onsdag den 19. august 2009

Under pressure - why Queen the band is still relevant- (unlike the Queen as in the Queen of....)

Mm ba ba de
Um bum ba de
Um bu bu bum da de
Pressure pushing down on me
Pressing down on you no man ask for
Under pressure - that burns a building down
Splits a family in tw0
Puts people on streets

Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtrEN-YKLBM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Pressure

CNBC carried this "under pressure" music theme for their US morning show and it made me reflect on how music and fashion sometimes tells more than "numbers" - so in the effort to find the newspaper headlines for 1981 I found this US biased service link: http://www.1980sflashback.com/1981/News.asp

A similar link exists for the economy: http://www.1980sflashback.com/1981/Economy.asp

Dow was in range of: 824-1024, inflation 10.2%, Unemployment 7.1% - Reagan President, Reagan fought Air Traffic, McEnroe won Winbledon, Gallon of gas: 1.38%

My point with all this? The world is circular - it is only clowns like Greenspan and other bureaucrats who truely believe we have evolved as intelligent species!

Friend of mine, known as one of the guru's of IT and entrepreneurs gave me a great qoute: "Basically, we have not moved far away from the fridge...."

Indeed we have not really gained any ground on productivity through innovation/inventions since the fridge!

Yes, we "feel" we are smarter, but at the same time we spend more and more utterly futile time on social-networks, setting up our different PDA', PDM' and gimmicks which end of the day steals more productivity time than it frees up.

The ultimate point here being: The world needs to go to Mars, to re-develop Africa, gets the Catholics in Southern America to believe in birth-control in order to reset/restart the growth engine ..otherwise we are probably looking at prolonged period of sub-par growth and slowly, slowly rising unemployment.

The issue of unemployment remains the most critical factor - there is NOTHING more demanding on a society than rising non-employed ....We are sneaking towards 10.0% for all of Europe and even the optimist' are now slowly, but firmly acknowledging that you can not create long-term sustainable growth by virtue of "talking, talking and talking" as it seems to be Mr. Obama's call.

(Click on chart for larger version)

Clearly the improvement in production & sentiment driven mainly by the "cash-for-clonkers" program, which really is an offer to get brand new car for free with no risk (Sounds similar to the old: Buy car, get money in cash, and pay nothing in 5 years offers coming from Detroit less than three years ago ? Yes, indeed, the King is dead, long live the King)

Well, we remain with our medium-term target of 940 in S&P - market is still hanging-on - but lets see what happens going into Bernanke speaking on Friday.

Safe trading,

Steen

0 kommentarer: