Lyndon Jimmy Obama

From AFPAK Channel today:

The Pentagon is reportedly concerned that correspondents embedding only in the south of Afghanistan, where fighting is fiercest, is causing too much "downbeat" coverage of the war and "undercutting public sentiment before President Barack Obama's strategy even has a chance to work" (Reuters).

Welcome to Vietnam.

Meanwhile, I was surprised to read in David Rosenberg's Breakfast with Dave today that his firm, Gluskin Sheff, has been receiving predominantly bullish Emails from clients who want to buy the recent stock sell-off. He is more overtly bearish, though.

So the administration wants people to hear more happy talk about a floundering "surge", and David Rosenberg is hearing "buy the dip" from clients who have internalized happy thinking.

Hmmm . . .

Non-mainstream data such as that generated by the Consumer Metrics Institute shows that the American consumer is far from "back". This CMI data indicates that a growth slowdown began last year and has lasted longer even than their measurement of the 2008 disaster.

Let us not discuss the Deepwater spill, where somehow "they" keep "discovering" that the spill rate was greater than thought. How many people believe all these "discoveries" rather than that we were lied to all along?

Dare we say the word "malaise"? (And for younger readers, this blog title refers to a well-known speech of President Carter on the energy crisis in 1979.)

All this on the backdrop of updated calculations from Smithers & Co. using the latest Fed data that continue to show approximately a 50% level of overvaluation of stocks based both on analysis of net worth and cyclically-adjusted earnings.

Once the credit osos (bears) finish chewing on Spain, when will they turn their sights on larger prey? Grizzlies on the loose . . .

The Asian contagion crisis that began in 1997 ended with the unanticipated bankruptcy of a very large country, Russia. Credit default swaps on the United States are at risk of rising to record levels sooner rather than later.

This can occur in the absence of another recession. There was no recession during Jimmy Carter's presidency, but the U. S. was forced to issue "Carter bonds" denominated in other than U. S. dollars. What's past may be prologue.

Stay tuned.

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