Countrywide Again

This is your final warning!

Many market experts and analysts have been warning us about this. To see the storm, you no longer need the flat-screen window to the world that you get each day from CNBC , Bloomberg or CNN. You don't even require the newspaper. Why?

Because I have reasons to believe that you can FEEL it right under your feet. That's where you'll see the U.S. housing market — the source of most of America's wealth — starting to crumble before your very eyes. That's where you'll see large chunks of the U.S. mortgage market — the lifeblood of millions of Americans — being swept away by a flood of home foreclosures and mortgage company collapses.

Some of the recent casualties of the subprime fiasco includes big names like American Home Mortgage of Long Island, bankrupt 6th August; Home Banc of Atlanta, bankrupt 10 th August; and Aegis Mortgage of Houston, bankrupt 13th August.

Now, according to Merrill Lynch, there's another candidate for failure which is many times larger — Countrywide Financial! The company has exhausted its $11.5 billion in credit lines. That was fast! It has just received another $2 billion capital infusion from Bank of America. And it's still not enough.

Indeed, one top Bank of America executive privately believes that up to ninety percent of the country's Alt-A mortgages, a staple of Countrywide Financial's business, will eventually default. If so, it will easily crush all the cash and credit of many Countrywides. Why do I believe Countrywide is doomed to failure?

Because Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo himself sees the industry and the economy going down for the count. Just last week on CNBC, he admitted that the mortgage crisis striking America today is "one of the greatest panics I've ever seen in 55 years in financial services." He acknowledged that the troubles in the industry are going to continue. He even predicted that the housing downturn is so bad it's likely to drag the economy into a recession.

If someone of his experience and exposure (55 years) believes it is going to be rough, you better believe it. Afterall, you have got nothing to lose and everything to gain if the market heads south and you are out in cash instead of equities. Right?

So, stay safe, sane and most importantly, solvent!

The Young Lion

The Young Lion
By Orison Swett Marden

A young lion, as the fable runs, was one day playing alone in the forest while his mother slept. As the different objects attracted his attention, he thought he would explore a bit and see what the great world beyond his home was like. Before he realized it, he had wandered so far that he could not find his way back. He was lost.

Very much frightened, he ran frantically in every direction calling piteously for his mother, but no mother responded. Weary with his wanderings, he did not know what to do, when a sheep, whose offspring had been taken from her, hearing his pitiful cries, made friends with the lost lion, and adopted him.

The sheep became very fond of her foundling, which in a short while grew so much larger than herself that at times she was almost afraid of it. The foster mother and her adopted lived very happily together, until one day a magnificent lion appeared, sharply outlined against the sky, on the top of an opposite hill. He shook his tawny inane and uttered a terrific roar, which echoed through the hills.

The sheep mother stood trembling, paralyzed with fear. But the moment this strange sound reached his ears, the young lion listened as though spellbound, and a strange feeling which he had never before experienced surged through his being until be was all a-quiver. The lion's roar had touched a chord in his nature that had never before been touched. It aroused a new force within him which he had never felt before.

New desires, a strange new consciousness of power possessed him. A new nature stirred in him, and instinctively, without a thought of what he was doing, he answered the lion's call with a corresponding roar! Trembling with mingled fear, surprise and bewilderment at the new powers aroused within him, the awakened animal gave his foster mother a pathetic glance, and then, with a tremendous leap, started toward the lion on the hill.

The lost lion had found himself.

Up to this he had gamboled around his sheep mother just as though he were a lamb developing into a sheep, never dreaming he could do anything that his companions could not do, or that he had any more strength than the ordinary sheep. He never imagined that there was within him a power which would strike terror to the beasts of the jungle. He simply thought he was a sheep, and would run at the sight of a dog and tremb1e at the howl of a wolf. Now he was amazed to see the dogs, the wolves, and other animals which formerly had so terrified him flee from him.

There is in every normal human being a Sleeping lion. It is just a question of arousing it, just a question of something happening that will awaken us, stir the depths of our being, and arouse the sleeping power within us. Just as the young lion, after it had once discovered that it was a lion would never again be satisfied to live the life of a sheep, when we discover that we are more than mere clay, when we at last become Conscious that we are more than human, that we are gods in the making, we shall never again be satisfied to live the life of common clods of earth.

We shall feel a new sense of power welling up within us, a power which we never before dreamed we possessed, and never he quite the same again, never again he content with low-flying ideals, with a cheap success. Ever after we will aspire. We will look up, struggle up and on to higher and ever higher planes.

Fears are like Tissue Paper

Many of our fears are tissue paper thin, and a single courageous step would carry us clear through them.
- Brendan Francis