How will Detroit get past this?

Working class America is supporting the privileged class like high maintenance prima-donna step daughters planning their weddings. And being told they should feel honored.

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I’ve never taken a 6 or 7 year loan and don’t intend to but think about how ownership has changed over the years from 2-3 year loans. Cars were never kept longer than 2-4 years. If you got 80 to 100K on them, they were pretty much shot. These days though it is common to keep cars much longer and 150-200K. Gee I thought I just bought it but I’ve had my Pontiac 9 years at least. What would be so wrong with extending the payments more to the useful life of the car? Especially with a low interest rate. Just sayin’ is all, times have changed.

I’ve seen auto loan rates as low as 2.5 % now for 3 year loans, only 2.75 for 5 years. At those rates the bank is practically paying the borrower.

In case you are not aware of it, nobody in NJ pronounces the name of the state as “Joisy”.
That mispronunciation dates back to poorly-educated NYers in the early 20th Century, and even in NYC, that mispronunciation is no longer heard.

I was inside one of the mortgage banks that went under in January or February 2008.
Fannie Mae gladly bought those stinking piles of mortgage paper. Why would be they buy mortgages made to people based on literally qualifications that did not look at either Income, or Assets (NINA LOANS)?
ANSWER: The men at the top of FNMA made mult million dollar bonuses.
…True…
Bad incentives produce bad behavior.
Bailouts, based on that kind behavior, produce even more bad behavior.

BTW… Trillions of free money, just passed, will result in how much inflation?
Anyone who says it doesn’t matter, gets an F. … (That doesn’t stand for Ford)

You said tax…didn’t mention income Tax. Tax is a tax…doesn’t matter if it’s income or other means. And NOT everyone pays those taxes. It depends on where you live and how you buy. I have a couple millionaire cousins in NYC who’ve never had a license and don’t own a car. They take public transportation everywhere…no gas tax…no tax on tires…they buy as local as they possibly can.

While people like me with good credit were getting mortgages @ 2.5%…those sub-prime loans were @ 9%.

Don’t put the blame in Fannie Mae…ALL the big banks were involved in this. Want to blame one entity…then blame JP Morgan…they’re the one’s who came up with the bundling scheme. It’s funny how some of the smaller more conservative and less corrupt banks did OK during this crisis. My Credit Union did very well also. If Fannie Mae was to blame then ALL banks (big or small) would have been in trouble.

People on the right have been warning about massive inflation since the Fed started quantitative easing under Obama. It hasn’t happened, get over it.

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There was massive inflation. It was on Wall St. All the phony easy money was spent buying equities. Currently the equities are being cashed in. Guess who’s getting rich from the phony easy money?

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People who had the foresight to know what to buy and when, and what to sell and when.

In March 2009 a friend’s broker advised him to buy GM because it just couldn’t go lower so he sold and hocked everything he owned to buy in and needless to say he lost. So much for professional portfolio management. .I had mentioned that U-Haul sounded like a better choice and he dared me to put my money where my mouth was so I thew a few bucks at it and cashed in for a 1700% profit. Some times a good hunch is better than an experts opinion.

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Yeah, I remember being at a seminar where they suggested a 2nd mortgage to buy, just before the market tanked along with real estate values. This was before most of you were born, not 2007. It’s one thing to be upside down on a car but a house is much much worse. Use common sense not expert advice.

And those are very very few. And there isn’t one who can do it all the time.

It’s funny how the stock market has turned into a place to legally gamble. Stocks were originally sold to INVEST in a company and reap dividends for your investment. People would keep the stock for years if not decades. Very few companies today offer dividends. It’s all speculative buying. Even your 401K portfolio is constantly buying and selling stock as the market shifts.

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Yes @MikeInNH. From down here in the boonies it seems that the markets are pumped by minute to minute trades. I have for years thought that a .5% tax on market transactions would drastically reduce the madness in the market.

It’s not just betting on the market…it’s you betting on how I bet on the market. And then someone else betting on how well you bet on me who bet on the market. This can go several levels deep. It’s absurd.

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“Betting” is the key word here. For years I’ve considered the stock market to be little more than legalized gambling. Just look at the past 5 day stock price chart for Ford. It looks like an EKG for someone being electrocuted. You can’t tell me that people are really waking up one day and saying “I think Ford’s gonna go out of business soon, I’d better sell,” and then one hour later saying “Nah, they’re gonna do great for years!”

It’s just people throwing money at a new-age slot machine hoping to score a quick buck.

That guy wasn’t a real portfolio manager. The #1 thing they do is diversify the portfolio. Trying to predict the market over the short term is gambling. Buy and hold a diversified portfolio, that is investing.

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+1
Most of the individual stocks that I own have been in my portfolio since the '90s.
Even with the recent drastic drop in share prices, they are all still well above the price that I originally paid for them. And, the dividends that they have paid over the decades have been really nice.

I don’t own any individual stocks. I have just found I’m not much good at it. But it has always been my position that I don’t invest in debt such as with CDs and bonds. My money goes to businesses who are producing useful products and services over the long haul and hopefully increase the value of the company over time. So I don’t see what I do as gambling. Gambling is what is done at the casino with good and bad results, or betting on who will win a baseball game. Now I did buy a chance to win that 57 Thunderbird but that was for a worthy cause anyway. Gambling can be fun though but investing to me is not fun and prefer to let someone else do it for a small fee.

I don’t either. Not directly, anyway. Indirectly, through my IRA, 401Ks and 403B I own lots of stocks.