“Believing that you could put together bad stuff with good stuff, mix it up, and make it great stuff, is the debauched, debased, phony belief system that brought down Wall Street.
Believing that you could create real wealth with capital, technology, hard work, a willingness to take risk-is the belief system that is the foundation of true economic progress.
Not all the financial news is bad.
For example, in the United States, 90% of mortgagors are meeting their payments, and more than 90% of the eligible workforce have jobs. Don’t believe Barack Obama, that this is a new Depression. Besides, he doesn’t believe it himself anymore, now that he has got three trillion dollars in spending approved.
It’s easy at a time like this, to focus on the bad side of things, but in fact this gives you a chance to regroup and reload.
So take advantage of the opportunities that are out there.
“When You Come To A Fork In The Road-Take It” Don Coxe, Chairman, Coxe Advisors LLC.
I live in Santa Fe. Tourism usually runs 70% occupancy. it’s 34% right now. we have 25 foreclosures in a high-end development called Las Companas, for the first time. our unemployment rate is 4.5, but last year it was 2.1%. three years ago, we had no foreclosures at all; now, we have almost 300.
Cox may be a glass-half-full man, but my personal experience doesn’t match his. even Berkshire Hathaway was dropped from a AAA rating. doesn’t sound like progress. but then, maybe it is….maybe the real progress is the transformation of a credit, big-banking culture to something much more diversified.
I stand corrected above. Mr. Cox is not of the Coxe funds that lost $1 billion last summer betting on Fannie and Freddie. My apology.
I disagree with the claim that 90% of the eligible workforce have jobs. Is this based on the 8.1% unemployment figure recently issued by the gov’t? You can’t deduct that from 100% to get the eligible employed figure. Unless you mean employment insurance eligible. I don’t think most would interpret the statement that way. I think if the quality and hours per week of jobs held by Americans were evaluated and they were all put in a row, the guy or gal standing at the 25 percent from the bottom mark would be working 15 hours a week for minimum wage, possibly as a contract worker, and doing a job that is of net detriment to society. So put me in the cynic boat. (grumbles something about how it’ll probably sink)
His firm also lost $1 billion in a quickly established leveraged fund last Spring-Summer of Freddie Fannie stock…I recall you wrote about last summer? So, his quote is well grounded in personal experience.
Thanks,
Brad