The future is never clear; you pay a very high price in the stock market for a cheery consensus. Uncertainty actually is the friend of the buyer of long-term values.
The real fortunes in this country have been made by people who have been right about the business they invested in, and not right about the timing of the stock market.
Asset values and earning power are the dominant factors affecting the valuation of a controlling interest in a business. Market price, which governs valuation of minority interest positions, is of little or no importance in valuing a controlling interest.
If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper-middle class should even probably be cut further. But I think that people at the high end - people like myself - should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we've ever had it.
A low-cost index fund is the most sensible equity investment for the great majority of investors. My mentor, Ben Graham, took this position many years ago, and everything I have seen since convinces me of its truth.
That's been lost. It's a huge problem. What you have is you have the major institutions of the world all wanting to deleverage. They want to take down their assets and liabilities. What seemed so easy to borrow against a year ago now looks like rat poison to them. So they're trying to deleverage. There is only one institution in the world that can leverage up in a way that's all a countervailing force to that, and that's the United States Treasury.
Investors, of course, can, by their own behavior make stock ownership highly risky. And many do. Active trading, attempts to "time" market movements, inadequate diversification, the payment of high and unnecessary fees to managers and advisors, and the use of borrowed money can destroy the decent returns that a life-long owner of equities would otherwise enjoy. Indeed, borrowed money has no place in the investor's tool kit.
At this point, when treasury bills, seven day treasury bills at 1/20th of one percent, it's not because people want to earn 1/20th of one percent, it's because they trust the fact the treasury will give it back to them next week.
I think the oversight is great, and I think that oversight ought to be devoted almost entirely to the question is this being done at market you know. In other words, you want to make sure that the government isn't investing foolishly. But you don't want to care about which congressional districts it goes to or whether banks get favored over.