. October 24, 2008 SouthAmerica: I wonder how many trillions of US dollars were lost today including all the stock markets from around the world. I guess the history books are going to call it "Black Friday October 24, 2008." Fasten your seat belts and enjoy the ride. .
although my english is not very good , i read your artical and agreed with you i'm from china ,a inner province ,now i feel the crash is treating our life...
History always repeats itself, but rarely in the same way. Or, to put it less elegantly: Depression my ass.
my predictions. USD - .98 euro by nov 11th. YES, US is screwed, but europe and CIS is MORE SCREWED. Start shorting....... THEN BUY bags and bags of beans cause we're all screwed when the IMF recommends an end to free ,market currency trading. trading will be by gov'ts ALONE. LETS SEE. BEANS AND EGGS BEANS AND DANDELIONS BEANS AND RICE..........
My prediction: inflation, lots of it. The presses are running all around the world I guess... ET focus will shift from index futs to Forex. Bank on it, and if it doesn't work out for you my apologies, please apply to Democrats for help...
. October 30, 2008 SouthAmerica: Smells like Panic, Panic, and more Panic â and nothing else. The coordinated efforts of many central banks from around the world to cut their equivalent of the fed funds rate, plus the massive amount of liquidity being pumped everywhere to keep the financial markets from imploding, plus all kinds of US government guarantees, plus The Federal Reserve agreed to provide liquidity swap facilities with the central banks around the world, plus the fed is ballooning its balance sheet with toxic wasteâ¦At the end of the day the US government balance sheet is away over leveraged, just like the US major investment banks before the current crash, and right now it is approaching junk status. That tells me that the problem is a lot bigger than most people have realized and the Perfect Storm is becoming even more powerful and at this point with the recession deepening for many countries around the world including in the United States with massive layoffs, new wave of bankruptcies in the horizon, declining incomes, declining real estate prices, and the prospect of many changes regarding government regulation, and so on by a potential Democratic majority in Congress and the first black president in US history. The stock market doesnât like uncertainty, and today we have so much uncertainty about the future that not even Nostradamus would be able to figure out what is in store for the US economy for the coming years. It is very possible that the US government is using its last bullets on its efforts in trying to hold the entire US economic system from a total collapse. Many countries around the world have realized that they have to do something about getting from under an international monetary system based on the US dollar â countries in South America are going to start trading using their local currencies instead of the US dollar. And the latest countries that mentioned that they are also moving in that direction are China, and Russia. Basically the US dollar has reached the end of the line regarding its role as the major global foreign exchange currency. The US dollar is having its last moment of glory as the financial companies in the United States such as hedge funds, mutual funds, insurance companies, banks and other financial institutions sold their investments around the world and translated it into US dollars to meet their obligations regarding margin calls, and redemptions from their customers. Many emerging countries from around the world have waked up to the fact that an international monetary system based on the US dollar is very bad for their economic health in the long run, since the prosperity brought by US dollar investments and the hot money can evaporate overnight leaving behind an economic chaos. The interesting thing is that when I watch many of these financial television shows here in the US not a single person realized the amount of bad taste that the United States is leaving behind around the world with every new financial crisis. In other financial crisis many countries learned to play defense and they did everything by the book to build a stable financial system, they kept interest rates high at the expense of economic growth, they built large foreign exchange reserves to protect their currencies, they kept their balance sheets clean from borrowing money in foreign currency, they did everything right and now they are being penalized by reckless financial management in the United States. As the main players of US financial system disappeared and died a very quick death that signal that the international monetary system based on the US dollar canât be far behind mainly now that the economic future of the US economy is in a complete fog and just God knows what is ahead of us. .
All in all....in a way this is not that complicated.... Assets must reflect values with 2/3's of the debt allowance removed.... ie...One used to borrow to price goods and services with $100,000.... Now that $100,000 has changed to maybe $30,000 or even less. This is where prices are going.....so the question becomes why is it that the FED wants to keep prices where they were....when the economy is no longer in a position to support those prices.... Prices are going ....where they are going.....1/3 or less....... Now one gets to add in the trickery of inflated dollars......
. November 7, 2008 SouthAmerica: Here is another piece of evidence that we are in the beginning of a Great Depression. It is unusual for The New York Times to publish articles such as this one on its business section. You need to read between the lines to see how the country keeps descending one step at the time into a great depression â we are in a downward spiral and the US government is trying everything they can do to prevent the down turn to get completely out of control and turning itself into a massive meltdown. The talking heads on television on Wall Street shows such as on CNBC are just a bunch of cheerleaders and all they have to offer is wishful thinking and nothing else. The Titanic has already hit the iceberg and these people think that all you have to do is wish that a new captain could make a quick miracle to save this sinking ship. ***** âExecutivesâ Suicides Accompany Downturnâ By: Landon Thomas Jr. November 7, 2008 The New York Times Walter Buczynski was a top executive at a Maryland mortgage lender before he killed his wife and jumped off a bridge last January. K. Upender was a distraught stock speculator in India who suffered steep losses in the Indian stock market this fall, according to the police, just before he chose to open the gas line in his house, light a match and kill himself, his wife and his 2-year-old son. Mr. Buczynski, 59, who lived in an affluent suburb in New Jersey and made close to $330,000 in 2007, and Mr. Upender, a 32-year-old former stock broker who had taken to trading stocks out of his home in Hyderabad, a fast-growing city in central India, were worlds apart. What they had in common, The New York Timesâs Landon Thomas Jr. writes, was a livelihood in the financial industry, a wrenching downturn in that industry and death by their own hands. The reason for a suicide, particularly one that also involves homicide, is never cut and dried. Mr. Buczynski, for example, left a note saying that problems with his marriage caused him to kill himself and his wife. Although there are no hard statistics yet to show an increase in suicides related to the financial crisis, anecdotal reports are coming from around the globe. As markets continue to tumble worldwide, with the prospect of a deep global recession to follow, some experts predict suicide could increase as those who once enjoyed the fruits of a global asset boom watch their fortunes evaporate in the broadest and most abrupt destruction of wealth since the great crash of 1929. Suicide reports have come from a wide variety of places, involving a diverse range of people. A chief executive of an Arizona-based commercial lender wore a tuxedo, swallowed pills and lay down to die in June as his company collapsed. A suburban stock broker in Connecticut jumped from an 11th-story window in July; a private equity financier based in London leapt in front of a train in August. And last month, a onetime dot-com millionaire shot five family members and himself in an upscale neighborhood in Los Angeles, blaming the financial crisis for his woes. Those deaths are the most extreme manifestations of a wider mental health challenge presented by the economic malaise. âThe majority of the calls I am getting now are from people overly stressed over their finances,â Daniel J. Reidenberg, a psychologist and the executive director of SAVE, a Minneapolis-based suicide prevention organization, told The Times. âAnd I have talked to business executives as well as people who have just lost their jobs. The severity of the credit crunch is causing people to engage in more extreme behavior.â While stories of financial executives jumping from tall buildings on Wall Street during the 1929 crash have long been part of the popular lore, experts and academics say there were only a few instances of such behavior as the market plunged. Most of that eraâs suicides came in the years after the crash as the Great Depression gathered steam. âMy research showed that a lot of people committed suicide in the privacy of their own homes as their fortunes and reputations were depleted,â Selwyn Parker, the author of âThe Great Crash,â told The Times. âIt happened all over the world â in New York, the bushes of Australia, Germany and Austria.â In fact, the highest suicide rate recorded in the United States was 17 out of 100,000 people in 1932, when unemployment peaked at 25 percent. That compares with 11 out of 100,000 people in 2005, the most recent year for which data is available. The reported total in 2005 was 32,637. Anecdotally, it would seem that more finance-related suicides stem from people losing their homes in foreclosures. However, the smaller cluster of executives who have taken their lives suggests that the global collapse of asset values has been enough to persuade some people of means and high position that their lives were without hope. Steven Stack, a leading researcher of suicide trends at Wayne State University, said that Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist, reached a conclusion more than 100 years ago that holds true today. âHis argument was that those who are the highest suicide risk are those with the greatest fortunes who lose the most and have the furthest to fall,â Mr. Stack told The Times. Scott Coles, the 48-year-old chief executive of Mortgages Inc., an aggressive lender to some of Arizonaâs largest commercial development projects, experienced that kind of precipitous downturn. He became a multimillionaire by signing off on large commercial loans that were financed by high-yielding mortgage investments â a business strategy that resulted in the collapse of his company and of his prominent reputation. The police ruled his death in June a suicide, and his company filed for bankruptcy later that month. At 82, Edwin Rachleff was nearing the end of his long career as a broker, most recently running A. G. Edwardsâs New London branch in Connecticut. He was a pillar of his local community and had been married to his wife of 60 years. But on July 28, one of his main clients, the $12 million New London Security Federal Credit Union, was declared insolvent by regulators and shut down. That day, he leapt to his death from the 11th floor of a building. Investigators are examining his ties to the defunct credit union. Mr. Rachleff left no note, but he was said to be upset over his worsening eyesight and the possibility that he might lose his brokerâs license. When Kirk Stephenson, 47, jumped in front of the morning commuter train that would have taken him from his country home to his office in London, he left no note either. Friends and family were in shock, as there were no evident signs of distress from Mr. Stephenson, who was married and had an 8-year-old son. While no public explanation has been given, his death came in late September, as Olivant, the small investment company where he worked as chief operating officer, was confronted with the news that substantial assets it held at Lehman Brothers would not be recovered anytime soon because of the investment bankâs bankruptcy. Karthik Rajaram, 45, who had founded an Internet business incubator, was an out-of-work investor living in an upscale Los Angeles neighborhood when he fatally shot his three children, wife and mother-in-law before turning the gun on himself in early October. In a letter addressed to the police found at the site of the shootings, Mr. Rajaram blamed economic hardships for his actions. Although research is scant, Howard Brenner, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, says that at higher income levels, those suffering financial distress will on occasion lash out at those closest to them. âIf these people are not alive,â Mr. Brenner told The Times, âthey will not be in a position to rebuke the head of household or suffer further embarrassment.â .