The Hussman Funds founder, John P. Hussman, Ph.D., has an article on the funds’ website about the current stock market. Its title is How Low, How Bad, How Long?

This interesting article was brought to my attention by the Investment Quality Trends newsletter.

The article gives you lots of numbers to ponder to describe the assumptions that are safe to make about the market’s future without predicting exactly any of the elements in the title.

The other topic that I found interesting in this article was the last paragraph about how to and how not to handle the home mortgage foreclosure crisis.  This paragraph discusses an idea similar to what I described in a previous post, Greenberg et. al. Solution to Real Estate Bubble.

The following sentence is from Hussman’s article:

Any solution that provides for a reduction in mortgage principal, without tying that reduction to some amount of surrender of future property appreciation – will immediately encourage mass delinquencies and foreclosures, as homeowners compete for what would, in effect, be free money.

I suppose this post could have been made in my Investing Forum, but I thought it of enough general interest to post here.

According to a story on Huffington Post, Obama Names Valerie Jarrett Senior White House Advisor. The story on HuffPo is rather brief but the links in the story and in the comments more than make up for the brevity.

Particularly enlightening is the DailyKos article So just who is Valerie Jarrett?

The DailyKos article had a link to an interview with Jarrett conducted by Katie Kouric.

The intellectual depth that Obama and his advisors would bring to the executive branch is one of the things that attracted me to Obama in the beginning. So far there have been few, if any, disappointments along these lines.

There are more videos at parodyandson.blogspot.com.

Andy Borowitz has written a piece called Bush in Race Against Time to Wreck Country.

Since this article is on Huffington Post’s Politics section instead of their 23/6 Humor section, then we should evaluate this as serious commentary.  Looking at Bush’s actions of late, it certainly seems like Borowitz has it figured out.

Can the economy last until January 20? When you are in a nightmare, it is sometimes hard to realize that things will be better when you wake up.