Today, Stephen Roach said something obvious that I haven't heard put quite this way: Insecure and scared workers tend take out their fears and frustrations on incumbent politicians.

Indeed they do. So if these bunch of half-wits we call a world-class legislature want to get re-elected, and we know they do, they will pander. The pandering will involve attempts to punish various countries that are seen to be "stealing" jobs from the United States. This time, the jobs cut during the recession aren't coming back, as we all know, so someone must pay.

Roach goes on to point out:

Third, China bashing has taken an ominous turn for the worse.  The Japanese fired the first rhetorical salvos in this trade battle well over a year ago, accusing China of exporting deflation and hollowing out the Japanese economy.  America has taken the blame game to a new level. The Bush administration has just imposed quotas on imports of selected Chinese textile products, and legislation has been introduced in both houses of the Congress...The most worrisome aspect of these legislative threats is the broad bipartisan and ideological support they enjoy in the Congress.

The government is prepared to give us not what we need, but what we think we want. I present the Medicare act, recently passed, as another fine example of this. Too few of our elected representatives are willing to tell us the real cost of our wishes. If they don't pretend they are possible, after all, they don't get re-elected.

I found this in one of the financial pages that I read on a regular basis.

For some reason, many of the fastest-growing, fastest talking communications tech companies in the nation have installed themselves in the techland paradise between Washington DC and Dulles Airport. Making our way to the airport last night, we passed Computer Associates, Oracle, Nextel, Juniper and dozens of others - many of the companies that blew up so spectacularly in 2000-2001...and now have ballooned again.

We don't know one from another...and have done no research...but our guess is that you could sell short any company between Dulles and the Beltway...except for maybe the Days Inn...and turn a nice profit.

I walk through Nextel's parking lot on my way to the coffee hut, and I can attest that it's always packed in the afternoon. It's so full that the employees park wherever they think their car *might* not impede traffic. When they see me on the part of the walk where I'm heading to the back of the lot, they follow me, hoping I'm moving a car so they won't have to park illegally that day.

Other buildings in the area are almost or completely empty (the completely empty one I'm thinking of has never had a tenant since it was built). Some are very full. Our lot definitely fills up. We share the edges of it with Sprint and...Comsearch, I think.

Based on my assessments of my employer, I'm sure there's plenty of doom to go around.

MSN has caught me completely by surprise. Usually, while the WSJ and CNBC are blowing productivity and GDP sunshine up everyone's ass, CBS Marketwatch remains the model of pragmatism among major financial news outlets. Today, MoneyCentral at MSN has run an article about how an analyst, one Michael Belkin, who has been right about everything so far has now decided that the market will turn down...severely.

First, Mr. Belkin got the following right:

• In mid-1999, he noted that the Federal Reserve had printed so many dollars in expectation of Y2K bank runs that the excess money would cause a stock market boom.
  
• In March of 2000, he told clients to sell tech stocks and buy U.S. government bonds. He even recognized that the 1000 point drop from late March to late April was not the end of the NASDAQ bloodletting.
  
• In November 2002, he advised clients to buy the most-volatile tech and gold stocks, sell low-volatility defensive stocks and sell bonds.
  

If his clients followed this advice, they'd have done very well indeed. He fully recognizes the liquidity bubble and says that it's now ending since the Fed has stopped pumping up the money supply. I do look at the weekly money supply numbers, and this is true. It's the quietest way for them to turn down the liquidity spigot. Surprisingly little of the media pay any attention at all to the weekly Mn numbers, but an interest rate change after an FOMC meeting is huge news.

What's he see coming for the future?

Belkin believes that the Bush administration essentially “rented the 2003 recovery from Wal-Mart (WMT, news, msgs)” by cutting taxes and mailing out rebate checks, and now faces an “involuntary deleveraging process” that will feed into weaker corporate results, softer economic statistics, worsening unemployment and, eventually, a sharp decline in real-estate values.

Only time will tell if Belkin or the rectal-sunshine-blowers are the ones who were right.