Trying to understand the financial crisis, and could use some help.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

I finally feel like I'm getting somewhere. I'd appreciate it if anybody with a background in economics could tell me if I've got this right. This is what I understand so far:

There was once this group of people hanging out on Main Street selling metaphors. Some of the metaphors that were sold were very good, but some were not. Some were bad. Some were like the brown acid at Woodstock. Actually, that's a simile, not even a metaphor. Then all of these metaphors - good and bad, got sold to Wall Street and bundled up together. They mixed some of the good metaphors with the bad, and suddenly all hell broke the mold and people were shooting monkeys in a barrel.

This was bad enough, but then things got worse: All along, a couple of guys had been hiding in a hedge, watching all of this metaphor mixing going on. These guys reasoned that mixed metaphors were not a very good sort of thing to have at all, and started inventing invisible insurance policies on the metaphors and selling them to each other in exchange for vast quantities of levers. Except that the levers they purchased did not come with any sort of platform to which they could be attached. And instead of insurance, what they were selling was like poison. Or drugs. Except that drugs are something that exists, and insurance on metaphors is something that doesn't - or shouldn't exist.

So eventually somebody, I'm not sure who, ended up with a bunch of useless levers, or insurance on useless levers, or insurance on mixed metaphors, or some drugs. And what the government proposes to do is purchase all of the mixed metaphors, give them to a bunch of people on drugs who will disentangle them, burn down the bad metaphors, then sell them ashes back to the people who owned them originally, but for more drugs. This is where things start to get a bit hazy for me, but I'm pretty sure the upshot is this: People shouldn't mix metaphors or sell drugs, and that levers are only good as long as you've got a place to stand. And there's no use crying over spilled meat.

Please feel free to correct me if you find any mistakes in the above.

[LynzM]

1. LMAO

Dude, this is *awesome* :rofl: Thanks for the laugh, I really needed that today! (And your explanation makes about as much sense as any others I've heard, in terms of describing the absurdity... )

[tama]

2. Sounds like

Derrida on farmakon.

Likes it.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

4. One wonders what Plato would have to say about credit default swaps. :-)

[LynzM]

5. Oh man....

Derrida. Deconstruction. A Map for Rereading. Thanks for the college flashback! :D

[RevolutionStartsNow]

3. Excellent, thanks

Now I get it. :)

[Winterblues]

6. Do you have any more of that brown acid?

:rofl: