Why, yes, and why don't we just keep emulating everything fair and noble about the right-wing financial madness currently happening down south? After all, what can possibly go wrong? Oh, wait ...
This is what a Category 4 financial crisis looks like. Giant blue-chip financial institutions swept away in a matter of days. Banks refusing to lend to other banks. Russia closing its stock market to stop the panicked selling. Gold soaring $70 in a single trading session. Developing countries' currencies in a free fall. Money-market funds warning they might not be able to return every dollar invested. Daily swings of three, four, five hundred points in the Dow Jones industrial average.
What we are witnessing may be the greatest destruction of financial wealth that the world has ever seen -- paper losses measured in the trillions of dollars. Corporate wealth. Oil wealth. Real estate wealth. Bank wealth. Private-equity wealth. Hedge fund wealth. Pension wealth. It's a painful reminder that, when you strip away all the complexity and trappings from the magnificent new global infrastructure, finance is still a confidence game -- and once the confidence goes, there's no telling when the selling will stop.
And here's the kicker in the very next paragraph:
But more than psychology is involved here. What is really going on, at the most fundamental level, is that the United States is in the process of being forced by its foreign creditors to begin living within its means.
And there, boys and girls, is where Stephen Harper and his crazed yahoos and dingbats want to take you. Just give them a few more years.
6 comments:
C'mon, don't you realize that the best thing that poor people can do is give all their money to rich people? Because obviously they're doing something right, and therefore they deserve it. And if they fuck up? Well, it wasn't really their fault, and we should give them more money to make sure that they know how important they are to us. And to thank them for having the balls to stand up and demand government hand-outs.
(How is his different from being a welfare bum? Well, they have nicer suits, for one thing. Actually, I think that's the only difference.)
...is where Stephen Harper and his crazed yahoos and dingbats want to take you.
That thinking is pre-sweater vest. Sharing and caring Stevie is reminding us that Canada's secure, risk-averse, Northern European welfare (in the best sense of the term) state's financial system is sound. And Big Daddy did this in less than two years!
Wow, what a guy!
What I'm wondering is why anybody is surprised by the U.S. economy's implosion.
This is what a Category 4 financial crisis looks like.
No one could have anticipated the breach of the levees.
heck of a job wall street.
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