Tuesday, May 20, 2008

As The Government Deficit Keeps Rising...

In a letter written to congressman Paul Ryan, CBO concluded that
The United States faces serious long-run budgetary challenges. If action is not taken to curb the projected growth of budget deficits in coming decades, the economy will eventually suffer serious damage. The issue facing policymakers is not whether to address rising deficits, but when and how to address them. At some point, policymakers will have to increase taxes, reduce spending, or both.
This gives another reason why one should consider a Roth IRA rather than a traditional one. But as the deficit keeps climbing up, we may have a much gloomier future as put by the CBO in the letter,
If foreign investors began to expect a crisis, they might significantly reduce their purchases of U.S. securities, causing the exchange value of the dollar to plunge, interest rates to climb, consumer prices to shoot up, and the economy to contract sharply. Amid the anticipation of declining profits and rising inflation and interest rates, stock prices might fall and consumers might sharply reduce their purchases. In such circumstances, the economic problems in this country would probably spill over to the rest of the world and seriously weaken the economies of the United States’ trading partners.
This makes me wonder whether it would be wise to put my money in the U.S. stock market at all. But we knew the inflation is going to shoot up, and putting money in the market seems to be a good if not the only way to provide an aegis. Maybe a good solution would be to quit my job and live on the money I saved up so far, and at the mean time, really concentrate on personal investment such as studying Economics, and that will certainly get you a job when the Economy goes bad in the future. Well, maybe not. But the idea of personal investment rather than monetary investment should be right.

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Admonition of Recession

On Wednesday April 02, the day after April fool's, Bernanke conceded for the first time in front of a congressional panel that U.S. economy may slip into a recession. On the same day, Dell announced to follow its job cutting plan to close down its Austin manufacturing facilities and lay off 8800 employees. On the same day, my company also decided to close down 10 offices and kick out about 200 employees. I wasn't asked to go, though the Austin office I currently work at is to be shut down. I was actually quite agog over the second and the third news for the following reasons:
  1. Amid the housing turbulence nation wide, Austin housing prices actually appreciated 0.3% over the past year. This makes Austin one of the few most active housing market nation wide. I've been shopping around and looking for bargains, but there are hardly any. The dell job cut will definitely have a negative impact on the local market, which will be good for me.
  2. The closure of our office means working from home, which saves gas and time to travel. Plus, this will enable me to move to a cheaper apartment which is far away from my current office, which is located in the most expensive area in Austin.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Consumer confidence goes down, oil price goes up

The Conference Board's index of confidence dropped to 75.0 in February from 87.3 in January, lower than what Economists expected. This means us consumers are really on a tough spot. The price of gasoline rose 2.9%. Maybe it is time to prepare to jog to work? Food price climbed 1.7%, which reminded me that I just spent $198.34 for my March groceries.

Time to re-budget!

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