Ingrid: I'm still impressed by your great website. Very nicely done. Anyway, I'm also pleasantly surprised and encouraged by some of the appointments Obama has made...specifically Tim Geithner as our Treasury Secretary... I think an excellent choice. I'm also much more optimistic on both the real estate and stock market. I've included a few paragraphs from Warren Buffett which appeared in the New York Times on October 16, 2008. Thought you'd enjoy.... Buffett: Today people who hold cash equivalents feel comfortable. They shouldn’t. They have opted for a terrible long-term asset, one that pays virtually nothing and is certain to depreciate in value. Indeed, the policies that government will follow in its efforts to alleviate the current crisis will probably prove inflationary and therefore accelerate declines in the real value of cash accounts. Equities will almost certainly outperform cash over the next decade, probably by a substantial degree. Those investors who cling now to cash are betting they can efficiently time their move away from it later. In waiting for the comfort of good news, they are ignoring Wayne Gretzky’s advice: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.” I don’t like to opine on the stock market, and again I emphasize that I have no idea what the market will do in the short term. Nevertheless, I’ll follow the lead of a restaurant that opened in an empty bank building and then advertised: “Put your mouth where your money was.” Today my money and my mouth both say equities. Have a great holiday season! Ed