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I Don't Think This Will End Until ECB Cuts
MaxedOutMama — Until the ECB chops its main rate to somewhere around 2%, I don't see the pain ending. What's going on now is the Japanese collapse I've been so worried about. There are a number of reasons for it, but the collapse of the yen carry trade is pushing up the yen, which is going to cut exports, and the Nikkei is collapsing. To make matters worse, Kaupthing just defaulted on some samurai bonds (yen denominated). Obviously Lehman was the first defaulter. Worries over another round of Japanese real estate deflation are growing. Nothing's really going Japan's way; the collapse in the Baltic Dry means that their major shipping lines are ...

Japan's Lost Quarter Century
Fund My Mutual Fund — We've talked about the United States Lost Decade earlier this year [Mar 26 - WSJ: Stocks Tarnished by Lost Decade] when the market was essentially flat over the past 10 years.... and more recently [Oct 7: Bloomberg - 2000s Stock Market Worse than 1930s] as the market has now lost substantially over the decade. The inference here is we were told "we'll never be like Japan because our economy is so dynamic, flexible, and innovative" - we'd never have real estate bubbles combined with financial bubbles combined with a stock market that went nowhere for a decade. Nope - free markets would never allow that. We're ...