A Couple of I told you so moments

Please don't take that literally, I'm not that kind of an egomaniac. However, I did just post this week that the Fed will do something to "scare the hell out of Congress", I believe that was my response I published to a questio from a member yesterday regarding the Supreme Court ruling. And here's the start of that process, from CNBC-

US Approaching Insolvency-wrning by the Fed's Fisher.

In another several dozen posts, I've been warning that regime change is only the start of a very long and painful, unpredictable process. Since Egypt never really achieved regime change as the military is the regime in that country, protests have flared up again. Reports are out that Egypt's Interior Ministry Building is on fire. There's very little chance that the military will allow free, democratic elections, which would effectively change the regime so the future of Egypt is not looking so bright and in the end, protesters (as they are realizing now) will most likely clash with the once esteemed military; that seems to be the emerging model in true regime change whether it be Bahrain, Syria, Yemen or Libya. There's no reason to believe it won't happen in Egypt.

This isn't meant to be breaking news, this is meant to illustrate how dramatically the power structure of MENA countries are likely to change and how dramatic the results will be for the global economy which only strengthens my theory of a very rapid increase in research/funding of alternative energy. If we consider Japan (the world's 3rd largest economy) alone, imagine what the effects will be if the oil imports they rely 100% on are disrupted because of these changes in the MENA region. There's already geographic choke points, now there's political instability and violence breaking out not only between citizens and their governments, but a much more dangerous kind of violence: Ethnic/cultural/tribal violence that killed nearly 1 million Rwandans in 100 days; religious violence between various religions (Sunnis, Shiites, Jews and Christians to a lesser extent).

As I made mention of a few days ago, Israel did enormous damage to it's perceived invincibility when it last engaged Hamas in Lebanon and that will certainly figure into the calculations in the current conflict.

One thing is for sure, none of this is good news for the market. I suspect as I have said many times and for many reasons, we will see the first long term secular bear market in equities and probably beginning this year.