You sound like you’ve been responsible – making payments, paying down principle, etc. I am in a similar boat, but I have not been paying down principle, just sticking with the monthly payments. I am definitely going into a capital preservation mode – I need to have the flexibility that if I get laid off, I have the cash on hand to pay my monthly bills for an extended period of time, especially if we are headed down to a fat depression.
I think a lot of non-defaulting Americans are going this way as well, leading to temporary deflation. Hopefully our future leaders in Washington, whomever they may be, start looking at saving and cutting costs as well, else we’ll just start printing more and more money to devalue the currency, and lead to inevitable inflation. Hopefully that is a worse case scenario, instead of these Argentina-like scenarious I’ve seen described as possible futures… which I’m not completely dismissing.[/quote]
Frankly, I’m sort of at loss what the Fed is really trying to do… There’s already talk about Fed dropping rates again….And some are speculating now it will close to 0%. That’s really the last wildcard. I’m trying to figure out why the dollar hasn’t been tanking more than it should. Perhaps, since the rest of the world’s economy is in shambles too. No idea…But it seems like the Fed is intentionally gonna try to inflate it’s way out of this mess. And europe looks like it’s in a lot worse shape than the u.s. right now. It’s pretty interesting what the economic summit China is saying what they are planning on doing. With an global economic crisis, their plan (described in this euro-asia economic summit) is that they are planning to keep their economy going by spending money domestically on infrastructure (rail systems/roads/transportation/etc) throughout the country during this global economic downturn. I wouldn’t be surprised if massive investments are made in alternative energy too, (since China probably has a vested interest in not being so dependent on oil too). I guess that way, they can keep people employed and keep the economy going. They mentioned in one of these summit meetings with euro nations that that was their strategy during the last asian financial crisis…And I guess when you have such a large budget surplus, you can afford to do this, and keep people employed.
OT: on my flight over to china, I watched a movie called “An Amerian Girl”. It was about the great depression. Ironic, and it was pretty sad to watch (for me that is).
