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.