MasterPo says: This blog is about topics and issues that are of importance to me. I am not one of the countless blogging lemmings that are tripping over each other scurrying down the hill and off the cliff of blogging oblivion trying to write the greatest blog on the latest topic de'jour. Your comments are welcome.


May 27, 2010

Y2K Has NOTHING To Do With the Coming Stock Market and Social Crash!


Throw MasterPo in the bus – or under the bus, it doesn’t matter – along with the rest of the doom&gloomers.

MasterPo does believe there is a major financial markets crash coming in the near future. And an accompanying social upheaval.

When?
Where?
How much?

MasterPo isn’t going to predict. The usual talking heads and other pundits can handle that level of minor detail. And it is minor because it won’t matter how much or when/where it will happen. Just that it will happen and will be severe.

This is one case MasterPo hopes to be wrong. But MasterPo’s gut is saying otherwise.

With all that said, the rest of this article is to the nay-sayers. The ones that say people like MasterPo are just fear mongering and spreading unrest.

These people often cite the Y2K hurdle as an example of similar fear mongering and nothing happened. Y2K came and went with little more than a hangover from the party.

This is a false comparison!

Y2K was a very tangible problem with a very tangible solution that everyone involved knew – Fix the software. And it had a clear, unquestionable due date – Fix it by December 31, 1999.

MasterPo is an IT worker and was heavily involved in Y2K testing and fixing for years the date.
So where thousands of other IT (and non-IT) workers through out private and government entities.
With Y2K people knew exactly what the problem was, how to find it, how to fix it, and how to confirm the fix was correct. Even if not all the bugs were found by midnight 1999, any problems that surfaced in the days/weeks/months after the flip of the calendar were relatively easy to find and repair.

There definitely was great potential for problems. But the fact that so few issue with Y2K did come up afterwards is a testament to how much effort beforehand was put in to avoid the problem in the first place!

Now contrast that with the current state of the financial markets, economy, and government’s policy on the subject.

We currently have an administration printing money like water from the tap. That just can’t last forever. Yes, physically they can print money until the cows come home. But sooner or later – likely sooner – world financial markets will get worried and take action. As they appear to be doing now.

The Healthcare bill will raise taxes tremendously! That, along with the promise of allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire at the end of 2010, and the effort to pass Cap&Trade (which, by President Obama’s own words will quote “necessarily cause energy costs to sky rocket”) will be like a sledgehammer on an egg shell.

Major companies like AT&T, Verizon, 3M and Caterpillar have already said these actions will cost them billions$$ – and neither the President or Congress seems to care!

Meanwhile we are being told we have turned the corner and are coming out of the worst economy since the great one of 1929. Never mind that no jobs are being created and wages are stagnant at best. Unemployment is 9.9% 9 (as of writing this) and the U6 rate is 18%!!

All hale the great job-less recovery!

Be honest: If that is true we are coming out of such a deeeeeeep economic funk does anyone really think raising taxes so much and so soon is a good thing for a weak economy?

Then there’s the world…

Europe seems to be collapsing after the great EU experiment has failed. And the European answer? Have one bankrupt country guarantee the debt of another bankrupt country!!

Policies from the Twilight Zone.

You’ve seen the rioting in Greece. No need to rehash that coverage.

All this and yet there is still a cadre of pundits saying it’s no different than other big scares like Y2K that just fizzled into nothing.

This current mess is nothing like Y2K. The opinions of the cause, the opinions of the cure, even the opinions of whether or not it is in fact a crisis prove by the sheer number of opinions (including MasterPo’s) any hope of a focused, surgical-like plan to resolve the problems (if such a resolution even exists). Which is also unlike Y2K in that for Y2K there was no question (at least among IT and systems people) the problem was real. But now even among financial “experts” and politicians there is great differences of opinion (at least publically) whether or not there even is a crisis, much less how that crisis is likely to present itself and when.

It is for these reasons that MasterPo is now confident to say this simply can not end well.

As in previous articles on this subject, MasterPo will not speculate details. Anything and everything across the spectrum is a possibility.

But the apex of the crisis is coming and coming soon.

How will you deal with it?

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