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Today's Daily Reckoning: A Bear Market Rally? London, England Wednesday, March 11, 2009 --------------------- *** Taking the Crash Alert flag down - for now...looking into a Grand Canyon of a dip... *** You can always count on a bear market rally...times are getting tougher for those living paycheck to paycheck... *** Congress getting into the spirit of the Boondoggle Age...Madoff to plead guilty as charged...the only way to preserve you wealth in uncertain times...and more! --- Special Offer --- Urgent Stem Cell Profit Deadline: Only 421 Lucky Readers Can Profit Your chance to take historic microcap gains from recent stem cell breakthroughs will vanish very soon. These companies are still so small that we can only inform 421 of the most savvy, nimble readers... So if you want in on this fortune-making opportunity - that's already delivered short-term gains of 208% - you must act RIGHT NOW. --------------------- The Dow roared back yesterday. It ended the day up 379 points. Gold fell $22 - to end the day below $900. We're going to take our "Crash Alert" flag down for a while. Finally, the Dow shows signs of life. We won't know for a few days...but we'll take a guess: the rally will continue. Stocks in the United States have lost $11 trillion in value - more than cut in half - without a single major bounce. We expected one after Obama was elected. All we got was a 15% ricochet. Then, after he announced his major stimulus/bailout/boondoggle program...we thought, surely, stocks would rally then. Nope. Instead, globally, stocks are down 20% since Obama office. But a rally in a bear market is one of the surest phenomena investors can count on. After so many years of rising prices - the bull market began in August 1982 - investors have learned to 'buy the dips.' Now, they're looking at a Grand Canyon of a dip; many can't help themselves. All they need is a little encouragement. Yesterday, the encouragement came from Citigroup - which said it had made money in the first two months of '09 - and from Ben Bernanke, who said we needed to regulate the financial sector better. The rest of the news is terrible, awful...revolting. Unemployment in the United States is up over 8%. A Bloomberg survey says it will go to 9.4% before the end of the year. Our own guess is that it will top 10%. By summer, one out of every ten people in the 'workforce' will be out of a job. There are always some people living on the margins...hand to mouth...paycheck to paycheck. The trouble is that the margins are getting wider. "24 Million Go from Thriving to Struggling," says a headline at USA Today. Not hard to see why. When you live from paycheck to paycheck, losing a job is a disaster. And in February alone, 651,000 jobs were lost. Obama says he's going to put millions to work with his spending proposals. He pointed to 60 new jobs in Maryland, on a highway-paving project: "That's how we're going to get this country back on its feet," he said. When we lived in Maryland, the only people who worked on paving crews were immigrants from Latin America. No one else wanted the job. But maybe things have changed. Meanwhile, Congress has gotten into the spirit of the Boondoggle Age. It sent a $410 billion spending bill to Obama for his signature. Included in the bill were 7,991 "earmarks," or pet projects that didn't make it into previous bailout, stimulus and boondoggles programs. Included in the spending bill, for example, is a program to pay for eyeglasses for people who are supposed to be blind...and to increase funding for Amtrak. The passenger train system has been losing money for as long as it has existed. According to classical economics (and plain good sense) Amtrak makes us all poorer. It takes valuable resources - labor, steel, electricity and so forth - and turns it into a service - transportation - which consumers judge to be worth less than the resources that went to provide it. Yet, that is the whole theory of the Obama stimulus program! Spend money on things that are unprofitable. (If they were profitable, they wouldn't need public funding.) Somehow, wasting wealth is supposed to make us all better off. As we think we reported yesterday, the bill for all these crisis- related boondoggles (including financial guarantees) is headed towards $12 trillion. And Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist at the New York Times, believes even that is not enough! "Many economists, myself included, actually argued that the plan was too small and too cautious. The latest data confirm those worries - and suggest that the Obama administration's economic policies are already falling behind the curve. "To see how bad the numbers are, consider this: The administration's budget proposals, released less than two weeks ago, assumed an average unemployment rate of 8.1 percent for the whole of this year. In reality, unemployment hit that level in February - and it's rising fast. "Employment has already fallen more in this recession than in the 1981- 82 slump, considered the worst since the Great Depression. As a result, Mr. Obama's promise that his plan will create or save 3.5 million jobs by the end of 2010 looks underwhelming, to say the least. It's a credible promise - his economists used solidly mainstream estimates of the impacts of tax and spending policies. But 3.5 million jobs almost two years from now isn't enough in the face of an economy that has already lost 4.4 million jobs, and is losing 600,000 more each month." Yes, dear reader, looked at individually, each spending project may make us poorer - but we'll make it up in volume! But here at The Daily Reckoning, we always look on the bright side. Yes...you know what we think of bailouts, rescues, and stimulus packages - they're all claptrap, eyewash and bamboozle. And they'll delay the restructuring that the economy desperately needs. But looking at the part of the glass that is half full - at least they make it easy for us to carp and criticize. *** Poor Bernie Madoff is going "up the river." The expression "up the river" refers to Sing Sing Prison, 30 miles up the Hudson River from New York City. How much time will Bernie do? "Life," said one report. "For up to 150 years," said another - perhaps over-optimistically. Bernie has copped a plea. When his attorney is asked the question, he is expected to reply: "Guilty as charged." Meanwhile, poor Martin Armstrong rots away in a New Prison. We will tell Armstrong's story when we have more time. It has all the ingredients for a great conspiracy story - the CIA...an omniscient computer program...money...power... you name it. Martin Armstrong was once the highest paid economist in the United States, as head of the Princeton Economics. At least, that's what the papers said. He developed an elaborate cycle theory, which was said to predict major market turns. Now, poor Martin is a convict...serving out a five-year sentence, after having spent eight years in jail for contempt of court, on charges related to an alleged Ponzi scheme. "Alleged" is an important word, because Armstrong was never tried or convicted on the original charges. But we'll leave that for another time.... Even from his jail cell, Armstrong still keeps up with the economy. His 8.7-year cycle theory predicted a downturn would begin in the summer of '07 - which it did. But now...get this...he says the recession will last for 23-26 years! Why so long? Because the feds won't allow the economy to heal itself, he says. We don't know if he'll be right or wrong. But it is a shame to keep people like Armstrong and Madoff in prison - at taxpayer expense. Both could make valuable contributions to society in order to compensate for their alleged crimes. We have previous suggested that Madoff be tapped for Secretary of the Treasury. The United States is running the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time, paying off old loans by taking out new ones. Why not let a real pro run the program? And surely some under-secretary post could be found for Armstrong. In the news over the weekend came word that Geithner was working 'night and day'...and alone. He is supposed to have a full complement of hacks and functionaries to help him; but they haven't been appointed or approved yet. So Geithner sits at his desk and talks to himself. What a pity! Destroying a major economy is not a job for a single man. Even Alan Greenspan had a crew of apparatchiks to help. Free Madoff! Free Armstrong! Let the pros do the job! *** And a note from our intrepid correspondent, Byron King, on why all of the cool kids own gold - and you should too: "I'm recommending gold because it's one way - and an ancient and established way - to preserve your wealth and purchasing power over time, especially during uncertain times. "Gold has history. Gold is to wealth as Sun Tzu is to the art of war. Gold is real. Gold is solid. Gold is nobody else's liability. Gold is quiet. Gold can be your own little secret. Many people even believe that gold is money! Archaeologists tell us that for about 8,000 years of human history, if you had gold, you could buy stuff. And if I owned a restaurant and you wanted to pay for your hamburger with a $50 U.S. Gold Eagle, I assure you that I'd take the coin and find a way to make change." Although gold may be in the midst of a correction due to this bear market rally, the long-term outlook for this precious metal is very, very good. Take advantage of this dip in the price and buy some of the yellow metal to pad your portfolio. You'll be happy you did. See here. *** An account of what we did this weekend... We are stuck with houses, dear reader. Chained to them...forced to take care of them... we are their prisoner. So we asked our gardener, Damien, to come on the weekend so we could work together. There were trees to cut...wood to split and stack...trees to trim...debris to burn...and weeds to pull. Damien is the best worker we've ever seen. He gets up early...he gets onto the job...and he doesn't stop. At 7:30AM we were still having our coffee and a croissant, but out the window we saw Damien. He'd already gotten out the tractor and was loading up the firewood cut the previous day. It was a wet day. A drizzle came down...making the logs slippery and hard to handle. We picked up only the light wood...we'd come back later with the log splitter for the heavy pieces. After several trips, we had loaded up all the wood we could pick up. Then, we attached the log splitter. What a marvelous device! Rural people all over the world must have welcomed the hydraulic log-splitter like a rich uncle. If Abe Lincoln had had such a thing, he probably would have stayed in Kentucky...and spared the nation a disastrous war. It makes splitting wood so much faster and easier than doing it with axes, hammers and wedges. You just set up the logs...and the hydraulic-driven wedge comes down and splits it. The hard work for us was maneuvering the huge logs onto the splitter. Many of them were so heavy, it took both of us to get them in place. After a few hours, your editor was beginning to get tired. Damien never takes a break. Not even to talk. He just grabs a cigarette and smokes as he works. We stopped for a quick lunch...and then right back on the job. By the evening, your editor was beginning to move more slowly. He was keeping up...but barely. All that bending and lifting - he wasn't used to it. We had ricked up a huge pile of branches, about the size of the Great Pyramid of Cheops in the center of the park. Damien had parked the wagon with a can of gasoline and some old newspapers off to the side. "Aren't you afraid that the wagon is too close to the fire," we asked him. "No." He then took the tractor and, using the front forks, raised up a side of the pile as if peeking under a woman's skirt. With the pile lifted up, he put under it a rubber tire, filled it partially with gasoline, and set it aflame. The flames shot up as Damien raced to the tractor to move it out of the way. Within a few minutes, the whole pile was blazing hot. It was about 8 in the evening. We continued throwing branches onto the fire and enjoying the heat. We hadn't noticed that the sparks were being carried by the wind over to where the wagon sat. One of them must have fallen onto a little gasoline. All of a sudden, we saw the wagon blaze up. "Don't worry about it...it will go out," said Damien. He was right. The old wooden wagon had been soaked by the slow rain. The gasoline burned off quickly...and the fire went out. Until tomorrow, Bill Bonner The Daily Reckoning --- Special Offer --- Important Message If You've Lost Money From Your IRA or 401(K) I don't know about you, but I'd barely trust Wall Street and the Big Banks with the 63 dollars in my wallet right now, never mind my IRA, 401(k), and life savings! That's why thousands of smart Americans are now taking matters into their own hands and quietly moving their savings and portfolio "off" Wall Street... to a far safer and more profitable place I call "Liberty Street". Read on to discover how this "Off-Wall Street Cash Recovery Plan" could recoup 100% of your recession losses by September 30, 2009. Guest Essay: The Daily Reckoning PRESENTS: As Bill is wont to point out, what the United States is facing right now is not a recession, it's a depression. So, we better figure out how to profit in the face of it. Chris Mayer explores... GREAT DEPRESSION SURVIVAL GUIDE, PART II by Chris Mayer "Although most Americans think of the 1930s as a decade of economic stagnation, the period was far from being one of unalloyed decline." - Robert Sobel, The Age of Giant Corporations Robert Sobel's book is our chief guide for the second leg of the Great Depression Survival Guide. As his book's title lets on, it was the larger companies that did the best. To illustrate this point, let's start with the auto industry. In 1929, the auto industry sold more cars than it ever sold before - 5.3 million units. But the wrecking ball called the Great Depression hit the auto industry especially hard. By 1932, only 1.3 million units were sold. As you might imagine, plenty of automakers never made it out of the Great Depression. Moon, Kissell, Elcar, Marmon and others all disappeared. What they all had in common was that they were small. Some were specialty carmakers, serving a small niche that got a lot smaller - too small to make a business out of it. Novelties - like Franklin's air-cooled engines - were desirable when times were good, but no one wanted to pay for them when times turned bad. But the Big Three - GM, Ford and Chrysler - survived. In fact, the falling away of the competition helped that. It allowed them to fill in and consolidate markets. So we have our first takeaway. The survivors often had large-scale operations and were leaders in their industries. Smaller companies had a harder time dealing with the Great Depression, as Sobel shows in his book. But the sales and profits of the largest companies increased during the 1930s. What else did the Great Depression survivors have in common? Here are more of my thoughts based on Sobel's research... The survivors were self-financing. They didn't need their bankers as a source of funds. In fact, most of large Corporate America didn't need their bankers for loans. The flush times of the 1920s led to the near disappearance of corporate bank debt by 1929. Banks had to go elsewhere to find borrowers. They began to finance real estate heavily and broker loans for the purchase of stocks and bonds. Ultimately, the banks got in trouble with these bets, but most of larger industrial America stood on its own bottom. Take the Gulf Oil Co., for instance. In 1929, the company produced 90 million barrels of oil. It was like granite as far as financial strength goes. In the 1930s, Gulf was able to expand operations, gain a foothold in the rich Kuwaiti oil fields, increase its advertising budget, pursue undersea exploration and refinance what debt it had at attractive rates. "Most of this would have been impossible were it not for the firm's strong position on the eve of the Depression," writes Sobel. The winners also often had great leaders. GM had Alfred Sloan as its president through 1937. Sloan was a brilliant strategist and organizer. The harsh environment of the 1930s rewarded tight ships and the accumulation of small advantages. These were things at which Sloan excelled. In fact, Sobel goes on to say that GM actually benefited in a number of ways from the Great Depression. "A management aware of possibilities and [with] adequate financing could hold its own and even flourish during the Depression," Sobel writes. Sobel finds other examples in other industries, everything from American Can in the tin industry to the New York Yankees in baseball. "Good leadership and finances could expand and dominate in the 1930s," Sloan concludes. Hence, we reaffirm once again the value of a good operator, a point I stress in these pages. Industries that were hard to get into did best. Another other important point here is that Sobel finds industries with high capital costs that kept competitors out did better than those with low barriers to entry. This one also makes intuitive sense. In a depression, money is tight. And if it takes bucket loads of money to crack into an industry, it's not likely to happen. The chemical industry held up well in part because to get in the business required heavy capital spending on equipment and research and marketing. Companies like DuPont, Monsanto and Union Carbide held onto market-leading positions simply because there was no threat of new entrants. Oil refineries, too, were another example. Sobel estimates that one barrel of gasoline capacity required $240 of capital. By the end of the '30s, it would cost you $320 to add one barrel of capacity. On a per worker basis, the refinery industry was about 10 times more capital- intensive than the typical American manufacturer. Those high costs discouraged new competitors and kept prices for gasoline up. It's no surprise, then, that price of gasoline did not go down in the 1930s. Productivity gains helped. Since money was tight and business was slow, you had to be innovative to squeeze out profits. You had to husband your resources carefully, like a caravan mindful of its water supply as it crosses the Sinai Desert. In the oil business for example, oilmen got much better at finding oil. Necessity is the mother of invention, after all. Crude prices fell in the 1930s, from $1.27 a barrel in 1929 to only 67 cents a barrel by '33. So the oil biz had to rely on new technologies to improve results. And it did. For instance, in 1929, about a third of all drilling resulted in a dry hole. By 1937, that figure was down to 22%. That's just one example among many in the oil industry, and other industries as well. In general, Sobel finds that output per man - productivity - increased 20% in the 1930s. Expanding markets also helped. Despite what you might think, demand for everything didn't topple over in the 1930s. Demand for gasoline, for instance, declined only in 1932. From then on, the number of cars and trucks on the road went up every year. And so did the demand for gasoline. That helped the oil companies. Oil also got some help from other industries. The rise of aviation in 1930s required fuel. The oil companies made that fuel. And the demand for highways required asphalt, also made by the oil companies. Some industries today will also see expanding markets for their goods. It seems obvious, but the point was often overlooked at the time - and so, too, it is overlooked today: There is some base-line level of consumption for things like energy, food and water - even in depressions. This base-line consumption is bound to rise, if for no other reason than population rises over time. You can't say the same thing for decorative balls sold at Target for $4.99 a pop, or for fancy $30 candleholders at Pier 1. If you want to be sure your money sees the other side of this thing, stick with the necessities. "The principal preoccupation of almost everybody in the 1930s was getting by," the great A.J. Liebling wrote in May 1963. It's a good point to remember as you think about investing today. "Almost everybody" is key, though. For the companies that shared the characteristics highlighted above - such as the large-scale leaders with good financing and top managers in expanding markets - the 1930s was a time of opportunity. Regards, Chris Mayer for The Daily Reckoning P.S. We own a bunch of these kinds of companies on our back page. In this market, I'm working hard to find little pockets of strength: investment ideas for which the economics are so compelling they continue to build value even in a depression-like environment. The quest continues. Check out what companies in the Capital & Crisis fit this mold by clicking here. Editor's Note: Chris is a veteran of the banking industry, specifically in the area of corporate lending. A financial writer since 1998, Mr. Mayer's essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications, from the Mises.org Daily Article series to here in The Daily Reckoning. He is the editor of Mayer's Special Situations and Capital & Crisis - formerly the Fleet Street Letter. Chris also recently wrote a book: Invest Like a Dealmaker: Secrets from a Former Banking Insider. Get your copy now...