Bad decade for U.S. stocks but not world's worst

[Downwinder]

Read it you will see the relevance.

Snip

... Had you invested in Brazil's stock market at the beginning of the decade, you would have earned close to 20 percent a year, the best return in the study. (All results are in U.S. dollars and include dividends, with a cutoff date of Nov. 30.)


Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/12/26/BU1R1B8D7G.DTL&tsp=1#ixzz0arbnJs8c

[Judi Lynn]

1. Very interesting. Thanks. n/t

[Braulio]

2. Thank Bush

The US market was inflated in 2000, it's easy to skew figures by picking a particular year. However, overall the US economy has done worse than it COULD have done because Bush mismanaged things the way he did. The guy is an idiot when it comes to economics.

[Downwinder]

3. It also has done better than it could have done, because they are

trying to bring it in for a soft landing. It is not there yet.

[Peace Patriot]

4. Corpo-fascist economic articles are almost not worth reading, they leave so much out.

For instance, the COST of the impacts of "commodity" extraction (oil, gold, trees). These costs are already catastrophic in some places, from climate destabilization--drought, hurricanes, floods, vast fires, pollution of air and water--catapulting us toward the ultimate catastrophe--the end of the human race due to our destruction of our only known habitat: earth. The incremental costs--the costs over the last half century--have been heaped on the poor, for instance the thousands of indigenous poisoned by Chevron-Texaco's "rainforest chernoybl" in Ecuador, and the vast displacement of peasant farmers worldwide, and their replacement with large-scale, toxic corporate agriculture. Corpo-fascist economists are, in fact, to some extent responsible for the wrong focus on mere monetary profits for those rich enough to "invest" in world-destroying enterprises. And they never talk about the profoundly destructive wars that the U.S. has inflicted on people and the planet--including the horrendously bloody and also polluting wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, and the "war on drugs" which is largely responsible for the displacement of 3 million peasant farmers in Colombia alone (through U.S. funded toxic pesticide spraying and military/paramilitary death squads).

This article is typically myopic. It looks only at stock market "gains" in Brazil, over a decade that saw some of the worst destruction of the Amazon rainforest in human history. It has oil as the second "winner"--one of the most destructive commodities ever extracted and sold--one of the biggest sources of pollution and THE worst instigator of war (which we have not seen the end of yet). It goes on like that, never counting the immense environmental and social costs that the investors don't pay for.

For an antidote to this kind of blather from bought-and-paid-for "economists," I recommend http://www.incakolanews.blogspot.com/ --which analyzes markets in context (political, social, environmental), and provides uncommonly brilliant commentary and lots of useful charts and links. Its focus is Latin America. I also read Paul Krugman--another rare economics writer with a broader view of economic realities.

Here's an IncaKola consultant on Brazil--very interesting overall, particularly interesting discussion of Brazil's new oil find (the section called "Saudi Arabian mirage"):
http://incakolanews.blogspot.com/2009/10/bringing-brazil-down-to-earth-by-armen.html

Here's another IncaKola consultant on Brazil (bankster expose)
http://incakolanews.blogspot.com/2009/02/lime-slimes-brazil-pyramids-scams-and.html

Here's an interesting IncaKola report on a study of the stock market worldwide in Jan. '09 (Venezuela ranks FIRST--the best performing stock market in a bad year worldwide):
http://incakolanews.blogspot.com/2008_12_28_archive.html

It's also funny (check out the Apple logo)
http://incakolanews.blogspot.com/2008/10/brazil-sees-funny-side-of-crisis.html

On Brazil's stock market hysteria (10/08)
http://incakolanews.blogspot.com/2008/10/brazil-decides-to-lapse-into-hysteria.html

And here's a whole bunch of IncaKola commentary on Brazil
http://www.google.com/cse?cx=partner-pub-2132404595457595%3Aieuw5hxtx75&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=Brazil&sa=Search
http://incakolanews.blogspot.com/2009/10/bringing-brazil-down-to-earth-by-armen.html

Also, check out the great links in the righthand side column.