With US stocks continuing a marked tumble that began in August, some analyst predictions of an extended period of brutal economic turmoil are gaining credibility among distressed American investors.
Books and newsletters warning of economic crashes and stock-market routs that rival the Great Depression have been around for years.
**Those include problems such as too much debt, the burst stock market bubble and excess capacity in global industry. **
He says the current rout in stock prices has more to do with cagey investors than with flawed economic fundamentals.
Other analysts take issue with comparing the loss in value of technology stocks over the last two years with the crash of 1929.
“It’s an old-fashioned concept that markets go up and down, and there is nothing really changing in the world that might make markets move,” he says.
Stock markets go up and down comprende! the dot com bubble burst because it was a bubble with no backbone it was all hype and it crashed in matter of minutes there is no al qaidah syndrome its called capitalism where the bubble bursts man its so simple sometimes !
Bush’s top economic advisor has said it could cost as much as $200 billion, a significant drain on a federal budget already swimming in red ink.
The Congressional Budget Office, while declining to predict an overall figure, estimates that combat could cost as much as $9 billion a month–a figure that dwarfs current fiscal concerns. The entire U.S. budget for the 2003 fiscal year is stalled in Congress over a $9-billion difference between Bush and congressional Democrats.
Rep. John M. Spratt Jr. (D-S.C.) said Wednesday it was appropriate that fiscal concerns were “conspicuously absent” from House debate. But he also urged lawmakers to recognize the pressures a war would put on a federal budget that is already projected to run $452 billion in deficits over the next four years.
“The cost, whatever the cost is, is not beyond our means in a $10-trillion economy. But it is beyond our budget,” Spratt said. One factor could ensure that the price tag for attacking Iraq would be greater for the United States than in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
That conflict cost about $61 billion, but other countries in the international coalition put together by the United States contributed $48 billion.
On the other hand, war spending could simply add to the deficit, if Congress refuses to choose between guns and butter and instead finances both. That could rile fiscal conservatives like Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., Bush’s budget director, who said Wednesday an armed conflict with Iraq “should not leave a residue of bigger government and higher taxes, as many wars have.” Daniels estimated that the cost of responding to last year’s Sept. 11 terrorist attacks added $80 billion in federal spending.
Lawrence B. Lindsey, Bush’s chief economic advisor, estimated in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal that a war with Iraq would cost from 1% to 2% of the gross domestic product–which amounts to from $100 billion to $200 billion. Lindsey did not detail how he arrived at those figures.
*** Up to $13 billion to deploy U.S. forces to the Persian Gulf region.
Up to $7 billion to return U.S. troops to their home bases after the war.
Up to $4 billion a month for occupation of postwar Iraq.**