[TheForge] Re: Price of steel & scrap-OT

[Mike]

> Anybody have a clue?

Based on wide but superficial reading, an abundance of ignorance and
the accumulated wisdom -- such as it may be -- of age, I think the US
financial system, probably the global one, is shingled out onto the
fog. [1]

There has been a series of fads for various kinds of paper, flogged to
the retail investors as better than gold.  Unless you got into the
dot.com bubble and out again at just the right time, these have been
okay at best and a dead loss at worst.  The professional and
institutional investors, on the other hand, are frantically dithering
around, looking for places to put their money.  Oil, coal, China,
income trusts, resource depletion, mortgage funds, mutual funds, index
funds, job export, India etc. etc.  The future appears to have the
potential for sudden, large and unanticipated excursions.

Cash sounds good.  Durable tangibles such as anvils. I don't think
we're at the point yet where the best advice is "Bullets and
Cigarettes".

And no, I am not a financial advisor nor do I play one on television.

- Mike

[1]

There was a farmer down Maine where the fog is legendary.  His hired
hand quit for to get married and he had to get another from up to
Kittery.

First day on the job, once the milking was done, the farmer says,
"Can't do much till the fog lifts.  I've some harness to
repair. Supposin' you go up on the barn and put on some shingles."

So they go off.  Come lunchtime, the farmer says, "How many courses of
shingles did you lay?"  and the hand replies, "You must have damn nigh
the longest barn in Maine for I've only laid one and I haven't
finished that one yet."

"Well, you should've laid two and a half, maybe three by now." says
the farmer and they goes out to have a look.  And damn if that hired
hand hadn't shingled a hundred and forty feet out onto the fog.


-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer@tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^

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