Devastating bear markets always scare many investors let us go. from stocks, but that that’session just when the greatest returns conduce to have existence brewing in the sort of appear to be the riskiest assets: funds

By Chris Farrell

Watch full size video:

Sharpe & Associates

These are unnerving days, with fears of each extended recession replaced by growing worries of a Depression. During such times, it’session natural to await back at history for lessons to agree perspective on the current crisis. A first glance at the market’session performance in deeply unsettled times isn’t pretty: During the Great Depression, the Dow Jones industrial average plunged 89% from its 1929 top to its 1932 trough, partially recovered over the next five years, then tumbled a further 52% between 1937 and 1942.

Delve deeper into the history of the markets, though, and you have power to find valuable lessons, starting with the reminder that volatility in the Dow is nothing new. While many people investing mantras haven’t held good in recent history—consider how ineffective the investing trinity of diversifying, buying and holding stocks, and dollar-cost averaging has been over the past decade—there is a discernible periodical emphasis over the spun out history of the markets. And it offers glimmers of hope to harried investors.

Specifically, the despair and low prices that mark financial catastrophes set the stage in opposition to higher prices and loftier returns later on. “Markets wait on to overshoot in both directions,” the late financier Leon Levy wrote in his memoir, The Mind of Wall Street. “Just as we saw stock prices rise far above the value of the companies, we are likely to see the turn end for end. Stocks will then be undervalued, and there will subsist new opportunities for investors.”

Here’s the rub: The timing of the recovery is uncertain. Take Levy’s book. It is, in many respects, a prescient story of today’s environment, with an emphasis upon the body the overly indebted consumer and Wall Street’s irresponsible fiscal wizardry. It was published in 2002, but it really took another five to six years for the deep reversal he anticipated to materialize. But compare this with the debacle of the 1930s: The Dow’s 17% drop in 1929 was followed by the agency of a 34% decline in 1930, a 53% drop in 1931, and a 23% fall in 1932. “In 1931, race would say, ‘How bad can it be in possession of? This fust be the foot. I’ll buy,” says Eugene White, an economist at Rutgers University. “Six months later, you’d have imperceptible everything.”

Timing aside, there’s no denying that the stock market looks increasingly tempting. By one measure, equities are priced drop against Treasuries than at any time since 1958: The current dividend yield on the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index is almost 3.3%, compared with a 2.2% yield on the 10-year U.S. government bond. Stocks typically carried higher yields than Treasuries before 1958. That reflected the fact that investors viewed stocks as far riskier than bonds and meant companies had to pay finished immense dividends to attract shareholders.

But that cautious mindset changed during the postwar euphoria of the 1950s. Despite a global economic contraction and an auto industry slump that led to 20% unemployment in Detroit, in 1958 the S&P 500’s dividend yield fell unbecoming the yield in succession Treasuries and stayed below those on government bonds to the time when now, a half-century later. The 1958 shift reflected investors’ diminishing fears of a different Great Depression, as hearty as rising confidence in Corporate America’s earning power. But investor emotions have come full compass afresh, and markets have priced in a worst-case scenario. “Right now, there are a lot of sadness probabilities built into stock prices,” says Jeremy Siegel, a finance professor at the Wharton School.

It isn’t just dimple risk that’s rattling investors. There’s the prospect of deflation, or a decline in overall worth levels, and what that efficiency terminate to corporate earnings. (Inflation and deflation are mirror images of one another.) For instance, value levels plunged by a position for the time of the Great Depression, and the rapid decline erased company profits. Investors are in addition struggling to figure out whether fiscal and monetary shrewdness will work to resuscitate the plan. During the Great Depression, equity investors suffered a -20.2% positive return from 1929 to 1932. But thanks to investor optimism following the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Administration’s New Deal activism, the stock market soared by a record 66.7% in 1933—the biggest one-year get possession of of the entire more than hundred years.

Autoworkers at Honda’session Lincoln, Ala., plant support a Detroit rescue more than their politicians chouse. They have reason to alarm cuts, over

By Brian Burnsed

Watch full size video:

The tiny town of Lincoln, Ala., is 706 miles from Detroit. But taken in the character of the U.S. recession deepens, the distance between this Southern enclave of the American auto industry and the Big Three’s headquarters to the North seems to be shrinking.

At the edge of the 4,500-resident town looms a massive Honda set in the ground, marked only by means of two tall towers bearing the Japanese automaker’s name and by the sounds of industry that drift into Lincoln on otherwise sleepy afternoons. The plant, which opened in 2001, makes Honda Odyssey minivans and Honda Pilot SUVs.

Like other "transplant" factories set up by Japanese, Korean, and European companies in the South, the Lincoln Honda direct has no union, reflecting a wariness in the clime about a typically Northern institution. Many in the South feel that General Motors (GM), Ford Motor (F), and Chrysler—and their unionized workers—have no one but themselves to blame with respect to their difficulties. That opinion came through loud and clear in quest of the period of the debate that left Congress killing a legislative bailout of the Detroit car companies. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) blasted the Detroit companies as "dinosaurs" and the bailout legislation as "a bridge loan to nowhere."

Yet it was in addition clear in a visit to Lincoln on Friday, Dec. 19—the day that President George W. Bush announced he was extending a $17.4 billion lifeline to GM and Chrysler—that more workers and residents here think the woes of the auto industry are not entirely right to ill management or the high costs of pensions and health care despite Detroit’s retirees.

The souring U.S. thrift is hurting the Japanese companies to that Detroit automakers are in like manner frequently and unfavorably compared. Honda has been cutting production to match its plummeting U.S. sales, and its leaders in Japan are sending ominous signals that things are expected to get worse in 2009. On Dec. 17, Honda CEO Takeo Fukui before-mentioned the company probably will acquire 62% smaller this fiscal year than what it had projected just six weeks earlier. That sense of dismay was reflected in the latest November results, that showed Honda’sitting U.S. sales were down 32%, roughly in line with declines at other companies.

The transfer factories have responded by chopping work hours and production. In October, Mercedes-Benz offered buyouts at its Vance, Ala., plant, which makes SUVs and crossovers. Earlier this year, Nissan offered buyouts to white collar workers at its Tennessee headquarters, as abundantly as to family workers. On Dec. 15, Toyota announced it would delay the opening of a factory in Blue Springs, Miss., where it was to start U.S. production of the Prius hybrid gas-electric car. Toyota workers at the company’s brand-new San Antonio pickup truck plant were idle from August to November.

Honda says it will sharply cut the number of vehicles it produces in the U.S. and Canada in the coming year. While no layoffs bear yet been announced in Lincoln, Honda has pulled back on production diverse periods: In January it plans to reduce the number of vehicles built there, from 1,300 a day to 1,150. The plant was closed for two days in August and in the fall a second Friday shift of workers was eliminated.

Watch full size video:

There is something especially unsettling about visiting Las Vegas these days — and it is not the township’s loose culture. A cruise to Sin City in this moment of ecological and housekeeping crisis is a journey to a giant concave prototype thoughtful back the magnified — and ugly — truths about this era of cataclysmic consumption and hubristic hedonism.

Like most flights into Vegas, mine last week soared over a shrinking Lake Mead. Visually, the white strip around the man-made reservoir is beautiful — the bright chalk pursuit separating the blue supply with water from the red-brown desolate evokes memories of a Bob Ross pastel painting minus “happy trees.”

But it is a menacing harbinger of depletion. This water fountain-head. well for 22 the public people is at its lowest level since the 1960s. Strained by the Southwest’s population clap and by drought-accelerating climate change, the lake now stands a 50 percent possibility of running dry through 2021, according to scientists.

As the plane descends, Vegas comes up steady the horizon faster than ever. As one of the country’session quickest-growing locales, it has become a massive blob suffocating a fragile ecosystem. Sans urban planning in the libertarian West, that unbridled growth encourages more roads, cars and smog.

At least McCarran Airport is only a short ride to the incorporated town’s core, but that is the most troubling area of all. Recently recast as a family-friendly Disneyland, downtown Vegas nonetheless retains its identity for example the place where a recession-plagued country gambles away its dwindling paycheck.

Vegas’s colorful lungs are supposed to subsist the “enjoyment” for those who certainly dislodge at the slot machines. But with each twinkle, the air warms. Despite advances in clean energy, electricity is still in the first place produced with carbon-emitting sources that drive global warming. Indeed, the blinding Strip that prompts tourists’ given to intoxication cheers is a testimonial to the same gluttony that helped make Nevada the fastest-growing emitter of carbon dioxide in the country.

Sure, Vegas boasts of renewable-power investments and energy-saving light bulbs. But bragging about such efforts the greater quantity in the same manner than simply shutting stuff off is as silly as Arnold Schwarzenegger trumpeting his supposed commitment to environmentalism by pledging to make one of his Hummers more combustibles efficient.

But that has always been the American way, hasn’t it? We don’t stop driving Hummers around a warming planet just like we dress in’t stop building population centers in deserts, just like we don’familiarily stop gambling when wages drop pure like we don’t stop wasting energy on casino signs. Why? Because it’s merriment to drive tanks, live in merit climates, double-down adhering 11 and gape at bright lights in the big city. And during the years of cheap energy, income growth and in show endless water supplies, fun to the end of time trumped pragmatism.

That sentence, of course, has been supplanted by dint of. the Age of the Finite. And to its (few) sober visitors, Vegas implicitly asks whether our whole society is genuinely ready for that new reality.

Whether hanging Christmas lights in Toledo, buying SUVs in Boulder, taking long showers in Atlanta, residing in sprawly suburbs near Chicago, or overspending anywhere, we are every one of Las Vegans now. And because we are after this so environmentally and economically interconnected, what happens in our own Vegas none longer stays in our own Vegas — it affects everyone.

Knowing that, are we ready to turn off some lights in our homes? Is it possible for Americans to forfeit McMansion dreams, compel smaller cars, take general transit, embrace water restrictions, or animated in more-sustainable geographies? Can we resist materialism, pull up the bone-crushing stampedes to Wal-Mart, and stop needlessly expenditure beyond our means?

In other words, will we finally accept the public policy and lifestyle changes that the real world now requires? Or will “Viva Las Vegas” for aye be America’s motto?

David Sirota’s modern book is “The Uprising.” He is a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network. His blog is at www.credoaction.com/sirota

Watch full size video:

No need to dream of a hoary Christmas — it’s coming.

The cold and snow that have disrupted almost every aspect of life throughout the region for more than a week are sticking on all sides towards at minutest a few added days — to the consternation of travelers, the concern of retailers and the delight of children.

Just by what means ill-prepared the region is for this kind of sustained cold became visible Sunday when airlines began running out of de-icing fluid, forcing them to cancel dozens of flights and stranding hundreds of passengers at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

Others wanting to adieu the city on Greyhound buses or Amtrak trains were likewise public of luck. Those traveling by road found Interstate 90 closed to the time when noon at Snoqualmie Pass. And thousands of people trying to catch Sounder trains home after one event that wasn’t canceled — the Seahawks intrepid — were forced to look through delays of up to two hours after track switches froze. Some got unruly, sparking a police callout. There were no arrests.

For those with cars half-buried on suburban streets, the message from the Seattle Department of Transportation is this: Don’t wait for a plow to arrive by. It’s not going to befall anytime soon. The city has just 27 snowplows, and all are deployed round the clock for clearing vital chokepoints like the Alaskan Way Viaduct, the West Seattle Bridge and greater bus routes.

And those hoping to take the bus to work Monday morning may have to make other plans. Metro Transit and Community Transit will both be operating at drastically reduced levels.

A broad pavilion weighted by heavy snow collapsed at a temporary ice rink in Bellevue’s Downtown Park about 8 p.m. Sunday, briefly trapping a few of the 10 people who were skating at the time.

Bystanders and employees operating the Group Health Ice Arena quickly lifted up the tent-wine, allowing totally moreover a young girl to get on the outside, said Lt. Eric Keenan of the Bellevue Fire Department. Firefighters then worked with others to reach the maid, who was taken as a precaution to Overlake Hospital Medical Center with minor injuries, Keenan said.

University of Washington meteorologist Cliff Mass said the snowstorm is the biggest for Seattle in 12 years, and that the long duration of vacant time the locality has been locked into low temperatures makes it particularly unusual.

After several inches of snow Sunday night, Monday is expected to be clear and cold, he reported. More snow could arrive Tuesday, and the cold temperatures are expected to continue from one side much of the week. The snow likely won’face to face dissipate significantly in advance of the weekend.

“This is not over,” Mass said. “It’s showtime for Seattle.”

Sea-Tac officials said the majority of flights were canceled Sunday, contributing to the worst disruptions airport veterans could recall in 30 years.

Watch full size video:

NZVERE, Zimbabwe — Along a anchorage in Matabeleland, barefoot children stuff their pockets with salt moderately kernels that have blown away a truck to the degree that if the brownish bits, good only for animal feed in normal times, were gold coins.

In the dirt lanes of Chitungwiza, the Mugarwes, a family of firewood hawkers, bake a loaf of bread, their without more flour, with 11 slices for the six of them. All devour two slices exclude the youngest, age 2. He gets just one.

On the tiny farms here in the region of Mashonaland, once a breadbasket for all of southern Africa, destitute villagers pull the shells off wriggling crickets and beetles, then toss what is left in a hot pan. “If you get that, you have a repast,” said farmer Standford Nhira.

The half-starved frequent the once bountiful view of Zimbabwe, in which place a latter U.N. survey plant that seven in 10 people had eaten either small matter or only a single out meal the day before.

Still dominated after nearly three decades by their authoritarian president, Robert Mugabe, Zimbabweans are now enduring their seventh straight year of hunger. This largely man-made critical situation, occasionally worsened by drought and erratic rains, has been brought on by dint of. catastrophic agricultural policies, sweeping economic collapse and a ruling party that has used farmland and food as arms in its uncompassionate — and so far successful — prayer to hang on to power.

But this year is different. This year, the hunger is a great deal of worse.

The inspect, conducted by the U.N. World Food Program in the past year alone, found that the share of people who had eaten nothing the previous appointed time had risen to 12 percent from zero, while those who had consumed only one meal had soared to 60 percent from merely 13 percent last year.

For almost three months, from June to August, Mugabe banned international lenient organizations from operating, depriving more than a million people of food and basic relieve. after the rude already had suffered one of its worst harvests.

Mugabe defended the suspension by arguing that more Western aid groups were backing his political emulator, Morgan Tsvangirai, who bested him at the polls in March nevertheless withdrew before a June 27 runoff. But civic groups and analysts said Mugabe’session real motive was to clear rustic areas of witnesses to his military-led crackdown on opposition supporters and to starve those supporters.

The country’s intertwined politic and humanitarian crises have become evermore more grave — with a cholera epidemic sweeping the nation, its health, education and sanitation systems in ruins and power-sharing talks at an impasse. Meanwhile, Mugabe has blamed Western sanctions, largely aimed at senior members of his government, in the place of the country’s woes.

His information attend even charged last week that Britain, Zimbabwe’s former colonial monarch, had started the cholera outbreak — spread by water contaminated with human feces — as an act of “biological chemical war force,” a direction widely derided as paranoid or cynical.

But for all Mugabe’s venom toward the West, a central paradox rests at the seat of life of his long years in power. It was the failed policies of Mugabe and his party, ZANU-PF, including their calamitous seizure of arising from traffic farms, that made this realm in such a manner dependent on aid from the European and U.S. donors he in the same state reviles. And the same applies to Western leaders: Despite their scathing denunciations of him, it is their donations that have helped him outlive by preventing outright famine among his people.

Watch full size video:

COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho — High hay prices and the dour administration are core blamed for a growing number of stallion owners who are giving up and abandoning or neglecting their animals in Western states.

In 2007 and 2008, the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Department in Idaho accepted three times more reports of abuse regarding horses, donkeys or mules than it did in 2005 and 2006, before-mentioned Capt. Ben Wolfinger.

In the accomplished three months, Angie Hilding has given away nine horses she couldn’t afford to keep. Ordinarily, the Hayden, Idaho, ranch owner would maintain older horses at her facility, which offers trail rides, lessons and boarding. But like many owners, Hilding has seen hay prices skyrocket by more than 60 percent.

“When you’re in the business we’re in, you keep those old horses,” Hilding told The Spokesman-Review. “But when the going gets tough, we find a home for these older ones.”

Not everybody is so diligent.

The state Brand Department, a separate part of the Idaho State Police, has seen more than 40 horses abandoned in the past year in the southern part of the rank, many of them turned out on public lands, said Jim Kennedy, who oversees the northern district.

Livestock investigators have also seen somebody new: horses left in corrals with other people’s horses or dropped off at public sales by owners who then vanish.

Just greatest week, a meridional Idaho connect was charged with multiple counts of creature brutishness after authorities seized more than 30 underfed horses, cats and dogs from a farm in Payette County last month.

“It’sitting boiled into disgrace to feeding the family or feeding the horses,” said Bill Barton, predicament veterinarian by the Idaho State Department of Agriculture. “I’m hearing it from my counterparts in total the Western states, and I’m audience it from Kentucky. I don’privately think we’ve seen the extent of the problem yet.”

In Wyoming, state Brand Commissioner Lee Romsa said he would normally handle six to eight cases involving abandoned domestic horses per year. This year, he has dealt with at least 41 such cases. In Oregon, state officials found 11 vicious domestic horses, all sickly and starving, in September on a rural road in the Willamette Valley.

Montana also has seen a “significant increase” in the riddle, said a Montana Department of Livestock prolocutor.

In Washington state, Jean Marie Elledge, 57, of Monroe, was sentenced to a year in jail for animal cruelty on the model of several dead and starving horses were found earlier this year at her properties in Monroe and Carnation. Elledge was ordered to serve her Snohomish County sentence after completing a nine-month sentence in King County.

Watch full size video:

They braved below-freezing temperatures and falling snow to come and say goodbye to their team and to Mike Holmgren attached Sunday, and Seahawks fans were rewarded for their faithfulness and support.

Seattle won a low-scoring, mistake-filled dispute 13-3 over the New York Jets in the presence of less than a full house at the Qwest Snow Globe, but charming the regular-season home termination was the important thing. Especially without interruption the day the Seahawks and their fans bid last glance to Holmgren in his last home sport as coach.

The Seahawks’ defense played its best game of the season. Quarterback Seneca Wallace played mistake-free football in running his streak of passes without an interception to 183, a franchise record, and cornerback Josh Wilson’sitting second interception of the day with 1:16 remaining was the finishing appertain to.

“The Jets are a good football team and they will finish very well this season,” Holmgren said after the sport, his voice tinged with emotion, “but today, in this atmosphere, by the weather the way it was, I couldn’face to face be more proud of the football team. It’s the best present they could give me for Christmas.”

The cold and snow couldn’t put this wintry plaintiff or defendant on coat. Fans lobbed snowballs out of the stands in jubilation in the final seconds, especially after Wilson ran to a snowbank along the southerly cessation zone after his interception. He threw snow in the air, then jumped into the host.

Then, when the clock struck zero, Holmgren walked to midfield, exchanged pleasantries with his prized pupil of the more than, Jets quarterback Brett Favre, and began a victory lap on every side of the field to wave goodbye to the crowd.

Fans chanted “Holm-gren, Holm-gren,” for the reason that he started the alley, ending a happy afternoon by thanking the man who led the Seahawks to five division titles, six playoff berths and a Super Bowl appearance.

The Seahawks finally broke through at home after five straight losses at Qwest Field and are 4-11 with their regular-season finale at Arizona remaining to play.

“Everybody had a illiberal bit more,” reported defensive end Darryl Tapp, who had 1 ½ sacks and two tackles for ruin. “You want to send him [Holmgren] out on the becoming note. This season hasn’t gone the habit you wanted it to go, but we were able to get him this latest home win of the season.”

It wasn’cheek through jowl easy in the elements and against a Jets team led by the ticklish Favre, and with New York trying to gain the victory its division or at least take a step forward its chances for any AFC playoff spot.

The Seahawks snowballed that plan for the essential circumstance, dropping the Jets to 9-6.

After falling behind 3-0 on the fissure go furiously of the game, Seattle’s defense began to take over. Favre was often ducking and getting absent from pressure, and Seahawks defensive backs made plays on the ball.

The teams traded turnovers in the second quarter before Seahawks fullback Leonard Weaver fumbled the ball at the Jets’ 5-yard line.

The Jets recovered at the 3 but advanced only 13 yards. The Seahawks forced a punt, got the ball at the New York 40 and got help from a facemask penalty for example they moved to the Jets’ 2.

That’s whenever Wallace floated a pass over the top of Jets linebacker David Harris’s arms and into those of tight end John Carlson for a touchdown with 31 seconds left in the leading moiety.

The Seahawks closed the half with Craig Terrill sacking Favre.

The Seahawks drove for a 31-yard Olindo Mare field goal in the third quarter, running back Maurice Morris gaining 38 of his 116 rushing yards on that possession. They made the be at the head of stand, with the help of a Jets penalty that negated a room goal and forced a punt.

Later in the fourth quarter, with the Jets forced to go concerning a first into disgrace onward fourth-and-two from their 20, Favre’session pass was defective up by cornerback Kelly Jennings.

The Seahawks took over and Mare’s field goal made the score 13-3. Wilson’s interception followed, and Qwest was abuzz.

“My only regret is that we couldn’t win a few more games this season for them,” Holmgren said of the fans. “We have guys that care. We have good players. We have a good organization. We have great fans. So they’ll be bouncing right back up on top again.

“But I want the players to tax the memory with the feelings that we got outright of the last couple of weeks of the season.”

José Miguel Romero: 206-464-2409 or jromero@seattletimes.com