed Funds rate cut was little more than a band-aid over the gaping chest wound in the financial markets. Cutting interest rates appeared to have an effect the first few times but it is clear now that the impotent Federal Reserve can only defer, not prevent, the credit bust that, according to Austrian Business Cycle Theory, must inevitably follow a credit boom. Repeated bailouts only serve to prolong the bad debt and cancerous malinvestments that keep us from wiping the slate clean and making a fresh start.
On a different note, I started working on my 2007 tax return this morning. I'm only 10% of the way through the 1099 forms and the tax refund meter is already down to -$1122! Fun!