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Looming Financial Crisis?

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10:33 / 10.10.08

It'll be a pretty sparsely populated world after this,
i`m not so sure that you`re right

10:44 / 10.10.08

We petitioned, we demonstrated, we sat in. I was willing to get hit over the head, I did; I was willing to go to prison, I did. To me, it was a question of what had to be done to stop the much greater violence that was going on.

—David Gilbert[2]

found on wikipedia

14:34 / 10.10.08

Bush vows to stabilise US economy

Wall Street has lost more than a fifth of its value in the past 10 trading days and is heading for one of its biggest weekly falls since the Dow Jones index was created 112 years ago.

Blimey.

(Bush) said: "We are a prosperous nation with immense resources and a wide range of tools at our disposal. We are using these tools aggressively."
His rhetoric is so hackneyed it's funny, that quote makes me think of Bush attacking the stock market with a pair of gardening shears. How long before he declares a War Against Recession (which neatly acronymises to W.A.R)?

15:10 / 10.10.08

The amounts of money involved are staggering, check out this graphic;

16:41 / 10.10.08

Not all bankers are evil greedy bastards
name one that isn`t

T.S. Eliot (possibly debatable).

17:06 / 10.10.08

name one that isn`t

My mate Geoff. Or, his other half. Or, my mate Rachael. Or, any of the staff behind the counters in the LloydsTSB down the road.

Well, they might be TEH EVIL, but they don't seem it. Maybe they are, in the privacy of their own home, but they all seem quite nice people.

11:13 / 12.10.08

name one that isn`t

My mate Geoff. Or, his other half. Or, my mate Rachael. Or, any of the staff behind the counters in the LloydsTSB down the road.

these guys are shop assistants not decision makers

11:17 / 12.10.08

if you havn`t seen them , then i suggest you watch "zeitgeist" and "zeistgeist addendum"

11:34 / 12.10.08

Not all bankers are evil greedy bastards
name one that isn`t

T.S. Eliot (possibly debatable).

just because someone could right well doesnt exonerate him/her, from any other of their actions

11:44 / 12.10.08

neon snake .....i bet your friiends still defend their bosses actions, and i suspect their motivations may be somewhat selfish, albeit subconsciously, ask them if they paid the same rate of interest the rest of us were charged on their loans and mortgages..

mortgage,,,is french word,,,,it means "death grip"

are they more afraid of their own unemployment than the damage they do to the world.

banking and monetarism is fundamentally wrong,,,money is invented by banks out of thin air.

the money they lent out to the public , didnt exist prior to the loan being drawn up.
again ,,,watch "Zeitgeist Addendum"

ONLY NICE THINGS

13:47 / 12.10.08

There's a thread on Zeitgeist here. I think the general consensus was that it was anti-semitic, and also cods. Woul you disagree, mashedcat?

ONLY NICE THINGS

13:50 / 12.10.08

Oh. You were in that thread. In essentially the same mode. Never mind, then.

My Mom Thinks I'm Cool

15:20 / 12.10.08

mashedcat...rather than continue pointing out various things I don't like or understand about your posts, which I believe to be pointless, I'm just going to repeat something I said earlier:

do you have any practical suggestions about things you and I and other people on this board could be doing? or are you just here to make dire, unavoidable prophecies and to accuse people you've never met except over the internet of various heinous guiltinesses?

11:29 / 13.10.08

these guys are shop assistants not decision makers

A) No, they're not. The guys behind the counter in my local branch, sure, but not the other guys. They're reasonably high up the corporate ladder.
B) So what if they were? Earlier, you were saying that "i was just following orders" would not be an allowable excuse. I occasionally get asked about loans when I'm in there, by the "shop assistants". They always try to get me to open a big ol' high interest account if I deposit anything large. They're contributing, just as the guys above them are.

Ref. your later point about fear of unemployment vs "damage they do to the world."; maybe they feel that they aren't doing damage to the world. Maybe they feel that enabling people to own their own home is a good thing? Or that loaning money to responsible borrowers to buy a new car so that they can take their kids to school and go to a job is also a good thing? And so on and so forth.
Maybe they don't feel that the monetary system is inherently evil in and of itself, or fundamentally wrong; maybe a group of people has fucked up royally through ignorance and/or greed, but that that doesn't mean that anyone and everyone who has ever worked in a bank, or transacted with a bank, or handled money in any sense whatsoever is actually evil?

Maybe we shouldn't be getting the pitchforks out and storming the keep, claiming that anyone within the banking system should be (at least) jailed?

I mean, look: you've already backed away from your original statement, by excusing the shopworkers. Soon, I imagine that my middle-management friends will be excused, and you'll get to a point where only the bankers who are actually evil will be up for jail (at least). And hey, I'm going to find an argument of "evil bankerz r evil" pretty hard to chip away at.

But whilst you're trying to "other" an entire industry of people, I find it difficult (rightly or wrongly) to view anything else you say as having credibility.

15:37 / 14.10.08

Woul you disagree, mashedcat?

its against all religions its against monetarism its against war,,,,,

My Mom Thinks I'm Cool

17:29 / 14.10.08

giving up for now on talking to mashedcat, here's the new news - shares rise again, a bit:

BBC website.

here in the US, Bush has announced another $250 billion spent to buy shares in banks.

thoughts? has this crisis, as the page suggests, "been averted"? what happens next?

the whole thing seems so dependent on people's semi-arbitrary mood swings...sometimes it feels like 10% of the market depends on the government buying banks or changing the interest rate, and the rest is just investors reading words like "catastrophe" and "panic" in the newspaper that morning and stampeding accordingly.

20:56 / 16.10.08

yawn

16:12 / 27.10.08

Crisis not quite averted.

I've gotten the impression that the bailout money given to American banks isn't being used to make loans because of regulations barring loans made from, um, non-collateralized money (or something like that).

So the biggest bankers are sticking to the letter of the law and using the bailout funds to buy littler banks.

Meanwhile, without loans being made, the situation is getting worse.

16:32 / 27.10.08

Impression confirmed (more or less) in the NYTimes business section:

In point of fact, the dirty little secret of the banking industry is that it has no intention of using the money to make new loans. But this executive was the first insider who’s been indiscreet enough to say it within earshot of a journalist.

(He didn’t mean to, of course, but I obtained the call-in number and listened to a recording.)

“Twenty-five billion dollars is obviously going to help the folks who are struggling more than Chase,” he began. “What we do think it will help us do is perhaps be a little bit more active on the acquisition side or opportunistic side for some banks who are still struggling. And I would not assume that we are done on the acquisition side just because of the Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns mergers. I think there are going to be some great opportunities for us to grow in this environment, and I think we have an opportunity to use that $25 billion in that way and obviously depending on whether recession turns into depression or what happens in the future, you know, we have that as a backstop.”

Read that answer as many times as you want — you are not going to find a single word in there about making loans to help the American economy. On the contrary: at another point in the conference call, the same executive (who I’m not naming because he didn’t know I would be listening in) explained that “loan dollars are down significantly.” He added, “We would think that loan volume will continue to go down as we continue to tighten credit to fully reflect the high cost of pricing on the loan side.” In other words JPMorgan has no intention of turning on the lending spigot.

It is starting to appear as if one of Treasury’s key rationales for the recapitalization program — namely, that it will cause banks to start lending again — is a fig leaf, Treasury’s version of the weapons of mass destruction.

In fact, Treasury wants banks to acquire each other and is using its power to inject capital to force a new and wrenching round of bank consolidation.

17:07 / 27.10.08

Eeeww. I feel like I'm living in that Zeitgeist propaganda movie that was making the rounds a while back. You know the one everyone says is a rip off of The Illuminatus Trilogy.

Oh America, why must you insist on making feel me as if I'm living in a crap Hollywood conspiracy movie? Why?

Time to buy gold and rice!

20:52 / 18.11.08

Boston Globe, have you been reading this thread?

Headline:

Excerpt: By looking at what we know about how society and commerce would slow down, and how people respond, it's possible to envision what we might face. Unlike the 1930s, when food and clothing were far more expensive, today we spend much of our money on healthcare, child care, and education, and we'd see uncomfortable changes in those parts of our lives. The lines wouldn't be outside soup kitchens but at emergency rooms, and rather than itinerant farmers we could see waves of laid-off office workers leaving homes to foreclosure and heading for areas of the country where there's more work - or just a relative with a free room over the garage. Already hollowed-out manufacturing cities could be all but deserted, and suburban neighborhoods left checkerboarded, with abandoned houses next to overcrowded ones.

And above all, a depression circa 2009 might be a less visible and more isolating experience.

Which dovetails nicely with Sharon Astyk's latest thoughts on the isolation hard times might be fostering:

...[T]he key to mitigation is the restoration of the social and communal ties that Brooks is talking about. There are two important reasons for this - the first is that as Brooks points out, there’s a big difference between staying home and eating beans and rice alone in your chilly house and getting together with your neighbors and sharing that meal. The sense of loss and deprivation is very different - I know I keep mentioning this, but social scientists have confirmed what Timothy Breen the historian observes - that “rituals of non-consumption” can replace our rituals of consumption - if we come together. That is, it can be a lot easier to bear tough times if you are working together with other people, and feel that they are in the same boat.

The second, and perhaps more urgent issue, is that our stability as a nation depends building layers of additional safety nets underneath the ones that break.

Loneliness vs. community. That's the theme for the week, I guess.

23:27 / 18.11.08

Thanks grant, that Astyk stuff is good reading from where I'm sitting.

all of our personal security depends on our community security

Word! No nuclear family, however heavily-armed, will get through this on their own.

I think mobile social and emotional capital might mend some of those nets: critically functional spirituality-based groups; well-placed charitable, development, and community organizing activity; attempts to put literacy to work in democratic processes such as feedback? I am currently experiencing a flow of opportunities to offer my opinions about stuff (for example: my experience of the local council services, a large-scale local regeneration project Planning for Real) and I have the impression these are useful for planting the strategies, solutions, and perspectives I've been crafting. Even taking two minutes, to inform them that their chosen feedback-engine is broken, is a useful contribution to collective enterprise in my opinion.

if each of us expands the category of people we will not allow to fall to the ground by one or two, well, there’s hope for us yet (More lovely Astyk)

I think this is especially true for people who rely much more on chosen fellow-travellers than families of origin.

Since I've delurked anyway, kudos to those of you posting in this thread who are not obvious lightwits like mashedcat, I Barbecrush you all.

00:22 / 19.11.08

I'm actually now wondering how much the anxiety about social isolation running through both those articles is blindly overlooking things like this.

I mean this here, that you're all looking at.

(Yeah, even you.)

I mean, I'm home by myself with no one but a 3-year-old in the room with me - I could've gone out, but decided it wasn't worth it. Yet here I am.

Hi!

I'm downloading music by Rizla's band right now, too. So not isolated, exactly.

Anyway, I imagine the *social* structures of the internet are going to go through some changes. Freecycle plus, maybe? Microloans and microsavings-and-loans?

01:02 / 19.11.08

today we spend much of our money on healthcare, child care, and education
and wide-screen plasma HDTVs, ipods, new cars every two years (here in the states, trucks with truck nutz here in the south), UV sunglasses, food processors, and 24-month aged parmesan reggiano. We're going to have a hard time if we have to learn to live without our luxuries like the majority of the rest of the world. It's hard not to want to be selfish when you can have so many nice things, and we've certainly been that. This eternal growth model couldn't be sustainable.

grant, personally, I am thankful for the modicum of social interaction that I get through this here box, because frankly, I don't get very much outside it (and I don't frequent many places besides here, how sad is that?). Still, I think that there is something disconnected and isolated about the mostly television-based and now somewhat internet-based society we're a part of now. There is a level of abstraction that disassociates people on the internet, which can be good at times but takes people some level apart. Though I'm sure there are many internet sites where interaction is more personal and possibly more emotionally deep than what's ostensibly a more cerebral site like this. Maybe through this crisis the internet will evolve into something even more effective interpersonally to help people through it, but I think real-life is always going to be more effective, when it works.
I don't know, reading back that sounds kind of like nonsense, but I'll post it anyway.

by the way, very good to see you, afj.

16:39 / 19.11.08

Mashedcat said:
` banking and monetarism is fundamentally wrong,,, money is invented by banks out of thin air.

Mashedcat, you use three dots to make an ellipse like this... not three commas like that,,,

mortgage,,,is french word,,,,it means "death grip"

Nope, ‘gage’ means ‘bet’ or ‘pledge’. ‘Prise’ is French for grip.

...can people who work in banks claim "they were only following orders" or are they responsible for their actions ?

Well not that nice young woman in my local branch, she’s always so smiley and willing to help out. But that grumpy git who often has the till up near the far end, I could believe he’s part of it all.

19:54 / 24.11.08

Remarkable Gleaning.

A farm family that traditionally lets the public pick whatever vegetables they like after the harvest was stunned when 40,000 strangers showed up.

16:59 / 02.12.08

Curious about what's happening in Iceland?

Here: NewsFrettir.com

One of the people who lost jobs in Iceland decided to translate Icelandic news into English for free, so the rest of us would know what was going on.

Bank runs & major inflation are the top stories now, as it happens.

13:45 / 22.12.08

So now the chief of the Bank of Spain says we face a global financial meltdown.

And the former U.S. Comptroller General, David Walker, says the U.S. will soon owe more than all its citizens are worth. I believe that includes the Wall Street CEOs who jaunted off with the multimillion dollar bonuses.

21:43 / 22.12.08

So now the chief of the Bank of Spain says we face a global financial meltdown.
Face one? We're in one. Maybe we should change this thread title to "Ongoing Financial Crisis". All of the economic signs I see here are pretty grim. I was looking today at building permits filed for about seven counties around here, it's amazing how drastically they've dropped in the last few months. A number of businesses are closing and up for sale, drastic layoffs or cuts in hours, and I think this is not unique to the area. 2009 is going to be a harsh new year, economically speaking. Paul Krugman has had some interesting articles lately, today he's talking about what the future economic landscape may look like.

15:11 / 10.02.09

So about the time we were having this conversation here, there was an electronic run on the banks that came, some Congress members say, within 3 hours of destroying the world financial system.

15:47 / 17.03.09

It's a bit like the end of Fight Club without the excellent Pixies theme.

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