October is a month for big stock market crashes.
+ The Stock Market Crash of 1987 or “Black Monday” was the largest one-day market crash in history. The Dow lost 22.6% of its value or $500 billion dollars on October 19, 1987.
+ The Wall Street Crash of 1929 began on October 24, 1929 (“Black Thursday”), and was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States.
+ The US bear market of 2007–2009 was a 17-month bear market that lasted from October 9, 2007 to March 9, 2009. The S&P 500 lost about 50%.
I’m writing this blog on October 1, 2017. We’ve had a wonderful bull market since March 2009. It hasn’t slowed. Even Friday was buoyant. Here’s the last ten years of the S&P 500.
So what could go wrong now?
My biggest worry is North Korea.
We have two hotheads going at each other verbally. The weekend was not good.
Rex Tillerson, our Secretary of State, did his diplomacy job and reached out to Kim Jong-un. Our president didn’t appreciate Tillerson’s effort and tweeted:
So what has to be done? What does Trump have in mind?
Harry J. Kazianis, is director of defense studies at the Center for the National Interest, founded by former U.S. President Richard M. Nixon.
He wrote this piece for The Week magazine:
I have studied North Korea for over a decade. This crisis is different.
Is war between the United States and North Korea looming? Or is the latest rhetoric coming from both sides just simply 21st-century chest pounding that will only result in more tough talk? As someone who has studied all things Asia and North Korea for over a decade, this latest crisis seems very different than previous ones – and it has me losing a lot of sleep.
Take for example this fiery statement from the North Korean government. In speaking to reporters on Monday, North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho said his nation has “the right to shoot down the United States strategic bombers even [if] they’re not yet inside the airspace border of our country.” The remark followed the release of a fictional video showing Pyongyang’s military attacking U.S. naval and air forces.
Yikes.
What worries me – way more than the rhetoric — is that North Korea’s growing military capabilities are now at a tipping point. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will continue to test ever-more advanced missile and nuclear weapons designs over the coming months and years; it is the only way to guarantee he can deliver an atomic payload to the U.S. homeland. His dream of having the ability to forestall some imagined future U.S. invasion to throw his regime into the scrapheap of history seems almost, if not already, in his grasp. We should all know the drill by now: A missile goes up, and the world’s collective stress level goes even higher.
The question now is whether tensions boil over to full-blown war. While we are not there yet, I would argue we are the closest to conflict on the Korean peninsula than any other time since the Korean War — a war that never officially ended. I would even guess that the odds of war breaking out between the United States and North Korea within the next six months are one in three. That’s not something I ever thought I would write.
Unless immediate steps are taken to walk back from the brink, Washington and its allies could be in for a fight with a nuclear-armed rogue regime that will have no reason to hold anything back – including the use of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. And that could mean U.S. cities coming under attack from North Korea’s atomic “fire.”
Where this all goes over the next 30 days is the key.
The good news, if there really is any when it comes to North Korea, is that I don’t see Pyongyang attacking our bombers, carriers, or troops in Northeast Asia. What I would look for in the coming days is a test of North Korea’s missile capabilities – and that can only mean a test of an ICBM.
But this next test will be very different. It will not be like the two ICBM tests this summer, where Kim’s rocketeers fired their missiles straight up in the air. Pyongyang will instead shoot missiles into the South Pacific to show just how far the weapons can go – and that they can indeed strike the U.S. homeland. In fact, if history is a guide, Kim will actually do this on several occasions, not only to demonstrate to the world that his nuclear arsenal is ready for primetime, but also to test new updates to his missile designs. Speaking of which, as North Korea develops new missiles in the years to come — especially mobile, solid-fueled ICBMs — Pyongyang will need to test those as well. Just as other nuclear powers do regularly, Kim will likely never stop testing his weapons as long as the regime exists.
There is now an obvious question in front of the U.S. and its Asian allies: Can they live with a rogue regime that will continue to display the means in which it can kill millions of people? Can, in fact, the wider world accept North Korea as a nuclear power that will have the capability to destroy Seoul, Tokyo, and Los Angeles, and, eventually, Washington, Sydney, London, or Paris? If so, we will have to implement policies — essentially a mix of sanctions, containment, and old-fashioned nuclear deterrence — to contain and slow the rate of growth of these programs.
But if the Trump administration sees in North Korea a regime that can’t be deterred, as National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster has alluded to, then the only other path is war and regime change. Such a conflict could cost millions of lives and trillions of dollars in damage. Large tracts of Asia and even America could be left uninhabitable thanks to radioactive fallout.
Unfortunately, because of the growth rate of North Korea’s missile program, these questions cannot remain unanswered for much longer. Very soon, Kim Jon Un will force the United States to make up its mind.
My advice: If containment worked against the Soviet Union and its allies, who posed a real existential threat to the West, then it can work against a country whose economy is one-third the size of Ethiopia’s. Let’s not presume war is the only answer.
This is now Harry speaking. To my mind, the most important words in Kazianis’s article are these:
What worries me — way more than the rhetoric — is that North Korea’s growing military capabilities are now at a tipping point. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will continue to test ever-more advanced missile and nuclear weapons designs over the coming months and years; it is the only way to guarantee he can deliver an atomic payload to the U.S. homeland. His dream of having the ability to forestall some imagined future U.S. invasion to throw his regime into the scrapheap of history seems almost, if not already, in his grasp.
Kim worries about leaders America didn’t like and replaced — including
Manuel Noriega (Panama)
Mohammad Mosaddegh (Iran/Persia)
Saddam Hussein (Iraq)
Raoul Cedras (Haiti)
Hudson Austin (Grenada)
Victoriano Huerta (Mexico)
Moammar Khadaffi (Libya)
Hence, Kim, in my opinion, is acting rationally.
Yet another nag on freezing your credit reports
The four companies and their freezing web sites are:
+ Experian. Click here.
+ TransUnion. Click here.
+ Equifax. Click here.
+ Innovis. Click here.
Say, thank you Harry. This took time finding them.
I’m not a survivalist. Here is stuff you need to have at home — just in case.
+ Water. At least ten gallons.
+ Food
+ Batteries, some way of charging your cell phones
+ Flashlights
+ Blankets
+ Tools — can openers, knives, swiss knives
+ Clothing — sweaters, jackets and rain gear,
+ Hygiene products. Toilet paper, feminine products and toiletries.
+ Extra gas for the generator
+ First Aid Kits
+ All your important documents in a waterproof pouch
+ Cash. Oodles of it, in all bill sizes. At least $5,000. Have you seen photos of the lines in front of ATM machines in Puerto Rico?
I travel with my laptop.
The best armchair travel: Sign up for Conde Nast Traveler’s daily email newsletter. No ordinary traveler (like me) can ever produce the gorgeous photos they do. Click here.
Here’s the article on the fall foliage livecams. Click here.
Another reason to hate Windows 10.
I have three of these Fujitsu scanners. I found this heartwarming message on Fujitsu’s “Support” site:
To watch Ken’s Burn’s documentary The Vietnam War.
Some PBS stations are still showing episodes, though often at weird times. The easiest way is to stream the ten episodes.
Click here. You will see this screen. Click on which ever episode you haven’t seen. Try to watch them in order. The episodes follow a time line. Ken Burns is our best documentarian.
Weekend’s favorite fake news
Tom Price Seated Between Two Screaming Babies on First-Ever Commercial Flight
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) — In an experience that he called “traumatic” and “horrifying,” the departing Health and Human Services Secretary, Tom Price, was seated between two screaming babies on Friday night on his first-ever commercial flight.
Price, who was flying from Washington, D.C., to his home in Georgia just hours after resigning from his Cabinet position, reacted with alarm after discovering that the airline had assigned him a middle seat between two passengers holding inconsolably shrieking babies.
Moments after making his terrible discovery, Price urgently called for a flight attendant and reportedly told her, “There are babies on this aircraft. That can’t possibly be allowed.”
After informing Price that babies were, in fact, permitted on commercial flights, the attendant instructed the former Cabinet secretary to fasten his seatbelt and ignored his request to be served a free glass of Dom Perignon champagne and beluga caviar with toast points.
According to witnesses on board, the two babies flanking Price screamed non-stop for the entire duration of the flight, except for a brief period during which one of the babies vomited on Price’s Armani suit.
Harry Newton, who had a wonderful weekend playing — guess what? I didn’t PhotoShop this iPhone 6 photo to make it look more gorgeous than it already is. I made the photo a bit smaller. But I play on this wonderful court in wonderful early Fall weather.
