Prepare for the worst & if it doesn't happen it's a pleasant surprise

Ok, welcome to my blog. Facebook only gives a little space in which to rant, so I'll start actually using this blog to put down my offensive opinions, conclusions and other vituperative, inciteful squeelings.

I'd like to start off with an observation of the current stock market figures. The Dow is up over 100 points as I write, which to me says that unemployment is also increasing. Some of you have already figured out the correlation between unemployment (which includes crappy temp/part-time jobbies that don't really support a life, especially when one must have enough income these days to invest for "retirement", whatever that is, because Socialist Insecurity sure won't cut it). As people are hired, their pay is an accounting debit (loss) on the company's balance sheet, therefore the profit margin decreases, lowering the company's stock price per share. As people are shitcanned, margin goes up, book balance looks better, hence stock price rises. Since the indexes like DJIA, S&P, NASDAQ, etc. are all composites of stock prices, the become (for us little peones) a good indicator of the current state of hiring.

Now, watching a lot of CNBC, I've heard discussions of whether the economy in general will go through another trough (the inverted "head & shoulders" that technical analysts look for) before it improves for the longer term, or whether we'll have an "L" shaped recovery ("Times are so bad that not losing is winning"), or whether it'll take off like a rocket for some unfathomable reason ("V-shaped recovery").

Being a cynical realist (some call that being a pessimist) I'd figure on another big, bad trough before things get better. That means more un/under employment. Me, I'm planning on preparing to live in a van, by the river. I figure that's a fairly low profile for when the shit hits the fan and the big witchhunting backlash happens.