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mojowork_n

mojowork_n's Journal
mojowork_n's Journal
April 16, 2013

I'm not an economist. If someone were making a film, that all would probably be part of the story.

As summed up at the end of the article.


The whole thing sounds like a drug crazed event, doesn’t it? A bunch of self-proclaimed geniuses realizing that they’ve ruined their business come up with a crazy plan to save their firms (most of them) and their lifestyle. They get one their own, who just happens to be Secretary of the Treasury, to bankroll their mistakes (and worse) and they just keep going while the rest of the country struggles on for years to recover.


If you're talking about "self-proclaimed geniuses" there were all those 'financial engineers' who thought they had a blueprint for the economic equivalent of cold fusion. They went down to some Florida or Caribbean resort (okay, maybe there was a pharmaceutical angle) and they were going to teach everybody else their revolutionary theories, and take the "less advanced" financial theorists to school. (Can't remember the book, a Brit. writer for the Financial Times. Brown cover. I picked it up for 10 minutes at a friend's house.)

But from what I recall, it wasn't just a real estate/mortgage/derivatives bubble. The price of a barrel of crude was up over 150 bucks. Then those prices just totally tanked. Down to 35 or 40 for a time? That index that measures orders for international container shipping, ocean freight. It had gone off the rails and tanked, signalling a crash, even before the rest of the economy did.
The cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars was still "on the credit card," not on the books. Instead of taking their earnings and putting them back into some kind of productive activity, the war profiteers were making bucket shop bets.

How much money is still hidden away in off-shore accounts? 30 trillion? Did you see the reports about the size of the money pile that's in "private" banks?

http://campaigns.dailykos.com/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=365

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/exposed_a_global_offshore_money_web_20130404

As much as anything, sheer avarice, arrogance and unrestrained financial piracy brought the house of cards down five years ago. Too many people taking advantage of unsustainable, paper-chit-from-a-crooked bookie, big and quick pay offs. Like Tony Soprano in cahoots with the regulators and at the end, they make sure they've pulled all the copper pipes (and every other asset) from the ruins of all those HUD-approved buildings.

The Libor scandal, everything Matt Taibbi has written about the vampire squid, HSBC paying the 1.9 billion "fine" for laundering drug money and nobody goes to jail?

People took to the streets to protest. (There was that whole "occupy" thing.) Then it just kind of goes away, and people go back to paying attention to which Kardashian is doing who.

...Maybe it's all of us, regular average citizens, that have some kind of pharmaceutical issues.

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