Stock Quotes
The reason for the secrecy was that he was informing Congress of the Lewis & Clark Expedition. Potentially, the Spanish, English or French might try to interfere with the expedition which was the precursor to American domination of the entire continent. Unfortunately, Jefferson’s plan for the Indians was not supported by many other Americans with the exception of New York State and the Iroquois remaining after many left after supporting the British in the Revolution. But the Iroquois who remained were already farmers in fixed communities and were experienced traders. Further, they had a complex governmental structure with many elements of democracy, and several had already succeeded in European educational settings. Their successful integration with the rest of New York can be demonstrated by the fact that New York is the only state where the average Native American Income is the same as the average white income, and there is no Indian gaming in New York. Jefferson’s vision, unfortunately, was never implemented in early the Westward Expansion.
After the American stock market had crashed, Churchill had total confidence that the American economy would rebound and believed therefore that American shares were a bargain. He bought stock in the Simmons Mattress Company.
This quotation is extremely important as it is one of The Prophets admonitions which preclude orthodox Muslims from partaking in modern finance. In this case, for example, financial vehicles like “short selling” would be prohibited, yet billions of dollars of short sales are made on world stock exchanges every day. In a “short sale”, you sell a stock that you do not own. When you do so, you are then obligated to deliver the stock, so at some point in the future, you must buy it in order to deliver it—called “covering” you short sale. When you buy it you may have to pay more money than you got for the sale, and you have lost money. If on the other hand, the stock price has gone down, when you buy it and deliver it, you will have made a profit. It is a particularly risky type of investment as there is no limit on how much you can lose. So called “Islamic finance” has come up with ways of paying interest or short selling that are disguised as something else, which some Sharia authorities have ruled is consistent with Islamic law.
[Other's disagree that divestiture tactics are not very useful. They do bring pubic attention to the fossil fuels threat. And divesture tends to drive the price of the coal companies down. That makes it harder to raise money to expand and mine more fossil fuels.]
While Stockman and some others believe that the Meltdown of 2008 would have “run its course” if the government didn’t bail out financial institutions, the very conservative Republican Secretary of the Treasure Paulson and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve told President Bush, Congress, and incoming President Obama that if there was not a quick bailout, the economy of the nation would crash with a depression resulting as bad if not worse of the Hoover Depression of 1929. Bush and Obama and the majority of Congress agreed and took action to avoid that. There is no way of knowing whether they were right or Stockman was. However, the people with the responsibility of governing and safeguarding the nation clearly did not want to take a chance that the advocates of no action might be wrong.
