I love reading conspiracy theories and find some of them are very compelling. However, saying the illluminati or whatever could orchestrate all the malinvestment and secondary and accidental effects of the subprime mess is 100% ridiculous. Now i do agree that the cause or root of this whole mess and every other boom and bust is the FED. So you could apply a conspiracy theory here, but not to lay claim to specific market actions as we all know you can't predict or model human behavior since we're all irrational and sometimes crazy. If i was an illuminati i would for sure keep this boom/bust cycle going with the fed because it's the easiest way to steal from the peasentry. Inflation can be considered a tax or better yet real wealth destruction. So artificially manipulating credit inflation allows me to loan money i pull out of thin air to the gov. on the way up and then buy good hard assets for pennies on the dollar during the bust/deflationary period after the boom. Simple and easy. The details of each boom and bust don't concern me as human beings will never change and the end result is always the same.
Of course it seems ridiculous. How could it be? After all, this is America. But I doubt "all of the secondary and accidental effects" were necessarily orchestrated. If excessive credit were the plan, they wouldn't need to specifically orchestrate most of it... they just know that to keep easing credit conditions and allowing ever greater leverage, there would eventually be a level of non-sustainability.... followed by a catastrophic collapse. All of this was preventable... just had to continue exercising the same prior prudence about credit and spending... that's all. 1. Loans to non-qualified borrowers where the bank had no collateral nor homeowner equity to fall back on? How STUPID is that? What presumptions could be made which would justify this a "sound policy"? 2. High levels of credit card borrowing allowed by anyone who could fog a mirror? 3. Credit Default Swaps? Ha! They USED to be illegal. 4. Allowing investment banks to up their leverage from about 10-15:1 to 40:1? And the Fed couldn't see the possibilities? Apparently they are counting upon our being too naive to connect the dots...
"Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalised and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to Communism." - Karl Marx - Das Kapital 1867
Open letter to the conspiritors: Guys, deposit $1B US (yeah I know its peanuts but its all I need to take my trading to the next level) in to my swiss bank account (I am sure that you will have no trouble figuring out the account number with your omniscient powers) by the end of the day or I spill the beans (ET gets the scoop), and don't even think about deploying the MIB, I have made copies to be released on youtube if anything should happen to me before I am sitting on my soon to be new 280 foot home in Monaco harbor with the rest of you! Have a great Presidents day and keep the party going until I arrive PS. Anyone have a jet sitting at Logan they don't need for a few days, flying commercial makes me loquacious.
Didn't NObama mention the idea of "phasing out SS and Medicare within 10 years"? How would that work, exactly? Hey Gnome, have you got a reference for that?
Who knows? Lots of things get "mentioned" and nothing comes of them. I don't recall seeing this as a "single statement or topic of a story"... just included in the list of "things needed to be changed, according to NObama"... But to even MENTION such a thing has to be among the most outrageous...