A Few Choice Quotes from a Pundit and an Investment Expert

From the Pundit

I got one of those mail­ings from Randi Rhodes, one of the Air Amer­ica pun­dits for the Left. Some­times I find her a bit shrill, but then again, she’s shrill for my side, so I give her a lot of lat­i­tude.
She knows as well as any­one else when she makes a par­tic­u­larly choice ‘zinger’, and she included a few of them on the email. Wish I had been lis­ten­ing (via the Inter­net) when she deliv­ered these in particular:

On FEMA (the US’s Fed­eral Emer­gency Man­age­ment Agency) “They shut the morgue down at 11 AM in spite of a 300-body back­log. I guess they’re just afraid that the mor­ti­cians will put ‘Cause of Death: FEMA’ on the death certificates.”

On Har­riet Miers, Bush’s Nom­i­nee to the US Supreme Court: “It’s worse than crony­ism, he nom­i­nated a groupie!”

On the Polls: “64% of Amer­i­cans believe aliens have con­tacted humans; 39% believe in George Bush.”

It’s fas­ci­nat­ing to me to watch the US con­tinue to cir­cle the drain. It’s true that the dol­lar has momen­tar­ily stopped it’s pre­cip­i­tous decent. On the other hand, the US Stock mar­ket has decided to do a big ol’ Swan Dive these past weeks, tak­ing what I had left there down with it.
From the Invest­ment Expert

I was fas­ci­nated to see an arti­cle in New York Mag­a­zine by an invest­ment advi­sor and cofounder of theStreet.com James Cramer, who calmly sug­gests what stocks and other invest­ments to use as a hedge toward the eco­nomic melt-down that Bush’s spend­ing (and lack of the taxes to pay for that spend­ing) poli­cies will have caused. His arti­cle starts out with almost cheery, clear-eyed pessimism:

The Gold Para­chute
Or, how to stop wor­ry­ing and save your­self from the president’s prof­li­gate spend­ing and stub­born insis­tence on no new taxes.
It’s dawn­ing on Wall Street that George W. Bush may be the first pres­i­dent since Lyn­don B. John­son who believes that we can have a guns-and-butter fed­eral spend­ing pol­icy with­out cre­at­ing a seri­ous infla­tion spi­ral, if not out­right gov­ern­ment bank­ruptcy. At least LBJ, to his credit, believed that there were lim­its to profli­gacy and that taxes had to be raised. Not Pres­i­dent Bush. He’s mak­ing John­son look like a fis­cal con­ser­v­a­tive, what with his insis­tence on wag­ing a war in Iraq that’s cost­ing $177 mil­lion a day and rebuild­ing New Orleans by tak­ing on a mon­strous load of fed­eral debt.

For the longest time, because Bush is a Repub­li­can, we on Wall Street sim­ply didn’t believe that he could be a reck­less spender. We knew only two par­a­digms: You either spent less and cut taxes or you spent more and raised taxes. Both courses at least pre­sumed some sac­ri­fice at some time. Not Bush’s plan. He’s gone on both the biggest spend­ing binge and the low­est tax­a­tion course in U.S. his­tory, which, alas, will pro­duce gigan­tic lia­bil­i­ties down the road. Of course, he’ll be back on the ranch by the time his suc­ces­sor will have to deal with his infla­tion and cur­rency debase­ment. Our only hope that finan­cial dis­as­ter won’t strike sooner lies with the Chi­nese, who actu­ally fund our deficit by buy­ing our Trea­suries’ $242 bil­lion worth, or 12 per­cent of all for­eign hold­ings. If the Chi­nese decide to be good com­mu­nists and stop buy­ing our bonds, the Feds will have to raise rates to attract new investors and the reaper will be at our doorstep with inter­est rates more akin to those of South than North Amer­ica. Right now, it’s not a prob­lem. But in a year or two or maybe less, I per­ceive that the gov­ern­ment will throw a bond auc­tion and nobody will show, includ­ing the Chi­nese, until rates shoot up dramatically.

What if that hap­pens? What if our fis­cally clue­less pres­i­dent really does keep spend­ing at a rate that far exceeds what our gov­ern­ment can take in at these low tax rates? What hap­pens if the president’s acolytes and the Pollyan­nas in Trea­sury keep believ­ing that we can grow our way, fairy-tale-like, out of this jam? You can bet that when you cash out your nest egg of nice U.S.-based mutual funds and solid com­mon stocks, your dol­lars will fit nicely into a wheel­bar­row designed specif­i­cally to cart worth­less cur­rency to the bank.

Or you can take mat­ters into your own hands and build a port­fo­lio around these five imminent-Bush-disaster stocks. Be the first on your block to immu­nize your­self against what may turn out to be the most finan­cially reck­less pres­i­dent in his­tory with these anti-inflation equi­ties designed to profit from our president’s unbe­liev­ably fool­ish Pan­gloss­ian profligacy.

He then goes on to pro­vide those five stocks that make up parts of the Bush-disaster-proof port­fo­lio. At the time I write this, you can read the arti­cle in it’s entirety at New York Magazine’s Web Site. As you might guess, it includes stocks in min­er­als, oil, and yup, the Ford­ing Cana­dian Coal Trust. It’s almost as if some­one could use that old beer ad: “With Bush (beer), Head for the Mountains!”

Funny, but I seem to remem­ber describ­ing the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion as a cat­a­stro­phe somewhere…Oh right. The descrip­tion of this very blog, at the right. Fancy that.