This from Sovereign Society:

We’ve just learned that President-elect Barack Obama’s economic team is considering an economic-stimulus program that will be far larger than the two-year, half-trillion-dollar plan under consideration last week.

Obama aides and advisers now say US$600 billion over two years is “a very low-end estimate”. The final number is expected to be significantly higher, possibly between $700 billion and $1 trillion over two years.

I wonder what the number will be next week…two trillion?

Today I want to talk about some of the other sectors that will benefit big when Obama is sworn in next month, and how you can benefit from one simple investment as this money begins flowing.

Obama said the package will include an initial tax cut and a massive infusion of funds for a number of things; roads, bridges, water systems, school repair, spreading broadband access, promoting health-care information technology, improving energy efficiency in buildings, renewable-energy projects, and assisting struggling state and local governments.

While campaigning, Obama often pledged, “To renew our information superhighway”.

By following through on this promise – which I believe he will – he can help stimulate the national economy, inject capital in the struggling state and local coffers and appease his “green constituents”.

Check, check, check…three more off his list.

Let’s start with increasing our broadband access. This would include huge projects to bring broadband into many rural areas of the U.S., funding for new computers for schools and technologies that can help reduce medical costs.

Broadband expansion is likely to be a priority for Obama’s administration. Although the U.S. currently has about 75 million broadband users, it is a pitiful 15th out of 30 industrialized countries on broadband adoption. In a recent speech, Obama called the level of access in the U.S. “unacceptable,” going on to say:

“Here, in the country that invented the internet, every child should have the chance to get online, and they’ll get that chance when I’m President – because that’s how we’ll strengthen America’s competitiveness in the world.”

The plan’s overall cost is expected to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, so the amount of money that will be made available for IT-related investments could be quite large.

Obama also said he wants to ensure that every hospital and doctor in the U.S. “is using cutting-edge technology and electronic medical records, so that we can cut red tape, prevent medical mistakes and help save billions of dollars each year.”

“In addition to connecting our libraries and schools to the internet, we must also ensure that our hospitals are connected to each other through the internet. That is why the economic recovery plan I’m proposing will help modernize our health care system – and that won’t just save jobs, it will save lives..”

Remember, the printing presses are primed and running. He has told us all that deficits will just have to wait a few years, stimulating this economy is the most important thing.

“We’ve got to make sure that the economic stimulus plan is large enough to get the economy moving,” Obama said last week on “Meet the Press.” Even with the country $1 trillion in debt, Obama said, “We can’t worry short-term, about the deficit.”

So where should we look to benefit from this huge investment in broadband and medical information technology?

iShares runs a good ETF that focus exactly on this sector – S&P North American Technology – Multimedia Networking Index Fund (NYSE:IGN) This index was created as a benchmark for U.S. traded multimedia networking stocks and includes companies that are producers of telecom equipment, data networking and wireless equipment…making it a perfect fit for this part of Obama’s plan.

The share price and performance of the fund have been less than stellar, but I believe this is finally going to change. Its top 10 holdings include: Qualcomm, Cisco, Juniper Networks, Foundry Networks, F5 Networks, Motorola, Harris Corp, Tellabs, Polycom and Corning.

These companies make the equipment and are leading providers of high-performance enterprise and service provider switching, routing and Web traffic management solutions. They are leaders in communication and collaboration, tele-presence, video conferencing, wired and wireless voice conferencing…exactly what we need to achieve Obama’s stated goals.

If President Obama is true to his word – and again, I believe he will be – then these companies will benefit from the billions and billions to be spent in their areas of expertise.

A buy at these levels could reap you huge returns in the coming year. Hold on tight, as the ride won’t be an easy one. Big money is going to flow into this area and these companies will benefit from it.

Source: Big Profits are Going to be Made… if you  Just Read Obama’s “Fine Print”

This from The Sovereign Society:

Often it’s the fine print that makes all the difference in the world. If you need any more proof of that fact, just ask the millions of Americans trapped in a sub-prime, Adjustable Rate Mortgage.

With half a million jobs lost in November alone and no one predicting an end to this recession any time soon, Mr. Obama hinted (read “fine print”) that $500 billion in spending is not out of the question.

He would like to see a plan that creates 2.5 million jobs. His interview on Meet the Press this past Sunday indicated that he wasn’t afraid of big spending to stimulate the economy, but that mindless spending should be avoided…

“We are not going to simply write a bunch of checks and let them be spent without some very clear criteria as to how this money is going to benefit the overall economy and put people back to work”. The new administration’s plans will be based on what is “going to make the biggest difference in the economy and what will have some long-term benefits.”

Obama emphasized that the spending will be on “infrastructure” – projects to build roads, modernize schools, expand Internet access, improve buildings’ energy efficiency, put better technology in hospitals.

“We’ve got to make sure that the economic stimulus plan is large enough to get the economy moving,” Obama said in the interview. And even with a $1 trillion budget deficit, Obama said, “We can’t worry short-term, about the deficit.”

This perspective is clearly shaped by the experience of the pre-Roosevelt Depression years, when (as some economists believe) stinginess in monetary policy and a failure to effectively target government spending led to disastrous results.

Infrastructure spending has a further advantage, in that it will direct the fiscal expansion to state treasuries. Most states are required to run balanced or almost-balanced budgets. Many states, without help from the federal government, will have to cut spending or raise taxes next year. The federal fiscal stimulus needs to deliver enough help to the states to offset this.

State-directed infrastructure investments, which are “shovel ready”, are a fitting part of the mix. Last week, the nation’s governors presented $126 billion in highway, public transportation, airport and waterway ready-to-go projects to Obama.

So where should we look to profit from this huge amount of money that is going to “stimulate” the economy? Just look at the fine print…here that means all the highways, bridges, airports and waterways. These will be major construction projects that will use a lot of steel, concrete and equipment.

There are a number of good infrastructure ETFs out there, but most of them are global in scope. Reading “the fine print” you have to guess that President Obama will make sure that our public tax dollars will flow to U.S. companies. If you want an all-domestic infrastructure play, the closest you can get is the PowerShares Dynamic Building & Construction Portfolio ETF (NYSE:PKB).

The index bottomed twice last month at about $7.50 per share and has recently rallied above its 50-day moving average to about $11.50. If you were to decide to buy in, do not chase it…$10 looks to me like a price that could yield you some big returns and as always keep you stops pretty tight.

Source: Want to make Big Bucks off Obama’s Stimulus Plan? Just read the fine print…

This from Whiskey & Gunpowder:

Though Citicorp (NYSE:C) is deemed too big to fail, it’s hardly reassuring to know that it’s been allowed to sink its fangs into the Mother Zombie that the U.S. Treasury has become and sucked out a multi-billion dollar dose of embalming fluid so it can go on pretending to be a bank for a while longer.

I employ this somewhat clunky metaphor to point out that the U.S. Government is no more solvent than the financial zombies it is keeping on walking-dead support. And so this serial mummery of weekend bailout schemes is as much of a fraud and a swindle as the algorithm-derived-securities shenanigans that induced the disease of bank zombification in the first place. The main question it raises is whether, eventually, the creation of evermore zombified U.S. dollars will exceed the amount of previously-created U.S. dollars now vanishing into oblivion through compressive debt deflation.

My guess, given the usual time-lag factor, is that the super-inflation snap-back will occur six to eighteen months from now. And the main result of all this will be our inability to buy the imported oil that comprises two-thirds of the oil we require to keep Wal-Mart and Walt Disney World running. At some point, then, in the early months of the Obama administration, we’ll learn that “change” is not a set of mere lifestyle choices but a wrenching transition away from all our familiar and comfortable habits into a stark and rigorous new economic landscape.

The credit economy is dead and the dead credit residue of that dead economy is going where dead things go. It came into the world as “money” and it is going out of this world as a death-dealing disease, and we’re not going to get over this disease until we stop generating additional zombie money out of no productive activity whatsoever. The campaign to sustain the unsustainable is, besides war, the greatest pitfall this society can stumble into. It represents a squandering of our remaining scant resources and can only produce the kind of extreme political disappointment that wrecks nations and leads to major conflicts between them. I don’t know how much Mr. Obama buys into the current adopt-a-zombie program — his Treasury designee Timothy Geithner was apparently in on this weekend’s Citicorp deal — but the President would be wise to steer clear of whatever the walking dead in the Bush corner are still up to.

All the activities based on getting something-for-nothing are dead or dying now, in particular buying houses and cars on credit and so it should not be a surprise that the two major victims are the housing and car industries. Notice, by the way, that these are the two major ingredients of an economy based on building suburban sprawl. That’s over, too. We’re done building it and the stuff we’ve already built is destined to lose both money value and usefulness as the wrenching transition goes forward.

All this obviously begs the question: what kind of economy are we going to live in if the old one is toast? Well, it’s also pretty obvious that it will have to be based on activities productively aimed at keeping human beings alive in an ecology that has a future. Once you grasp this, you will see that there is no reason to despair and more than enough for all of us to do, so we can recover from the zombie nation disease and get on with the next chapter of American history — and I sure hope that Mr. Obama will get with the new program.

To be specific about this new economy, we’re going to have to make things again, and raise things out of the earth, locally, and trade these things for money of some kind that we earn through our own productive activities. Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is optional. The only other option is to go through a violent sociopolitical convulsion. We ought to know from prior examples in world history that this is not a desirable experience. So, to avoid that, we really have to put our shoulders to the wheel and get to work on things that matter, and do it at a scale that is consistent with what the world really has to offer right now, especially in terms of available energy.

In my view — and I know this is controversial — a much larger proportion of the U.S. population will have to be employed in growing the food we eat. There are many ways of arranging this, some more fair than others, and I hope the better angels of our nature steer us in the direction of fairness and justice. The prospects of a devalued dollar imply that we very shortly will not be able to get the all the oil-and-gas based “inputs” that have made petro-agriculture possible the past century. The consequences of this are so unthinkable that we have not been thinking about it. And, of course, the further implications of current land-use allocation, and the property ownership issues entailed, suggests formidable difficulties in re-arranging the farming sector. The sooner we face all this, the better.

As the fiesta of “globalism” (Tom Friedman-style) draws to a close — another consequence of currency problems — we’ll have to figure out how to make things in this country again. We will not be manufacturing things at the scale, or in the manner, we were used to in, say, 1962. We’ll have to do it far more modestly, using much more meager amounts of energy than we did in the past.

My guess is that we will get the electricity for doing this mostly from water. It may actually be too late — from a remaining capital resources point-of-view — to ramp up a new phase of the nuclear power industry (and there are plenty of arguments from the practical and economic to the ethical against it). But we have to hold a public discussion about it, if only to clear the air and get on with other things, namely the new activities of alt. energy. But I would hasten to warn readers (again!) that we’ll probably have to do these things more modestly too (don’t count on giant wind “farms”), and that we are liable to be disappointed by what they can actually provide for us (don’t expect to run Wal-Mart on wind, solar, algae-fuels, etc).

In any case, we’re not going back to a “consumer” economy. We’re heading into a hard work economy in which people derive their pleasures and gratification more traditionally — mainly through the company of their fellow human beings (which is saying a lot, for those of you who have forgotten what that’s about). Our current investments in “education” — i.e. training people to become marketing executives for chain stores — will delude Americans for a while about what kind of work is really available. But before long, the younger adults will realize that there are enormous opportunities for them in a new and very different economy.

We will still have commerce — even if it’s not the K-Mart blue-light-special variety — and the coming generation will have to rebuild all the local, multi-layered networks of commercial inter-dependency that were destroyed by the rise of the chain stores. In short, get ready for local business. It will surely be part-and-parcel of our local food-growing and manufacturing activities.

I hate to keep harping on this — but since nobody else is really talking about it, at least in the organs of public discussion, the job is left to me — we have to get cracking on the revival of the railroad system in this country, if we expect to remain a united country. This is such a no-brainer that the absence of any talk about it is a prime symptom of the zombie disease that has eaten away our brains.

Automobiles (the way we use them) and airplanes are utterly dependent on liquid hydrocarbon fuels, and you can be certain we’ll have trouble getting them. You can run trains by other means — electricity being state-of-the-art in those parts of the world that do it most successfully. I know that California just voted to create a high-speed rail link between Los Angeles and San Francisco. It’s an optimistic sign, but it shows more than a little techno-grandiose over-reach. High-speed rail would require a mega-expensive re-do of the tracks. We need to scale our ambitions for this more realistically.

California (and every other region of America) would benefit much more from normal-speed trains running every hour on the hour on tracks that already exist than from a mega-expensive, grandiose sci-fi program that might not get built for ten years. The dregs of the Big Three automakers can and should be reorganized to produce the rolling stock for a revived railroad system.

Even amidst the financial carnage underway right now, the public is enjoying a respite from high-priced gasoline, but it is due to be short-lived. As I’ve already said, we are in danger not just of oil prices going way back up again, but of losing access to our supplies from the exporting countries. In other words, we’re just as likely to face shortages as high prices, and soon.

Oil shortages are certain to produce a political freak-out here unless we get our heads screwed on right — and this means that the next President had better prepare quickly for a comprehensive action plan in the face of such an emergency (which has to include a robust public information initiative).

That this meltdown is building straight into the Christmas holidays is one of those accidents of history that leaves one reeling in wonder and nausea. The cable networks better be prepared to bombard the public with round-the-clock showings of It’s a Wonderful Life, because they’re going to need all the moral support they can get as zombies stalk through the silent night, holy night.

Source: Zombie Economics, Part I