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The Boycott Continues: 14th Sequential Week Of Equity Outflows
Another week, another vote of no confidence in the market. It is getting really bad: we have now had over a quarter of non-stop redemptions by mutual funds, which of course means, by end-retail investors. The problem is that now everyone is starting to notice the stench that the market is not supported by anything except momentum manipulation and primary dealer machinations. Per ICI, the week ended August 4 saw an outflow of ($2,788) MM, bringing the total to over $46 billion in domestic equity redemptions year to date. Retail is now fully boycotting stocks, as the no-volume surge of July was not even sufficient to bring one meager week of inflows, and in fact, July saw almost $16 billion in outflows. If not even a 10% surge in stocks is capable of bringing retail back into stocks, perhaps it is time the administration and the SEC ask themselves, "what will?" We can not wait to see how the market drop of this week impacts fund flows. If history is any indicator, it will not be pretty.
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Carbon-based is so yesterday. Today it is Silicone-based that counts.
Fed (PPT) backed HFTs will continue to artifically prop up the stocks even when they know its not fully helping MFs / retailers. They know it'll be much worse if they stop doing that.
Even Tyler agrees with PPT's thesis: "We can not wait to see how the market drop of this week impacts fund flows". If Market doesnt drop, it helps HFTs mint free illegal money plus fund flows will be impacted less. HFTs will act in FED's interest not to go short.
so bottom line: TBTF owned; FEd, SEC backed silicon based power houses (as you put) will continue to manipulate stocks (prop it go high) whenever they get the chance to do it on low-volume. As long as the collective PPT manipulation continues, its not going to be a smooth ride for well deserved shorts either.
retail is stupid so retail exiting is bullish. you can't have it both ways Tyler.
Ask themselves? Ask themselves? Tyler, how is the weather on Fantasy Island? This administration does not care about operating a free market; it's sole compass is the registered voter poll. Populism rules. Yes, the lobbyists do have a magnet on the side of the compass, as bribery is perfectly legal, as long as it is a politician receiving the money. How else, other than bribery, can you explain that it is legal to give cash to both sides in an election?
The thing formerly known as the Stock Market is dead. America is no longer a capitalist state. The government controls the food chain, banking, automobile manufacturers, housing, energy, health care, and insurance. Do you think that gasoline is naturally stuck at $2.49 a gallon for the last year? Do you think that Wal-Mart and McDonalds did not receive instructions from WhiteHouse.gov to lower prices? Who do you think put the "O" in rOllback and dOllar menu?
Do we not understand what fascism is? This is fascism.
Free markets are a thing of the past. Globalization means we are all going to be third world, it's just going to be downhill for some, and lateral for others.
AaAaAaAaaamennnn!
I've heard that before and now I'm beginning to believe that is the case.
HH: You have never had free markets...NEVER. It has just been a Fox Fantasy.
I'll take a Fox fantasy over Fed intervention:
http://images.psxextreme.com/wallpapers/ps3/megan_fox_01.jpg
That's pretty much what I think, except for the populism part.
Elections are managed. I don't see how this isn't obvious.
Just watch the withdrawal totals accelerate now that we started the next leg down.
Exactly, this house of cards will fall faster and harder than most imagine as fear takes over. Investors have been taken for a ride the third time this decade, enough is enough!
The masses are done with stocks. Boomers are 10 years closer to retirement than they were in the 90's. 401k was the proverbial "set up like a bowling pin, knocked down it gets to wearin' thin" plot. An engineered fucking of the middle class to create a slave society.
I can't prove it, but I bet that all these redemptions are because of high unemployment. People are cashing in their 401k's and IRA's just to make ends meet. The Baby Boomers retiring will be yet another reason of the markets to wash out.
I suspect some of it can be traced to this. Normally when some layoffs occur in my neck of the woods, I get new (and old) clients who need to rollover their qualified money, such as their 401(k) or pension payout. This time I'm seeing less even though there are many more people out of work. And some that are rolling over are also taking cash distributions as soon as the money comes over.
Not a good sign.
Also shiny new iPhones.
Because you're worth it.
Good. Boycott away . I'm ready for this to all to come to an end, sick of waiting, sick of myself ! ZEROHEDGE is the most wonderful website, but, if I don't take a break from it all the madness will consume me .
+1. Please note that the headlines from ZH haven't changed, just the realization by more and more that we never left a recession and we've been in a depression. Eighty years from now, no one will be quoting ZH headlines and laughing at how clueless the ZH community was. Can't say the same for Hank Paulson, Benron, Timmay, Romer, Athuchan or Zandi or CNBS or Bloomberg, etc.
Breaks are healthy - and like life, will be here when you come back. Have a good day.
Where's the sarcasm off switch? You must've forgotten...
/sarcasm
Either way, have a nice day, Village Idiot.
DON'T FORGET:
Today is $500 ATM Thursday for TBTF banks.
What happens when it all collapses?
Will my food stamp card keep working?
Will my meals keep coming once a day?
Will the town keep paying for my trailer's heating oil?
Where did all the Doctors go mommy?
Every yo-yo trick championed by supporters of the market, pension funds, public sector employment and whatever else could use a good hard dose of reality brings the economy closer to hyperinflation.
Stop. Trying. To. Pick. Winners. And. Losers. Just. Stop.
Hyperinflation will only occur when all or most of the private and publicly held debt is extinguished. We only have $51T or so to go, so don't hold your breath for hyperinflation.
I'm not holding my breath. But I am biding my time until the assets I believe will flourish under inflationary conditions decline to reasonable multiples.
Doesn't make any sense.
Hyperinflation always occurs when the level of debt is too high and not acceptably collaterized to the surviving creditors, not AFTER the debt has been extinguished.
Right, because Weimar Germany didn't have any debt.
God, all this backward-ass thinking. I just don't have the words.
i dont understand why everyone is getting out when cramer just told us the markets a buy
lol XD a good one!
and just as timmy g. officially Welcomed Us To The Recovery!
Time Magazine notes the following:
Many portfolio managers ... have been concluding that stocks are overpriced in relation to investments like bonds and have begun to dispose of some holdings to trim their risk ... stock mutual funds now have just 7.3% of their assets in cash, ... The low current figure suggests to Cooperman that the funds are almost fully invested and will now be taking money out of stocks.
The Goldman Sachs strategist believes Congress and the Administration would have to move to slash ... the federal deficit to reignite the market rally. His opinion: "I think people are through overlooking the deficit problem."
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,921548,00.html
KKR pulls multi billion offering due to market conditions, GM announces multi-billion offering casue of great "profitability"...go figger.
All I know is that the banksters wanna get paid fo rthese IPOs and will somehow make market conditions work for these massive issues.
1101010111010110010100101011 !
"perhaps it is time the administration and the SEC ask themselves, "what will?""
Quiet man...their ideas are along the lines of "Well, what if we FORCE everyone to buy stocks from direct payroll deductions?"
Just let them blithely ignore this data....
Stuff those mattresses, bitchez!
DOW 36,000. Time to buy the high betas.
Disclosure: Long Moody's
For the Young
There is a greater need for cash now instead of large contributions to a retirement account. Just about every young worker I talk to (at least those with their heads out of the clouds) don't believe they will be able to retire anyways.
For the Old or soon to Retire
Its a retirement draw down (just pure dumping stocks) or a shift to bonds to save what little remains in your retirement plan after the 2008 crash.
For Companies
Record insider selling because companies can't dump stocks for cash fast enough.
For Hedge Funds
Its not a boycott because many hedge funds are either net sellers or they already moved away from equity markets. (at least in the US)
couldnt agree more, when we finally do have to deal with peniless retirees its not going to pretty
Yah, about those penniless retirees - those who can't afford to retire won't. They will hold onto their jobs and work til they die, cutting out those looking to enter the workforce. If they can't hold onto their jobs, they will be competing with the young for burger-flipping jobs and cashier posts at Wal-Mart, once again cutting out the young looking to enter the workforce as they make better, more dependable employees.
japan 101, savings rate close to 3% from 15%, olderr people wont give up their jobs and the young guns all have temporary jobs and cant save
Say goodbye to Mr. Sarariman, say hello to Mr. Arubaito.
Soylent green is PEOPLE!
Hi,
I don't understand why you think that the public is going out of stocks is a bad thing.
The public is the "stupid money" and they usually get out at the lows. Therefore, I think we are before a long-term bullish trend.
When you will see the public go back to the stocks, it will mean that the bullish trend is at its end.
wow, talk about oversimplified binary logic
logic which assumes structural integrity of the markets
jeez
It may be oversimplified but it has a very long record of success. Take a look at a chart of consumer confidence and the S&P and tell me whether you think its a good plan to buy stocks when the consumer is happy or the consumer is depressed.
Now that we have had a 10 year bear market and the bookstores are overflowing with how to protect yourself from the coming collapse don't ya think that maybe its worth taking a look at equities? This morning for example you could have bought INTC at less than 11x or an earnings yield of 9%. Since they just released earnings and gave some guidance which historically they almost never miss, why would you think its such a poor idea to own this kind of an asset as opposed to 10 year treasuries yielding 2.70.
People hate the market and many will never be back which is exactly why it offers great returns.
The trouble with relying on past performance/charts is the underlying assumption that this is a cyclical recession and not a ongoing debt de-leveraging crisis.
I've never been able to actually have someone explain to me how we will be able to pay our collective debts back.
Yes this is a de-leveraging crisis. It is ongoing but the vast majority of the hit has been taken on various balance sheets. In the end the governments balance sheet will be fixed by some form of taxation and currency devaluation. Ask yourself, if the Fed tmmw bought 1.5 trillion in treasuries what effect would that have on nominal prices of goods, services, real estate, etc. Very, very, little. So at least for now there is no problem in monetizing the federal stimulus and you can expect more of the same. They will keep on monetizing until the de-leveraging is near an end. They will probably overshoot as they always do and will at some point have to do a 1994 and jam rates higher to suck out all the liquidity sloshing around. Until then equities will have little competition and will do just fine. Maybe very fine.
So your whole bullish thesis is is based on the ability of the fed to effectively monetize debt?
Regardless, of the fact that in the history of the world debt monetization has only ever ended one way: in tears.
You really are the defination of dumb money.
lizzy, stop playing with your food and just eat. :>)
No, the bullish 'thesis' is pretty simple. The corporations I am investing in have outsize earnings yields. The bearish 'thesis' comes entirely from some guess as to what macro economic conditions are going to exist over the next 10+ years. I would posit that neither you nor anyone else has even the smallest clue as to what that is going to look like other than it is extremely likely that nominal activity will be way higher than it is today. In which case equities are very very cheap.
And yes I may well be the definition of the dumb money but I am very very lucky and have been for long enough so that this is my sole source of income. Sometimes its better to be lucky than good.
I also run a stat arb model that is also very very lucky. Who woulda thunk it?
Scrificial lamb.
Mazel tov.
I heard the exact same argument in 2000 (when unemployment rate was 4.0%).
I also heard the same argument for the last 20 years coming out of japan.
I would also state that the last "deleveraging crisis" that occurred was the great depression. It only took 22 years for stocks to see the highs of October 1929.
I think one can use history and come up with a very large clue about what the next 10 years is going to look like.
No no lizzy. Ya got it all wrong. This time it's different. You know, it's all about that new paradigm thing-a-ma-jig thingy stuff.
The consumer has nowhere near fixed his balance sheet. Nor have the financials(16% of S&P). The market is telling you this...BAC/WFC/JPM at or close to 52 week lows. Individual and corporate income tax receipts are less than the defecit. Your argument would have merit if this was August 2009, not 2010 when economic data was improving, not deteriorating as they have been for 3 months. The ugly fact has dawned on markets that the USA has too many promises and won't be able to deliver. You cannot change this paradigm shift unless you fix the problem.
Yes and if you bought most equities in august of 2009 you probably would not have made a great deal of money since then unless you were a very good stock picker. The idea is to buy stuff when it is obvious why it should go down and sell stuff when it is obvious why it should go up.
I have news for you, private deleveraging has only just begun. We are still above 300% of GDP for private debts and that deleveraging will not end until that level has gone down to where it always goes down to, ie around 100% of GDP. That means roughly another $30 trillion to go.
Question : do you expect the Fed will have no problem transfering those $30 trillion to its balance sheet?
I know, they just did a trillion plus over the last twelve months, so 30 times that amount in the comming years should be a piece of cake, No?
The only 'deleveraging' that matters is bank loans cause that is what effects money supply. If I lend you money there is no change in money supply so aggregate price levels are not effected. If your hypothesis were correct surely through the most violent part of the meltdown and gdp contraction we should have seen money supply contract, but that has not been the case. M2 has shown no year over year decline at any point and is now growing at about a 2% yoy pace. And yes it would have declined if it were not for the Fed expanding its balance sheet but then again they understand this.
First, M2 doesn't include all commercial bank loans. If you want to use the broadest measure of money supply available, you have to use M3, and that one has been decreasing since early 2010 (-5% by now):
http://www.shadowstats.com/charts/monetary-base-money-supply
Second, if you lend me money that I go on and spend it doesn't affect money supply, but it affects aggregate demand :
aggregate demand = GDP + change in debt
At the top of the bubble in 2007, change in debt (public + private) was +$5 trillion so it artificially boosted aggregate demand by almost 30%. Now that private deleveraging has begun we have the opposite effect on aggregate demand, and this despite releveraging of the sovereign that is not even able to compensate. So instead of adding $5 trillion to aggregate demand, the change in outstanding debt is substracting about $2 trillion. That's a delta of $7 trillion that is affecting the world economy. And the same is happening for the entire OECD so you can easily double that figure. Needless to say, it's not the leveraging of the emerging economies that is going to be capable of compensating this.
All in all, it's about $60 trillion worth of private deleveraging that is going to be substracted from worldwide aggregate demand in the decades to come. And it has only just started.
And you are bullish on equities?
If I lend you money it does nothing to aggregate demand cause i no longer have the money to spend.
If a bank lends you money then it is just a book entry and does not come from anyone else. This is how the money supply grows (also fed monetization does same) When loans are paid back the money supply shrinks or if the fed sell off treasury holdings.
Yes it appears m3 is down marginally from the top. I thought they had discontinued the series.
I would be surprised if global m3 had declined over the past year given the level of loan growth in the developing world.
Your numbers are vastly inflated. M3 is roughly 13 billion according to your chart. The idea that 60 trillion dollars of debt is going to be paid down over the next decades is without merit.
If you are lending me money, it's that you didn't intend to spend it during the duration of the loan, otherwise you wouldn't lend it but spend it. The fact that you lend me money and that I spend it increases aggregate demand at the moment I spend it. It brings forward demand that you normally would have generated much later if this loan hadn't been made. But the opposite is also true, while I'm deleveraging, ie paying back my instakllements to you, I'm slowing down demand because I have to spend less than I would have had if I hadn't had to repay you the loan.
That's why it's the total changes in outstanding debt that affect aggregate demand, and not only the changes in money supply. Outstanding debt is at $52 trillion, that's 4 times M3. For the entire OECD we're talking about $100 trillion.
Private deleveraging will continue unabatted until the level of outstanding debts is fully collaterized acceptably by the surviving creditors.
Now remember that deleveraging means either :
paying back debt and not taking on new one
restructuring debt, ie postponing the moment of payback in exchange for higher interests and lower periodic repayements
defaulting on debt, ie destroying money (in the simple example above, if I don't pay you back your loan you don't get to ever spend the money you might have spent in the future if I had repaid my loan. Sometimes you get to reposess the asset I bought in the past, but you don't create new demand).
So defaults are the most rapid way of deleveraging but also the most handicap future aggregate demand.
You can't reason in money supply only because it only affects a small part of aggregate demand. What affects aggregate demand are the changes in outstanding debt.
That's something neoclassical economists and especially monetarists like Bernanke have never understood. Bernanke thought his $1 trillion of money printing would greatly affect money supply and aggregate demand. He doesn't see the mountain of $52 trillion of debt that wants to go down at the rate of $5 trillion a year and thinks his $1 trillion is going to have any impact.
Ben would have to print ten times faster if he wanted to compensate private deleveraging if he wanted to get back to the level of aggregate demand during leveraging times.
He should be printing $10 trillion a year and distributing the money directly to the American households if he wanted to reverse the process and get back to the aggregate demand prior to deleveraging. What do you think would happen to the dollar if he anounced that kind of programme : it would collapse immediately and stop to be accepted internationally.
So Ben is trapped; either he kills the dollar or he lets the economy go down into a very long deflationary depression noting that with a trillion a year he's only going to slow down the deleveraging process so that the deflation will be more subdued, but over a much much longer time..
Now Ben is not going to take the risk to kill the dollar (and the Euro and the Yen and the pound and the Swiss Franc and the Aussie and... together with it) because those currencies are what the OECD derives it power over the emerging economies : they are the reserve currencies of the world. So he'll print slowly. So the whole world will go into a very long deflationary winter, at least two decades long.
And you want to buy equities?
You are assuming that J6P is selling his stocks based on an investment decision. Some are, but a lot more are selling because they need the money or because they are rightfully panicked that they don't have enough funds to pay for their desired standard of living in retirement.
And any time someone quotes "earnings yield" I become suspicious of them. Explain to me what good the earnings yield does for me the retail investor? How do I make money off of the earnings yield? My opinion is that people quote earnings yield hoping people will confuse it with dividend yield.
Whether a company returns is earnings directly to the shareholder in the form of dividends or stock repurchases or re-invests in the business is a decision made by the company. One would think that if they could invest the capital at an attractive rate they would do so and that would not be a bad thing for the shareholders.
If people are confused by the concepts of earnings yield and dividend yield they have no business making their own investment decisions and should buy some diversified global fund.
Part of the point being made is that the market rallied 10% DESPITE a massive withdrawal from equities. Therefore, it's somewhat questionable who the marginal buyers were/are.
Your comment assumes that people will come back to stocks at some point. Which is the other point. Perhaps retail buyers are simply done with stocks for the long term (how's that buy-and-hold working for them?). Demographics are against stocks (but perhaps not Leo's pension funds), and investors might simply be capitulating due to what appears to be a rigged game (it always has been of course). There have been long stretches in our history where no one bought stocks, unlike the equities driven culture of the past 20 years (where a 10% return was assumed).
So, if many of the retail investors get out, who will the computers trade with?
Who cares who the co mputers trade with. The whole idea of owning an equity is to own part of a business that generates profits. These profits can be returned to shareholders in the form of dividends or stock buybacks. So if some stock with an earnings yield of 10 never trades another share and you own it you will get a perpetual payout of 10% a year if all earnings are distributed. A lot of folks tend to confuse investing with 'trading'. If you want to be a 'trader' then you need someone else to step up to the plate so you can unload your shares. It's a whole different game. It's also one where the average jane is in for trouble because she is competing with some fairly sharp folks that make a living at it. They have money and technology on their side.
Perhaps people ignore earnings yield because they know that of that 10% you quote, only 2% is returned to shareholders as dividends. The other 8% is given to executives as bonuses or wasted on dubious acquisitions intended to pump up the short-term value of the stock.
The compensation paid to executives is pre-tax and pre-quoted earnings. If they pump up the price of the stock then you are free to sell it.
comment moved
And where, praytell, are you getting 10% yield? 10% yield in this market means the company is probably on the verge of bankruptcy. Once the company goes bankrupt, you get *GASP* nothing.
You can't build a skyscraper during an earthquake, and you can't have an economic recovery with the government changing the rules every other day. Investing in something that has high yields despite being a GREAT company is great, until one of those rules changes instantly destroys their business model and they go down the toilet. It's called political risk, and the level of political risk in this country right now is probably higher than most African nations. The question you have to ask yourself is this--how comfortable would you be investing in any of the African stock markets?
" So if some stock with an earnings yield of 10 never trades another share and you own it you will get a perpetual payout of 10% a year if all earnings are distributed."
Have you never heard of :
- companies going bankrupt ?
- companies whose profitability goes down ?
You are assuming that because a company has had an earnings yield of 10% in the past, it will have the same for perpetuity.
All I have to say is : ***FACEPALM***
So I guess the answer is to short some intc cause they might go chapter 11.
Good luck.!!
I have not the vaguest idea of who is going to file for bankruptcy in the decade to come. Neither do you. I guess if I had asked you the probability of bankruptcy of Lehman or Bear Stearns back in 2006 you would have answered zero?
So what. That means because some company might file chapter 11 in the next decade I should invest in nothing? If something is yielding 10 % and you reinvest the proceeds you double your money in about 7 years. It would take an awful lot of poor diversification and bad luck not to beat the 10 year return of 2.7% investing in a basket of global companies with earnings yields in the 8 - 12 % range, especially when these earnings are coming in a pretty crappy environment. And like I said before, I am very lucky.
I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart. - E. E. Cummings
I've been challenging myself to see how meagerly I can exist. It's kind of a grim challenge, but a challenge all the same and not entirely unrewarding.
Yesterday I taught myself to eat toilet paper.
Auggh!
Next step, Federal Reserve Note salads.
gee you think the banks are gang-banging their clients with help from the NY FED?
glad to see the public, on balance, isn't buying it
Volume tanks...algos step in...
Boycott on! Even NYT (which retail reads) is mentioning low volume as a result of non-participation by skittish investors.
I think that a good proportion of equity fund withdrawals are not political statements, just a reflection of how bad things have gotten in the economy: people cannibalizing retirement funds and savings to pay bills. This is the most dire aspect of it all.
This is bullish for equities over the intermediate term. The more retail investors get disillusioned with stocks (like they should always have been! No middle class touched stocks in the 50s-70s) the better.
"perhaps it is time the administration and the SEC ask themselves, "what will?""
The central bank, but they know that already. I'm somewhat impressed with the resolve of the central bankers, particularly considering the political pressure to inflate the currency that must be bearing on them.
Nevertheless, once you travel down that road there is no turning back. They know that too.
Come on ppl, Mutual Funds are for J6P's and Janes or grannies that are ignorant of market fundamentals. This manipluted, volatile market is no place for Joe, Jane nor Grannie. The sheoples are just waking up.
what market fundamentals?
It's the Matrix...don't ya get it Bitchez!!!?
edited myself out .
All of the outflow from the mutual funds is going somewhere. And we know it isn't being used to buy CD's, houses or most consumer retail goods.
Anyone have a graph of flow into bond funds, bond CEF's, MLP's or anything resembling yield.
Wall Street has burnt the retail investor on one side, and the Feds ZIRP has scorched them on the other. We, the retail investor, are looking to replace lost interest income at a risk that is "somewhat" tolerable.
the outflow is due to Boomers retiring. Simple as that, and get used to it.
"Retiring", yeah, that's what we'll call it.
Nothing like spending your "not-so-golden" years in abject poverty because you lost your job ten years before your planned retirement, and had to spend your retirement nestegg (what was left of it) on food and mortgage payments.
The Boomers are not voluntarily retiring. They are being forced to retire through corporate "downsizing". If Boomers still have jobs, the majority of money being withdrawn is to either protect it for a nonexistent future retirement or just to make ends meet after putting themselves into massive debt.
Hear, hear.
This market is all about liquidity. The chart above demonstrates that it is NOT coming from retail investors. It is from HFTs and those fee schemes known as hedge funds. Once the HFTs and hedge funds have finished robbing the retail investor at a certain market level. They will bring it to a lower level and continue the fleecing of the sheeple. Liquidity ran out at S&P 500 = 1100. Skynet is reducing it to the next lower level.
Headlines like "equity outflows" drive me nuts... there is NO equity outflow overall... for every seller there is a buyer!!!
Sure there is money going out of mutual funds, but there is equivalent money coming in from somewhere else, perhaps even the same retail investors buying ETFs in preparation for the capital gains tax hike next year??
Regards,
Michael
PS- the increasingly high correlation of price moves among individual stocks, reported here on ZH, support the thesis of money moving into ETFs.
Has it occurred to anyone that getting rid of retail investors,mutual funds, etc. might be a p art of the master plan? Besides me I mean . . .
DOW/SP500 bearish weekly megaphone wedge chart continues...
http://stockmarket618.wordpress.com
I wonder how this works?
Money goes out and the market goes up.
It's Magic right?
its magic alright
wait for the rabbit
Larry is 83 and at work most mornings slumped over his drafting table. He got screwed by the medical industry and saddled with major bills when he had no insurance. No retirement either to speak of. He and the wife live in their recreational vehicle.
Larry's skin is rotten - he looks like he has been dead for 7 or 8 days - but he is fairly lucid and only makes minor mistakes in his drafting. And, he seems happy to have work - at least on a part-time basis - it gives him something to do and get out of the trailer. One day we'll open his office door and he will being lying dead next to his drafting table. I guess we all gotta die someday.
Meanwhile, most of the office personnel know Larry is their future since the company owners are screwing them out of their retirements via greed and ignorance. Mark's retired parents lost it all in the tech stock bust and live on SS in a 18' x 20' room with some relatives. He knows that is his future also and is slowly deteriorating mentally from job stress.
Ho Hum. Just another day in the construction business.
Well Hell, if you're going to throw real stories about real people into this bull ring, we all might as well go home.
Damn, but the picture you've drawn creeps me out. That's because I know it's true. We all see this stuff around us daily, at least those of us who live in the Real America.
Pardon me while I pop out and hang myself.
I am Jack's total lack of surprise.
Yah, about those penniless retirees - those who can't afford to retire won't. They will hold onto their jobs and work til they die, cutting out those looking to enter the workforce. If they can't hold onto their jobs, they will be competing with the young for burger-flipping jobs and cashier posts at Wal-Mart, once again cutting out the young looking to enter the workforce as they make better, more dependable employees.
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