Replies to post #181472 on Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[Doesnt Add Up]

I'm guessing that they've had Saddam locked up for a long time just waiting for the right time to pull him out of the hat.

I mean if the guy had a million dollars in his pocket why was he sitting down in a hole waiting to be found. Wouldn't you think he could afford to get some cosmetic surgery rather than the overgrown beard?

No, the administration was getting some bad press with Halliburton and half the freindly Iraqi troops leaving. Pretty hard to convince other nations to pay for the Iraq clean up if your involved in corrupt contracts and loss of confidence. So voila.. we happened to find Saddam.

I dont buy that they just stumbled on him or that he was controlling revolutionary forces from the foxhole they had him stuffed in.

I'm guessing that they found Saddam at the same time they got his sons or at least have had him bunkered in since then.

D.

[market_watcher]

It's interesting that they are now calling the Iraqi occupation a 'financial strain'. Does the author of that article realize that a significant proportion of the GDP growth over the past 9 months has been from increased defense spending? Remove that 'financial strain' and GDP could start to underperform. Be careful what you wish for.

I think calling the Saddam hunt a major uncertainty is simply untrue. What was uncertain was the timing of it. What I also think is uncertain is the amount of incremental cash flows or increased discounting of current cash flow estimates this event actually leads to.

"It might put a temporary pause on the rise of the euro," he said, noting that capture of the former Iraqi leader should lower the risk of attacks against the United States, which had been weighing heavily on the dollar.

Yes, because I've never heard of anyone performing a terrorist act in order to avenge someone else's capture. That would just be stupid to think. I think this guy's just speculating here and has nothing substantive to back up this assertion.

"There's a lot of momentum in this market," Lincoln said.

I don't see that in the momentum indicators. A quick look at the ADX 14 on the Dow weekly shows that clearly.

Hmmm... Self, how about we use the capture of Saddam as an excuse to play whack-a-mole for a while on the shorts, then load our own short positions, then announce that, gee, the capture of Saddam doesn't really mean that much to the market, because the US will still be in Iraq for a long time and it will still cost a lot more money and a lot more lives? Then we can take things down for a while, unload our shorts at a nice profit, then reload at wholesale to sell to the dummies, um ... er ... I mean "public" ... at retail.

Unless the criminals think that the public will anticipate this. What are the odds that they give the public that much credit? I think they have a pretty decent guage one what the public's level of sophistication is when it comes to something like thinking more than one move ahead.

Technically, I think the weekly charts are showing divergences that should be of concern. We also closed at the top of the Dow BB last week and we have not closed above the upper BB since the rally began last October. I don't know how high the upper BB will end this week, but it doesn't appear to be rising at more than 30-40 points per week at its current slope.