Warning to the Unwary: Don't Believe or Trust Them

Stocks are soaring today in a continuation of the bear market (a.k.a. bear trap) rally sparked by a very upbeat earnings report from the government supported casino doing business as Wells Fargo Bank.

With the recent easing and current flexibility of the accounting rules and a government eager -- to the point of desperation -- to portray as beneficial and efficacious the confused, flawed, and stumbling efforts it has been taking and is continuing to take purportedly to restore the economy, I view -- and recommend that everyone view -- earnings reports from major financial institutions and industrial concerns that have become dependent on, and subservient to the government with substantial doubt, skepticism, and suspicion.

None of these entities and certainly not the government ever has been noted for being trustworthy even in better times and under far more favorable circumstances. Just recall the rosy things they were telling us as the economy was on the brink of tanking.

Supporting this view is a report in today's Wall Street Journal indicating that the bond market is a superior predictor of future economic conditions, and that it is foretelling a bleak future.

Finally, anyone interested in understanding how and why we got into our current economic mess and the counterproductive results of the supposedly corrective steps the government has been and is taking would do well to get and read a book entitled Meltdown by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. It's a short book, just about 200 pages, written clearly in ordinary nontechnical language for the layman who isn't a financial or economic expert, and it's available from Amazon at a very reasonable price.

One of the important things that the book vividly points out is that the government's recovery efforts are being led by the same charlatans, clowns, and incompetents who led us into the debacle. While they never saw and denied the risks to which they exposing us, others did. Those who saw and warned of what was coming were ignored . . . and they still are being ignored.