Complex Numbers

Further Thoughts on Our Impending Doom

elusive ennui warm inside : To quote Don Henley, "They ain't here; they ain't coming." I sometimes envy the truly religious - that is, anyone who believes there's an external entity, be it God, Odin, Barack Obama or Space Aliens, that will, if we pray or sacrifice or vote or wish hard enough, come to rescue ourselves from ourselves. I sometimes envy them because I don't think wishing's going to make it so. Oh, Obama might become President, sure, but he's still not going to save us from ourselves.

We have to do that, and we're doing a piss-poor job of it while all we do is watch TV, surf the Internet, complain about gas prices and blog.

Thomas : The rise and fall, the changing fortunes, of business is the cornerstone of capitalism, and it is, simultaneously, its boon and its bane. But that cycle depends on the natural waxing and waning of peoples' needs and faddish desires. And sometimes, something very fundamental changes - imagine what would have happened had government bailed out carriage makers at the beginning of the last century, or typewriter manufacturers at the end of it.

I'm not saying that the need for banking is obsolete, but clearly some of the practices of bankers (that group for which British author Neil Gaiman said the collective noun for was a "wunch") were doomed to failure and, just as evolutionary pressures force some organisms to adapt or die, the evolutionary pressure of business should force some businesses to adapt or die - whether the business is making carriages that were destined to be replaced by motor vehicles, or repackaging bad loans into worse investment vehicles.

orangefiire: I'm talking about the economic problems here in the US, starting with the deflation of the housing price bubble and its ripple effect on banks, insurance companies, the Federal Reserve, and ultimately all of us in the US. And probably some foreigners as well, but no one cares about them unless we have a military force over there. Wherever "there" is.

Just kidding, AL and Mavis Moog

The StoryMaster : The broker (one which doesn't appear to be part of the collapse) that holds part of my portfolio had a portion of said portfolio in AIG; they only sold it recently, after it had tanked. Before that, they sold the portfolio's position in LEH - after it tanked. Back in 2001 or whenever it was, they also sold its position in Enron - after it tanked.

With the market the way it is, I may just have to wrest control back from the "professional investment advisers" and put it all into Apple and Netflix stock. I figure no matter what happens to the rest of the economy, people will still want their iPods and movies... cheap entertainment while we're all sitting at home, jobless.

Anyway, I do think you're right, SM, in that we as a country are still going to be in a good position to recover from this. And that it's not exactly business as usual. But if I got handed a severance package of $10M or more, I'd take the scrutiny... I could live pretty well for the rest of my life on $10M and to hell with the investigators. I'd like to see them FIND me in Belize. Oops, did I say where I was going? I meant Fiji. Yep, moving to Fiji; look for me there.

I do think banks will continue to lend money, just not as freely as they have in the past, and to me that's a GOOD thing - having an economy based on fake money created by debt is no way to run a country; as I recall, it was unregulated buying on margin that was a major trigger for the Great Depression (which, when all is said and done with the coming Depression, may be renamed as the Great Manic) in the first place, and while there's less *direct* buying on margin, it's apparent that a lot of the 'money' in the market over the past few years has been borrowed.

As for buying businesses at an utter steal... unless Warren Buffett buys it, it's probably not as good a deal as we think

AL : I'm not a socialist, and Sarah Palin scares me to death, too. Apparently mediocrity isn't just fashionable anymore; it's entrenched.

Give me an intellectual elitist ANY day of the week. But especially on Election Day.