Challenging Times

If you're watching CNN, the DOW, your TV or checking on your investment portfolio, you're seeing waves of market dips, crashes and recesses.  It's challenging times around the globe.....unless you have a gold mine in your back yard!   This has only been going on since.....oh 2007....but, who's counting, right?  Today S&P  FINALLY decided to downgrade the U.S. credit ratings and stocks have plunged.  Ya think?!  Moody, Fitch, are you out there?

More importantly the lack of global leadership and common efforts to take critical actions around the world, especially in the U.S., and REDUCE sovereign budget deficits and debts....are slowly ending the world as we know it.  We can not control the oceans or the winds....only Mother Nature has that right, but we can control the ships and crews that are sailing through the mightiest of headwinds and turbulences. 

I wouldn't put too much stock (no pun intended) in S&Ps ratings.  There's a huge conflict of interest based on their very existence.  And, like all corporate engines, their sole purpose is to make money.  They're not in it for the public service.  Doing the right thing and rating companies, stocks, products, etc.,  based on real facts, extensive research, short and long term potentials and overall risks are completely secondary or tertiary for them. 

As the market takes it's daily tumbles, it's just one of many waves pounding us from the financial tsunami that started years ago.  The rating downgrades are way too late and pretty much meaningless in the scheme of things.  The market has been a mess for awhile and it's only taken these yahoos a few years to catch up and actually report there are some risks and volatility.  There's a storm a comin! And, there's a thousand miles of seas from where we are and where we need to be. 

Hello!  Is anyone awake and manning the ships?