Dumber than a bucket of rocks

Is Wall Street as Dumb as we Think?

Dear Fellow Conservative,

"Somehow we just missed that home prices don't go up forever."

No, that's not your idiot brother-in-law explaining how his four home equity loans eventually landed him penniless on a futon in your rec room. It's the billionaire CEO of JP Morgan, Jamie Dimon.

Dimon was explaining to Congress's Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission how he and his fellow Magic Men crashed the entire U.S. economy and then turned to taxpayers for a bail out.

Really? So Dimon's defense to Wall Street's utter recklessness with other people's money is to claim that Wall Street doesn't really understand how the market works? Again: Really?

But no one on the Commission challenged Dimon because, while the Commission's stated purpose is "to examine the causes of the financial crisis," its actual purpose is to conceal those causes -- especially the federal government's own central role in creating the housing bubble.

Further proof that the Commission isn't serious: It has not yet recommended that the President resign immediately. (Obama's next idea for fighting unemployment is to institute a weekly census.)

Instead, we get make-believe "hearings" where executives like Mr. Dimon admit to egregious stupidity. The Magic Men are happy to play along -- as long as they get to keep their tax-supported bonuses.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not suggesting that everyone on Wall Street is as dumb as Jamie claims they are.

What I am suggesting, however, is that whether the "best and brightest" on Wall Street turn out to be stupid or dishonest doesn't matter to our retirement accounts. Isn't it time we stopped trusting them with all our money? And if we don't feel quite competent to manage it on our own (I sure don't), shouldn't we find someone whose character, reputation, and financial expertise we can rely on?

I think so. And if you're with me on that, I've got just the man to help you take control of your own investments and put your mind at ease about your financial future.

His name is Dr. Mark Skousen, a free-market economist and editor of the investment newsletter Forecasts & Strategies -- and he just might be the smartest financial advisor working today.

How so? For one thing, unlike the Wall Street Wizards who "somehow just missed" the oncoming financial collapse, Dr. Skousen actually predicted it almost two years in advance, in 2006, when he warned his Forecasts & Strategies subscribers that "we clearly are headed for fiscal disaster" (and then showed them how to protect themselves).

But that's just one among hundreds of uncannily accurate market calls Dr. Skousen has made in the 30 years since he launched Forecasts & Strategies -- including:

• Last March he called the exact bottom of the market, telling his subscribers that "stocks are a screaming buy." In the four weeks following, the Dow soared a remarkable 24.5%.
• Just weeks before the NASDAQ collapsed in 2000, he warned his subscribers that tech stocks were dangerously overvalued.
• He told his subscribers in 1995 that the NASDAQ would double, and then double again -- which is exactly what it did.
• He called the Gulf War of 1990 "a turning point for U.S. stocks" -- and the Dow subsequently began a bull market that didn't end for nearly ten years.
• And he issued a "sell everything" recommendation to his Forecasts & Strategies subscribers just 41 days before the stock market crash of 1987 -- then told them to get fully invested again several weeks later, just in time for the recovery.

(It's not a financial prediction exactly, but Dr. Skousen also correctly forecast that Rima Fakih would become the first Muslim woman to win the Miss U.S.A. contest after she wowed the audience in the burka competition and knocked them out in the talent portion of the competition by not driving.)

Then there's my favorite Mark Skousen prediction -- the one that launched his career back in the early '80s, when he defied the so-called experts by predicting "Reaganomics will work." Which, of course, it did -- and, come to think of it, will again, when we finally bring it back.

But until that blessed day arrives, take comfort in this: Mark Skousen knows how to make you money even during turbulent economic times.

Bottom line: Trusting Wall Street's "We didn't think markets went down" Money Men to manage your money is like trusting Bill Clinton with your daughter. Better to take your financial affairs into your own hands, with the expert guidance of Mark Skousen in Forecasts & Strategies.

The cost? About a tankful of gas for your SUV -- or two tankfuls if the Democrats push through "Cap and Trade," or as it's formally known, "The Huge New Tax on Everything Under the Sun Act of 2010."