If not for the honorable George W Bush, things could have been a lot worse. the administration should bring him and his team back in an advisory role
Maybe you're simple and can't see how it works. Level III assets is how banks bolstered their balance sheets and were able to lend out more and more. The mortgage derivatives were that profitable because of it. Along the way, people are collecting commissions & bonuses, so everyone plays along while they are getting their money. We can also refer to fractional reserve banking & the central bank as the primary cause, which is relatively established among those who can think for themselves. But while each scheme of the boom/bust is relatively similar in nature, there is a particular method to each one, and they keep getting more intricate. The simple scheme of Roaring 20s/Great Depression is just too simple to pull off nowdays. You can't just expand credit & contract it in such manner, the Fed is under too much attention and too many people can catch on to such simple tricks. Hence, the latest, and possibly, the last scheme. It is pretty well designed, I must say, hence fools even the supposed intellectuals who assume they know how the system works.
i'm talking about money not what you think is money. money is simple it is a medium to exchange goods and services. nothing more nothing less. what does futures have to do with the concept of money
Probably true. And for what it's worth, the "Commodity Futures Modernization Act" that was spearheaded by several Midwestern Republicans such as Phil Gramm and never even went to a committee hearing or a recorded vote, was part of the FY2001 Appropriations Bill. And yet McCain appointed Phil Gramm as his Economic Advisor . . . Kind of like hiring a known pedophile to run the local boys prep school.
Yes. No disrespect to Pabst, I think that what he said with sarcasm about Hillary Clinton as a good cattle futures trader was funny because it is true that she did not understand what she was doing, but just want to make some money like everyone wants to make money.
You had booms and busts way before central banks, before the advent of mortgage "derivitives", hell you had massive land busts back when people paid cash. Guy's like you are the same type who said "excess speculation from 10% stock margins caused the crash." Now there's stock crashes of 85% or more with 50% margins. So the new blame is on mortgage derivitives. Yet except for Florida and Vegas the worst housing markets in the country are those that had LITTLE speculative buying. Was Detroit flipper heaven? There's been a HUGE AMOUNT of liquidity apart from leveraged. Just look at baseball salaries. Or teachers and GM pensions. Or the net worth of exchange members vis a vis their stock IPO's. It's that massive influx of cash and the credit it creates that causes from era to era capital to chase assets well above their value equilibrium. There's also a seller for every buyer and a transactional zero sum aspect of asset fluctuations. And I won't even get into how the depression we're in is effecting global regions with scant credit apparatuses in place. Yes I'll repeat-discussions like these-bullshit that Congress and the media SPECIALIZE in-are simplistic exercises because the causation is more rooted in investment psychology than in economics. Clearly regulations and interest rate policy effect decision making but the fact remains most people will misjudge risk in seek of gain. That should be obvious. This board personifies the point. Fewer than 1 out of 10 people here will ultimately trade successfully yet fully 100% of ET'ers THINK they'll be in that 10%. Why would you believe faulty, misguided optimism in performance is confined to ET?