Where’s the Boing Boing compensation committee?

@Simplewonder: Good point about the economy being the best birth control. I feel bad for people who just had kids and are now being pulled under by this economy.

.. really? Hmmm.

- Commodities will continue to decrease in price
- An unknown number of people will lose their jobs
- Local communities will organize efforts to assist their neighbors
- Obama will take office
- A number of energy bills will be seen, but few will pass. The ones that do will simultaneously create jobs and green energy
- Soldiers being brought home from the war will take jobs in the new green energy economy
- In seven years, upper-middle class families will pour millions of dollars in investment into green energy stocks
- The end of the recession will not be a big deal because we will all be concerned about the increased rain fall, number of hurricanes, etc.

I actually have learned some new financial terms from attempting to follow “Fast Money,” a show whose host jokingly suggested ought to be re-named “Where the Heck is My Money?” As a result of watching, I understood why my stock maven gal pal bought Citicorp at $4 a share last Friday. And why day trading could make me a fortune if only I had some money to risk.

And I have to stick up for Suze Orman, too. Although she has affected a bizarre TV presence in the last few years, full of tacky tics, she has always given sound advice. Didn’t you hear her on Larry King, telling the idiot woman caller not to do this Christmas on credit cards?

I’ve noticed that the political guys, like Cooper and Matthews and Olberman, simply aren’t paying much attention to the financial news. It’s not their thing.

“…he explained to me and told me that before his people could predict the markets and invest accordingly there were tools to predict such trends already in place. now its diffrent nobody can predict this animal anymore.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong. They couldn’t predict the markets, they just made lucky guesses. I’ve not been able to find where I found this link – I could have sworn it was here on BB, but I’ve not found it. Anyway, a good recommended read. It’s a random walk, ladies and gentlemen, and anyone who tells you different is selling something.

The Giant Pool Of Money talks about exactly how and why Subprime mortgages and CDO’s started the dominoes falling.

Another Frightening Show About the Economy talks about the Commercial Paper Market and why market liquidity is so important. Also it explains Credit Default Swaps and why they contributed to a lot of anxiety last month (but I think now they’ve been revealed to be not nearly as big a factor as originally thought.)

You don’t even have to read them – it’s a radio show so you can just sit and listen.

The loans lent to people that couldn’t afford them and then weren’t paid back were often not in poor minority neighborhoods–they were expensive homes with inflated value that people thought would continue inflating. Then they didn’t.

This had nothing to do with CRA. Cut that shit out.

BB should be a place where you can come to get what you want and need – like it is now. I think people need immediately useful ideas and encouragement to keep going until they find answers. Thanks for your support.

Please correct if wrong about that “hardship” part.

The greatest default rates are in places such as Las Vegas, Phoenix and the Inland Empire, where builders and flippers went wild and conjured up fraudulent “creative financing” schemes to keep their bubbles inflated until they could cash out. All that is a minor distraction compared to the multi-trillion dollar house of cards built by investment bankers with CDOs. But arcane financial instruments and huge sums disappearing from accounting databases don’t make good TV.

I haven’t watched TV or flown on a plane since the year 2000. I stopped listening to radio in 2001 when a favorite Sunday morning radio piece on NPR was shrilly, angrily calling anyone who questioned Bush’s war on Iraq a traitor. And that was the LIBERAL. I knew my country had gone insane.

Point: I am in a world of people who can’t process data.

At least America, some of them, are figuring out that there is no “terrorist” threat that requires our complete and utter devotion and treasury.

While America was looking for box cutters like a vampire counting beans, I watched the debt climb into Death’s country. I watched the tax cuts and the insane military spending drive us into China’s newly moneyed arms. I watched a Forever War making many rich and bankrupting the nation.

I watched the housing bubble and cried havoc. I warned people that it would burst and take out all the “wealth” that we thought we had made since 2000.

I saw the derivative market grow; I heard Buffet warn us that it would destroy us. Where were my people? Watching Iraq being destroyed in yet another Friedmanite takeover of a foreign market.

I didn’t know about the re-re-re-leveraged mortgage debt, but I should have guessed, watching my mortgage change hands so many times.

This wasn’t a surprise, this depression. Not only have we made our castle of money on a hill of derivatives sand, but we happily sent our industry overseas while giving the finger to the unions. Pension funds were outright stolen to fund corporations to overwhelming approval. Bankruptcy was made almost impossible for a normal human to use. All it took was a match. And the oil companies and the traders that finance them lit the match.

We watched in puzzlement as oil and commodity prices, set by casinos, when into the danger range. We watched jobs disappear, and almost no one connected the next dot, which was a wave of default and foreclosure. The match lit the can of gasoline.

Financial engineers had packaged mortgage debt and sold it as AAA rated investments to the entire world, and everyone made out like bandits. But the insurance company, AIG, which was Too Big To Fail, was unregulated and did not have to actually have the ability to cover losses if a wave of foreclosures hit. The gasoline can started the neighborhood on fire.

Everyone assumed bubbles go on forever. For the Smartest Men in the Room, who got out early and are now posed to buy our country for pennies on the dollar, this has been a raging success. You all are not processing this: this is Disaster Capitalism. They made a fortune, and now the disaster they made is the opportunity to buy us cheaply. And here’s what is making people so surprised and puzzled: they are being gifted with 8 trillion of our money,with no strings, to buy us up with. Truly, it is good to be Milton Friedman’s Chicago Boys. After Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Indonesia, Poland, China and Russia, the United States of America is now similarly poised in shock, waiting for the Brick, the book the free-marketers used so many times in other countries, to be opened and used against us. We’re about to be Russianized, kids. Shock them until they’re dazed and uncomprehending, then hit them with “reforms” too fast to follow until that perfect market is achieved, and half the country – actually, more – is made destitute and invisible.

At least, that’s how it usually went. Here’s hoping Obama doesn’t listen to the Chicago School Boys, as so many did before.

The only thing that triggered this crash was high oil prices caused by runaway speculation, on the back of the US’s destruction of Iraq.

A drag on the economy, for sure, but the crash(es) were caused by phantom value mortgage derivatives, plain and simple.

Oil speculators and companies enjoying the biggest profits ever

Since the oil companies’ books are open to the public, we can see that they were paying massively increased prices themselves and not the source of the markup. Their margins are actually quite small–they just happen to be gargantuan companies.

Wall street’s “finest” having all of their losses (and then some) re-imbursed by the Federal Gov., no questions or details allowed

That’s not even remotely accurate. For example, Joseph Lewis bought roughly 7% of Bear Stearns before it collapsed for almost a billion dollars. He lost over 90% of that investment. That same story, on a much smaller scale, is everywhere in the financial sector.

You’re angry. We all are. But misinformation isn’t helpful to anyone.