The Dow Jones Industrial Average on Monday climbed over 16,000 points for the first time in its history.
The blue-chip stock index reached a new all-time high in the first hour of trading, rising roughly 50 points to the new milestone.
The new high is just the latest surge from what has been a strong stock rally in 2013. The Dow closed above 15,000 for the first time in May, and in February cleared 14,000 for the first time since the financial crisis. The markets have been buoyed by the Federal Reserve’s unexpected decision to stick with stimulus policies.
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. John Kenneth Galbraith
The Dow is no indicator on how the economy is doing especially since it is being artificially inflated, at least your article stated that.
"In the beginning of a change, the Patriot is a scarce man, brave, hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, however, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a Patriot."
The Dow is no indicator on how the economy is doing especially since it is being artificially inflated, at least your article stated that.
Yes the stimulus is working. Glad that you recognize that.
Just think of how well the economy would be doing if BOTH parties were actually working on bi partisan ways to cut costs, promote jobs and reduce unemployment.
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. John Kenneth Galbraith
Not the stimulus, the Fed printing money every month is working so the rich, people that can afford to buy stock, get richer and the poor, who can't buy stock, are left with zip.
AFTER BUBBLE AND CRASH, VOLATILE VIRTUAL CURRENCY BITCOIN MARKS NEW HIGHS
Bitcoin_Big_Year (1)
You may tune into “Real Housewives of Miami” for drama. Me? I google “bitcoin.” The virtual currency’s a vortex of intrigue and high adventure—not to mention volatile and high-flying returns. Some think it might be the future of money.
After notching stratospheric highs in April, bitcoin crashed hard. Some seven months on, its dollar exchange rate (how many dollars a bitcoin is worth) is nearing $500. That’s almost 100 times its value on January 1 and roughly double its earlier peak.
It pays to be skeptical when pundits pin market movements on any one thing—usually, there’s too much going on to tease out all the underlying causes.
Bitcoin_CashThat said, bitcoin’s latest run may be partly thanks to surging demand in China—where companies are IPOing in bitcoin, and the primary exchange, BTC China, recently surpassed Japan’s Mt. Gox, traditionally the world’s bitcoin hub.
In fact, China is second only to the US for bitcoin downloads.
Beyond frenzied investment, Bitcoin’s backers still ardently believe in its value as a medium of exchange that bypasses central bank fiddling and Wall Street fees. So, how easy is it to use bitcoin as money, its stated raison d’être?
Austin Craig is making a documentary on the phenomenon, and he and his fiancée attempted to live on bitcoin alone for a time. Craig told the Wall Street Journal, “It’s been consistently inconvenient and occasionally frustrating but never impossible.”
The couple went hungry one night in Stockholm, but otherwise, they made it work for over three months. Bitcoin in no way rivals major currencies, but Craig’s experiment shows how many small venders will accept the currency, along with higher profile firms like WordPress or China’s search engine, Baidu.
To capitalize on bitcoin’s widely-heralded returns this year, entrepreneurs hope to navigate regulatory uncertainty and open organized financial vehicles to investors.
SecondMarket is offering a fund called Bitcoin Investment Trust to qualified high-net-worth investors (because of bitcoin’s inherent risk), and the Winklevoss twins will launch an ETF that would track bitcoin’s exchange rate and trade like a stock.
The two tech investors think bitcoin’s market value has room to grow 100 times bigger. Cameron Winklevoss told CNBC “that payments are increasingly going to use a network like the bitcoin network to move money around the world.”
Bitcoin_Ponzi_SchemeHe may be right. But for the time being, dealing in bitcoin can still feel like the Wild West. In October, the feds shut down the black market site, Silk Road, that traded largely in bitcoin, and a long list of scams and thefts dog the currency.
In one of the most notorious, Trendon Shavers set up a fund called the Bitcoin Savings Bank, took in “investor” cash promising 7% weekly returns, then shut it down and fled with some 263,000 bitcoins. The SEC has since charged Shavers with running a Ponzi scheme.
More recently, a Chinese bitcoin exchange, Global Bond Limited (GBL), disappeared without a trace, taking $4 million with it. A study (PDF) by SMU’s Tyler Moore and Carnegie Mellon’s Nicolas Christin found 18 of 40 known bitcoin exchanges have shut their doors (some due to fraud, but not all). Of the closed exchanges, a significant fraction failed to reimburse clients.
Victims have little recourse. Transactions in the currency are irreversible, anonymous, and hard to trace. Unsurprisingly, the year’s flurry of headlines, volatility, and scams is attracting regulators and lawmakers in addition to investors and technophiles.
Two Senate subcommittees, one on banking and the other homeland security, will soon meet to discuss virtual currencies. Meanwhile, the Treasury Department earlier this year decreed fraud and money laundering rules for traditional money services like Western Union also apply to virtual currency exchanges.
In response, bitcoin backers formed the Bitcoin Foundation to act as advocate for the otherwise decentralized currency. The group believes bitcoin will survive heavier regulation and maybe even thrive thanks to increased credibility.
Bitcoin_Virtual_CurrencyNot everyone agrees. Evoking Wall Street during the New Deal, some favor self-regulation, and believe compliance with new rules could prove too expensive for businesses. One group created the Digital Asset Transit Authority (DATA) to hold off federal regulators by encouraging bitcoin firms to police themselves.
Is Bitcoin poised to go mainstream as Cameron Winklevoss suggests? It’s tempting to say, “Yes!” just look at its rising exchange rate. But torrid demand shouldn’t be confused with viability as money.
The former depends largely on speculators expecting to make a return. The latter depends on bitcoin being accepted and used widely to buy things.
And here’s the problem: Given the present state of affairs, the two are mutually incompatible. Why spend an asset that gains 10,000% in a year? Bitcoin is, at the moment, less a medium of exchange, and more a speculative investment. According to Nicholas Colas of ConvergEx Group, up to 90% of bitcoin buyers are investors.
If bitcoin really is the future of money, the first thing it needs is a more consistent value. People want to know how much their cash will buy tomorrow or the next day. The second thing it needs is wider acceptance by vendors. Even as more businesses daily decide to accept bitcoin—stability remains elusive.
not much different.....IT'S ALL VIRTUAL VALUE....isn't it????
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
The news: Meet Litecoin, the digital currency that's growing even faster than Bitcoin you haven't heard about.
Bitcoin now costs over $900 and threatens to price out its entire mainstream market. In 2011, former Google employee and MIT graduate Charlie Lee built Litecoin to correct some of Bitcoin's minor flaws and make "small changes that made [Litecoin] a little bit better."
Described by Lee in an interview with Business Insider as "silver to Bitcoin's gold," Litecoin has grown in value over 400% since Monday and is "more abundant, and more lightweight" than the original currency. While there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins, a fixed point which keeps prices plump, there will be up to 84 million Litecoins at total market saturation. This keeps prices quite a bit lower than Bitcoin (Litecoin is now worth around $25), but isn't a guarantee against price inflation down the line.
It's also designed to generate more Litecoin using computer memory rather than processing power, an increase in required hardware which will discourage people from a digital arms race to generate more Litecoin. Finally, it boasts much faster confirmation times (the process by which Bitcoin users verify each other during transactions), making it a little more convenient to use in real-world transactions.
"If Litecoin truly succeeds, people will be using it for everyday purchases, and Bitcoin for large purposes," claims Chen.
Cool. Right? It's like Bitcoin with some incremental improvements to make it function more like a currency and less like a wildly fluctuating commodity.
With Bitcoin spiraling out of price control, a lot of speculators are making a lot of money - but simple economics says that it's going to be accompanied by a heck of a crash. (How much damage the crash will do to Bitcoin is ultimately irrelevant, because built-in market volatility is a feature of the currency, not a bug.)
Writes the New York Times' Adrian Chen:
"Bitcoin is built on a weird mix of the most old-fashioned kind of speculative greed, bolstered by a contemporary utopian cyberlibertarian ideology. Boosters say that bitcoin is the currency of the future. I'd argue that the phenomenon is a digital gold rush perfectly emblematic of the present.
... the crash is going to be great. Bitcoin is too dependent on speculative mania to be of practical use as a currency."
By tempering some of the madness built into Bitcoin, Chen's version of digital currency is a little bit more stable and little bit more functional for its intended purposes.
So should I get Litecoin or Bitcoin? Both are probably good investment bets for someone willing to take a lot of risk, because they're both pretty much guaranteed to increase in value continuously unless something so disastrous happens that other investors flee the market. If you've been priced out of Bitcoin, Litecoin seems like a good alternative
Yes, of course when stocks go up, all of the middle class celebrates, even though they are unemployed and under employed and over-taxed.
"While Foreign Terrorists were plotting to murder and maim using homemade bombs in Boston, Democrap officials in Washington DC, Albany and here were busy watching ME and other law abiding American Citizens who are gun owners and taxpayers, in an effort to blame the nation's lack of security on US so that they could have a political scapegoat."
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. John Kenneth Galbraith
You gotta dig a little deeper than a simple chart... case in point? the Carter years.. The graph makes it appear that his term was good for the economy.. Just ask the Real estate market what 21% interest rates will do for home sales. and to be fair, the Reagan 2nd term.. the Economy was propped up by deficit spending...much the same as it is now.
"Arguing with liberals is like playing chess with a pigeon; no matter how good I am at chess, the pigeon is just going to knock out the pieces, crap on the board, and strut around like it is victorious." - Author Unknown
Not the stimulus, the Fed printing money every month is working so the rich, people that can afford to buy stock, get richer and the poor, who can't buy stock, are left with zip.
BINGO! It is one of the biggest scams ever!!!!! The bankers/wall street are surely raking in the bucks...taxpayer's bucks!!
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
Logged
