It's hard to argue with this logic about pushpins from the folks
at
The Onion.
With unemployment at its highest rate in 25 years and countless
retirement savings wiped out by the collapse of the stock market,
experts say the American pushpin industry may be the lone bright
spot in an otherwise bleak financial landscape.
knows that when the economy contracts, pushpin sales
expand," said Paul Michelson, a pushpin analyst for Wells Fargo.
"
In uncertain times, they provide a sense of stability
to those who just lost their jobs or may be late with their mortgage
payments."
Added Michelson, "Pushpins are sharp, rigid, and enable you to attach
thin items to the wall. People really gravitate toward that."
In times of prosperity, however, consumers tend to be more interested
in high-ticket items such as flat-screen TVs or oil paintings. During
economic booms, the pushpins go in the back of the junk drawer until
hard times hit again.
I've used pushpins a lot more than usual over the last year. Anyone
else?
As to Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke, we're sure they, too, are decent
souls and value truth, except when it's inconvenient.
Shareholders Be Damned! - Barrons.com
By and large, though, markets are unpredictable, and they need to
stay that way. If markets were predictable, they would cease to exist...
some one or a few would run off with all the money. To the extent that
it has been "predictable" and made some corporations lots of money recently...
as we have seen, that was largely due to manipulation and corruption,
not the effects of free markets.
A few have run off with all the money. Who was on the other
side of those massively leveraged positions that the banks lost on?
It seems to me that the fact the losers are now being bailed out by
the government means that effectively there has been a massive transfer
of wealth from taxpayers to the "winners" of those bets.
Manipulated, corrupt and un-free markets indeed.
My suggestion to the submitter is to
try a more honorable career, like record-company executive or drug-dealer.
LOL! The Stimulus Czar needs stimulating... asleep at the wheel while
Obama blabs away. Perhaps a portent of things to come? Will this administration
sleep while Rome burns?
The economy is filled with dour and miserable people who rate
110% on the buzzkill meter. The stock market is filled with happy
people who are making lots of money and lots of professionals who
want to be my friend (except for short sellers, who just hate everybody).
The stock market has happy news business reporters who tell me it’s
OK to make money with stocks. The economy looks depressed enough
to hang itself, but not until it talks you into going first.
Therefore, all you need to do to profit beyond avarice is to
buy companies where a) insiders aren’t selling and b) companies
where insiders are selling. You can’t lose. The stock market will
protect you from the economy.
So wait…I’m to believe that the economy is crashing because corporate
managers were too stupid to see the dangerous bubble they had created,
and I’m also to believe that corporate managers are so brilliant
that they’re anticipating problems ahead and dumping stock like
crazy?
I love it…everyone who agrees with
me right now is a genius. The same guy, if he disagrees with me
tomorrow, is a moron.
So wait…I’m to believe that the economy is crashing because
corporate managers were too stupid to see the dangerous bubble
they had created, and I’m also to believe that corporate managers
are so brilliant that they’re anticipating problems ahead and
dumping stock like crazy
reply:
——
Point [well] taken. Since these people are confirmed stupid, this
is absolute proof of a market that has nowhere to go but up. The
economy may be noxious, but the stock market is soaring.
It’s become the official Happy People
Club. Happy people attract happy people. This is the real secret
to success.
What good are economists anyway? A commenter on a housing blog wrote
recently that economists did a worse job of forecasting the housing
market than either his father, who has no formal education, or his mother,
who got up to second grade. “If you are an economist and did not see
this coming, you should seriously reconsider the value of your education
and maybe do something with a tangible value to society, like picking
vegetables,” he wrote on patrick.net.
Take that, you pointy-headed failures! Go jump off a supply curve!”
Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota recently said she fears
that Obama will build "reeducation" camps to indoctrinate young people.
But Obama hasn't made any moves toward taking anyone's guns, and
with money as tight as it is, the last thing
the president wants to do is run a camp where he has to shelter and
feed a bunch of fat, angry white people.
Look, I get it, "real America." After an eight-year run of controlling
the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court, this latest election
has you feeling like a rejected husband. You've come home to find your
things out on the front lawn -- or at least more things than you usually
keep out on the front lawn. You're not ready to let go, but the country
you love is moving on. And now you want to call it a whore and key its
car.
These days, bankster-bashing is a popular sport; for some reason
Summers enjoy the same status. May be he is really one of them...
Americans may be struggling to pay their credit card debt. But for Larry
Summers, President Obama’s chief economic adviser, the issue is apparently
a snooze.
Mr. Summers was caught dozing in a Roosevelt Room meeting
this afternoon as Mr. Obama addressed credit card industry officials,
according to a White House pool report.
Mr. Summers “appeared to be nodding off near the beginning’’ of Mr.
Obama’s remarks, the report said. It went on “And then he DID nod off,
doing the head on the hand and then head falling off the hand thing.’’
The photographers had a field day at what would otherwise have been
just another White House photo op with officials seated around a table.
Selected Comments
I’m sure he’s burning the midnight
oil on all our behalves…Obama should bang the table tho and wake
him up; it’s a little embarrassing.
— scottso
Well it WAS a boring meeting topic. I mean,
unless it involves hedge funds or bailing out his buddies, the Masters
of the Universe, why would Summers care? Only Little People pay
credit card interest, after all.
— Parakeeta Byrd
He was having a dream that
went like this:
” Water glass: $5.00
” Embossed namecard: $10.00
” Official pen: $11.00
” Access to the President: priceless.”
— a. hamilton
Obama likes to talk and talk and talk, so no wonder Summers
is bored out. He has probably heard Obama say the same thing a 1000
times. Kudos to Summers for actually getting a power-nap while Obama
keeps blabbing.
“It was the culture of what some called IBG-YBG: I’ll be gone, you’ll
be gone,”
“Rich Democrats don’t like having their taxes raised either …
“When I talked to my friends in November and December at firms like
Goldman, they would tell me, ‘If the government doesn’t bail us out,
we’re going down.’ They really thought they were going to zero, and
without exception, they all forget that now,” he says. “They forget
that their company’s stock was going to zero. It’s a state of delusion;
they don’t remember those days. The flip side of that is,
every guy except the Goldman guy remembers
that Goldman was bailed out.”
“You wear a nice suit on the subway, and people look at you,”
“The more I see and hear Secretary Geithner speak on financial services
policy, the more I am convinced that this man has not a clue what he
is doing …”
“In a witch hunt, the witches have feelings, too.”
"Capitol One is famous for their predatory practices. I imagine smiles
across the nation as people take a small pleasure in defaulting on their
Capital One credit cards. "
Borrow from the Fed at 0%, lend at 30%, and be backstopped by the
Fed? Even I could make money doing that. Sign up for your pre-approved
Brewcrew card today! Special lower interest rates for customers of Lefty's
Liquors.
"One of the lessons that
investors seem to have to learn over and over again, and will again
in the future, is that not only can you not turn a toad into a prince
by kissing it, but you cannot turn a toad into a prince by repackaging
it. But very imaginative people in the securities market try to do that.
If you have bad mortgages they do not come better by repackaging them.
To some extent the chickens are coming home to roost for the mortgage
originators and securitisers."
"People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should
never be given a new bus. The economics establishment (universities, regulators,
central bankers, government officials, various organizations staffed with
economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system."
Nassim Taleb suggests ways to make economic life closer to our biological
environment: smaller companies, richer ecology, no leverage. The risk
takers of the economy should be entrepreneurs, not bankers; Companies
should be born and die every day, without making the news.
In other words, a place more resistant to black swans.
Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world
What is fragile should break early while it is still small.
Nothing should ever become too big to fail.
No socialization of losses and privatization of gains. Whatever
may need to be bailed out should be nationalized; whatever does
not need a bail-out should be free, small and risk-bearing.
We have managed to combine the worst of capitalism and socialism.
People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed
it) should never be given a new bus. The economics establishment
(universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials,
various organizations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy
with the failure of the system.
Do not let someone making an “incentive” bonus manage a
nuclear plant – or your financial risks. Odds are he would cut
every corner on safety to show “profits” while claiming to be
“conservative”.
Counter-balance complexity with simplicity. The complex
economy is already a form of leverage: the leverage of efficiency.
Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come
with a warning.
Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments
should never need to “restore confidence”. Be robust in the
face of them.
Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains.
Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is
denial.
Economic life should be definancialised. Citizens should
not depend on financial assets or fallible “expert” advice for
their retirement.
Make an omelets with the broken eggs. We need to rebuild
the hull with new (stronger) materials; we will have to remake
the system before it does so itself.
Selected comments
And what I find most amusing is that everyone expects to make 8-10%
when the economy is growing at a much smaller rate than that.
Remember over the last decade how the mantra defending all this was
"spreading risk." Funny you don't hear that anymore, because they were
right. We all got the risk, whether we wanted it or not.
Now, I think that is funny. But they don’t — they are serious:
“In a new white paper, S&P lists six qualities investors want
from ratings firms: all public ratings available to all investors
without charge at the same time; a ratings process free from conflicts
of interest and independent of issuers, investors and governments;
ratings based on sound, consistently applied methodologies that
consider real-world trends; broad and consistent coverage of a wide
range of securities and asset classes; ongoing scrutiny to ensure
timely upgrades or downgrades if appropriate; and freedom to choose
rating opinions from multiple sources and additional benchmarks
on issues besides the likelihood of default.”
These guys should work for HBO — seriously, give them a job doing
anything but rating credit.
[W]ith hindsight, we can see that something went
wrong in recent years, as evidenced by the currently high rates
of mortgage delinquency and foreclosure
Barry, you are just jealous. Alexis Glick gave Goldman a fantastic
blow-job on Money for Breakfast today.
No sooner had she wiped her lips, the Bloomberg team were at it
as well.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Gamblers Anonymous had a special
chapter for derivatives gambling.
I heard as l'Oreal's internal slogan: "we are not selling shampoo,
we are selling dreams" -- in fact, derivative contracts are not
zero sum games, there are intermediaries, ******-shuffle
them, and they are to an important extent intermediating among retail
investors for a fat fee. You may have noticed those sport cars these
financial volks drive... it is not because they are smart; it is
because they are -- collectively -- selling dreams of getting rich,
and selling these dreams bloody expensive.
It's over — we're officially, royally fucked.
No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which
is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been
running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened
when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he
was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into
a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our
national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete
and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy
itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like
a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days
of the British Empire.
... ... ...
The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the
largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion.
In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27
million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income
for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a
second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that
America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat
to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport
to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and
explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no
mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death
power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national
economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than
AIG's 2008 losses).
So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of
gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst
part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is
some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by
the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape
the American Dream.
It was "In Goldman Sachs we trust" before it became "Government Sucks"
CalculatedRisk
Government Sucks is headed in the same direction as the US econo-political
system--COLLAPSE. Don't get carried away by bear market rallies. They
are to suck more dopes.
Goldman Sachs employees provide a service. You give them billions
of your tax dollars and they promise not to stop spending. I mean just
think of all the private airline pilots that would lose their job if
GS was allowed to stand on their own.
So lets:
1. Mark to maybe
2. Post bonus amounts later
3. Get an overnight deposit from the Fed to bloat the Balance Sheet
4. Postpone all accts payable (issue IOUs)
5. Send a big check to O
6. Pay HP his ghost retainer
Michael's exhortation of the 7th amendment makes better sense
each day. Imagine and Ordinary Joe who shoots his banker and the
jury returns a verdict of "self-defense".
Only 53% of American adults believe capitalism is better
than socialism.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found
that 20% disagree and say socialism is better. Twenty-seven
percent (27%) are not sure which is better.
Adults under 30 are essentially
evenly divided: 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism,
and 30% are undecided. Thirty-somethings are a bit more supportive
of the free-enterprise approach with 49% for capitalism and
26% for socialism. Adults over 40 strongly favor capitalism,
and just 13% of those older Americans believe socialism is better.
The consensus that's being cried out for, supports the de-centralisation
of markets yet the participative democracy of socialism. Centralised
forms of state socialism are indeed dead. Markets are good at allocating
resources, when unhindered by the crises and contradictions of capitalism.
It appears we are angling towards market socialism. A system
of democratically-run co-operatives competing in the marketplace.
It was an idea that was intellectually 'fashionable' in the 80s
- but is long overdue a reappraisal.
The best way to introduce such a system with minimal controversy
(and I do stress minimal, not zero) is to introduce favourable tax
breaks to encourage co-op start-ups; and phased subsidies, eventually
disappearing after three years when its assumed the enterprise is
stable and self-sufficient.
Nobody seriously thinks of returning to the socialist systems
of the Soviet type - not only because of their political faults,
but also because of the increasing sluggishness and inefficiency
of their economies - though this should not lead us to underestimate
their impressive social and educational achievements.
Impressive social and educational achievements? You mean the
totally unncessary and deliberate starvation of some twenty million
peasants?
Or the mass grave of Kolmya?
These are the social achievements we are supposed to be impressed
by?
It is a relief to see that good Professor no longer wants to
create that mass murdering totalitarian state in the UK - one that
would almost certainly have killed me and most posters here - but
it is a shame to see that building autobahns and making the trains
run on time is not the be all and end all of Government. There is
that little thing about genocide as well.
As for the rest of the article, it is built on a fantasy. He
says:
Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what
amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international
bourgeois anarchism, and those who believe in a planned socialism
uncontaminated by private profit-seeking. Both are bankrupt
But in fact this pure stateless market capitalism does not exist
outside of his imagination. Britain still takes 40 pence in every
pound. The State continues to regulate and run large parts of the
economy. It owns a large chunk of it as well. Nor is there any evidence
that it is bankrupt as an idea. Socialism is dead, but there is
no viable alternative to that mixed capitalist model.
And, by the way, the heaviest regulated sector failed. The banks.
Not the least regulated Hedge funds. The problem is, as always,
stupid Government.
Finally,
Britain deregulated its markets, sold its industries to the
highest bidder, stopped making things to export (unlike Germany,
France and Switzerland)
This claim is utter b*ll*cks. Britain has a larger manufacturing
sector for the size of its economy than France does. I don't know
about Germany or Switzerland and I can't be bothered to look it
up.
Given the level of research the good Professor put into his article,
I don't feel any particular need to either.
[Apr 10, 2009] Every day I get up and look through the Forbes list of
the richest people in America. If I'm not there, I go to work. ~Robert Orben
Hat tip to By Barry Ritholtz. That's about current stock market ;-)
Like Winnie-the-Pooh, I'm left scratching my head. How could a
‘safe' deposit account evaporate, leaving the bankers unscathed?
This will cheer you up. I lost a big sum of money recently. It
evaporated with Lehman Brothers. As it happens, I was hardly aware
that I had anything deposited with this distinguished banking house
(or hopelessly greedy incompetents, depending on the way you choose
to look at them) until I telephoned the manager of my account at
a hedge fund.
Now let's go back. I am a financial innocent. I distrust all
wealth management and fund manager types. I distrust them from a
deep, puritanical atavistic well. But I happen to have savings and
pension funds to consider. We drones make our money by luck and
talent, by inventing things or creating things, and not by accountancy,
so we are doomed to be the patsies of the financial sector. We are
the wildebeests by the waterhole. We are the ones who have to die
to feed these ghastly, lazy, incompetent predators.
Inspired by “There was an old lady who swallowed a fly”, lyrics by Rose
Bonne
No money down, two years interest free,
Buying a house was no problem you see.
And so the young man along with his spouse,
They could not afford, but yet bought the house.
A company provided the debt,
That allowed the couple to buy, but yet
They did not provide the money for free,
They packaged and sold it off for a fee.
And so the young man along with his spouse,
They could not afford, but yet bought the house.
The rating folks called the bonds triple A,
The sun was shining, it was time to make hay.
It allowed the company to sell off the debt,
To earn fast fees, a good business bet.
And so the young man along with his spouse,
They could not afford, but yet bought the house.
The banks came along and bought the debt,
Locked in a spread that yielded great net.
They thought the bonds were Triple A,
Or so the rating companies say,
Of the bonds offered by the company,
The ones packaged and sold for a fee,
That allowed the young man and his spouse,
Though they could not afford, but yet bought the house.
But the terms soon changed for the young man and his spouse,
They could no longer afford to own the new house.
The rating companies had erred quite a bit,
All of a sudden the banks took a hit.
On bonds they had thought risk free,
That they bought from a company that had earned a fee,
For providing the loan to a young man and his spouse,
They could not afford, but yet bought the house.
The Fed came along to bail out the banks,
A task for which they deserve little thanks.
Shouldn’t they have known all along?
Banks chasing yield would end up so wrong?
And couldn’t the rating companies see,
This kind of debt is more like Single B?
And the company that provided the debt for a fee,
Should never have lent to the man and his spouse,
Because they could not afford, but yet bought the house.
Make "economic life closer to our biological environment: smaller companies,
richer ecology, no leverage. A world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers,
take the risks and companies are born and die every day without making the
news. In other words, a place more resistant to black swans.". Some suggestions:
2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains.
...
3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed
it) should never be given a new bus. ...
4. Do not let someone making an “incentive” bonus manage a nuclear
plant – or your financial risks. ...
6. Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come
with a warning . ...
8. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains.
...
If there was one thing the Bush Administration did that was extremely
harmful to the country, it was to verify that if you tell the lie long
enough, the people stop asking you to tell the truth... While Obama
is wow'ing Europe with his rock and roll status, his appointment and
bank stooge Tim Geithner, is stealing the silverware out of the White
House drawers.
As an aside: it is astonishing that Congress and much of the US populace
are apoplectic about $165 mn (perhaps $182 mn) of bonuses paid to AIG
executives and employees, when $170 billion or so of public money is
at risk (and tens of billions probably already gone out of the window)
in the rescue of this most undeserving of companies. Perhaps you
can only get indignant about what you can comprehend… .
Bernard Madoff’s $9.3 million Palm Beach mansion is now
in the hands of the U.S. government, along with two of his boats and
a Mercedes.
At 6 p.m. Wednesday, about a dozen agents from the U.S. Marshals
Service descended on the five-bedroom, seven-bath house along the Intracoastal
Waterway.
“I’ve never seen so much bull in my life,” Deputy U.S. Marshal Barry
Golden said shortly after entering the house. “Pictures of bulls, bull
statues, even bulls on clothing. There’s a lot of bull in the house.”
The bull theme even extended to the boats seized earlier Wednesday.
A 55-foot yacht moored at a Fort Lauderdale marina is named Bull. A
24-foot speedboat taken from a warehouse in Palm City is named Little
Bull.
"Oh my God, do they believe the garbage they shovel out?"
The worst of it is, I think they do.
killben said...
"The dishonesty of this crowd is just breathtaking. The Bushies
were blatantly high handed, while Team Obama prefers the Big Lie
and assumes we are all too dumb to see through it"
An Indian-born economist once explained his personal theory of reincarnation
to his graduate economics class. "If you are a good economist, a virtuous
economist," he said, "you are reborn as a physicist. But if you are
an evil, wicked economist, you are reborn as a sociologist." —Paul Krugman,
"Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in the Age of Diminished
Expectations" (1994, page xi):
Reader Tim C pointed us to a
post on Tim Price's blog, "The
Price of Everything," which provides astute financial and sometimes
social commentary. Below is an excerpt:
Dear Western banking establishment,
I notice that your unauthorised credit facility from international
lenders of last resort now totals approximately $10 trillion. As
a taxpayer and therefore your largest shareholder I would be grateful
if you could repay this facility at your earliest convenience. I
have charged you an additional £30 for this letter and a monthly
unauthorised overdraft fee of £28. If you do not repay this facility
shortly I will have no choice but to become further massively impoverished
along with legions of fellow taxpayers for multiple generations
to come.
I would also be grateful if the strategists and economists who work
for you could abstain from publishing their unsolicited opinions
about resolving the banking crisis within the financial media. I
am sure you will agree that hearing from the same strategists who
worked for the architects of such widespread financial destruction
is likely to irritate those of us who were not actually complicit
in the extraordinary and venal credit boom of the last several decades.
There is an expression that if you’re not part of the solution,
you’re part of the problem. Those of your employees who were the
public face of the problem are, I think you will agree, unlikely
to represent the solution, unless perhaps they are fired – en masse,
from a giant howitzer, into an area where they can do no further
harm. Alaska, perhaps. I would further suggest that the high profile
commentators who work for you and who have implicitly played their
part in marketing and then amplifying this catastrophe might consider
quietly entering another field with superior ethics and enhanced
value to society at large: perhaps as piano players in brothels.
This note has been copied to the letters editors of The Financial
Times and The Wall Street Journal (which I understand is shortly
to be renamed simply The Journal on the basis that Wall Street no
longer actually exists – as was noted this week by Messrs Wen Jiabao
and Vladimir Putin at Davos. Don’t worry about not being there –
you weren’t missed).
Since the start of the year is always a time for slimming and working
off the excesses of the festive period, I wonder whether your industry
would consider operating along similar lines. Just as there is no
real need to have 18 different coffee bars all touting their wares
along my High Street, there is probably no real need to have 18
different banks, not all of which are subsidiaries of Santander,
clogging the High Street and busily not wanting to extend me back
any of my own money so generously lent to them.
I would also be interested in your views as to the wisdom and efficacy
of the monstrous pile of credit being shovelled at you and your
peers by governments when it was overmuch credit creation that precipitated
this crisis. I do not, of course, expect anything other than a self-interested
response. But you may find the following observations pertinent.
If they seem acutely relevant today it is because they were written
in the early 1930s, by one Garet Garrett (and a grateful hat tip
to M. Gandon):
“The general shape of this universal delusion [that is, credit]
may be indicated by three of its familiar features.. First,
the idea that the panacea for debt is credit.. The burden of
Europe’s private debt to this country now is greater than the
burden of her war debt; and the war debt, with arrears of interest,
is greater than it was the day the peace was signed.. Debt was
the economic terror of the world when the war ended. How to
pay it was the colossal problem. Yet you will hardly find a
nation, state, city, town or region that has not multiplied
its debt since the war. The aggregate of this increase is prodigious,
and a very high proportion of it represents recourse to credit
to avoid payment of debt.
“Second, a social and political doctrine, now widely accepted,
beginning with the premise that people are entitled to certain
betterments of life. If they cannot immediately afford them..
nevertheless people are entitled to them, and credit must provide
them.. Result: Probably one half of all government, national
and civic, in the area of western civilization is either bankrupt
or in acute distress from having over-borrowed according to
this doctrine.. Now as credit fails and the standards of living
tend to fall from the planes on which credit for a while sustained
them, there is political dismay.. When [people] have been living
on credit beyond their means the debt overtakes them. If they
tax themselves to pay it, that means going back a little. If
they repudiate their debt, that is the end of their credit.
In this dilemma the ideal solution, so recommended even to the
creditor, is more credit, more debt.
“Third, the argument that prosperity is a product of credit,
whereas from the beginning of economic thought it had been supposed
that prosperity was from the increase and exchange of wealth,
and credit was its product.”
Not only he did, he managed to escape the jail and make a tidy sum on
his junk memoirs ;-). As for who was a real fool I like the comment " you
get the leaders you deserve and Greenspan was the greatest con artist of
all time."
In his bluntest admission to date of his role in inciting the financial
crisis, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan has decided to come out clean:
“I screwed up!”
Greenspan, 83, was speaking at a press conference in Basel, Switzerland,
at the fringe of the Global Symposium on Rebuilding the Pillars of Self-Regulation,
which he intended to boycott.
Asked about his one-time conviction about bank officers’ superior
risk-management skills to those of regulators, the Maestro conceded:
“They had me with their fan charts! Default probabilities in color!…
I’d never seen them before!… Bayesian, no less!”
Greenspan expressed his stern commitment to do whatever it takes
to redeem himself, including re-writing his memoirs, proofreading FOMC
minutes, or even taking a job at the Treasury.
Yet, local sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, revealed
Greenspan has applied to extend his Swiss visa, after being tipped by
Chinese secret agents he had been shortlisted by Secretary Geithner
for the post of Bank Nationalization Czar.
“That would be a step too far,” he suggested, when asked about the
prospect.
Chinese secret agents were not available for comment.
Still, trusted sources report China is working to quash Greenspan’s
plan to stay in Switzerland, luring him instead into spending his latter
years in Beijing.
Greenspan did not seem entirely closed to the idea. Visibly distressed
by the fatals flaws he discovered in his ideological framework, he said:
“As long as I can get my saving deposits out of Citi and into China,
it could help me find my peace of mind,” he said.
Indeed, sources say he is already considering a lucrative offer to
employ his formidable forecasting skills as prime-time anchor for the
Chinese weather channel.
The Last but not LeastTechnology is dominated by
two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt.
Ph.D
FAIR USE NOTICEThis site contains
copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically
authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available
to advance understanding of computer science, IT technology, economic, scientific, and social
issues. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such
copyrighted material as provided by section 107 of the US Copyright Law according to which
such material can be distributed without profit exclusively for research and educational purposes.
This is a Spartan WHYFF (We Help You For Free)
site written by people for whom English is not a native language. Grammar and spelling errors should
be expected. The site contain some broken links as it develops like a living tree...
You can use PayPal to to buy a cup of coffee for authors
of this site
Disclaimer:
The statements, views and opinions presented on this web page are those of the author (or
referenced source) and are
not endorsed by, nor do they necessarily reflect, the opinions of the Softpanorama society.We do not warrant the correctness
of the information provided or its fitness for any purpose. The site uses AdSense so you need to be aware of Google privacy policy. You you do not want to be
tracked by Google please disable Javascript for this site. This site is perfectly usable without
Javascript.
April 26th, 2009 at 9:44 am
... ... ...
The economy is filled with dour and miserable people who rate 110% on the buzzkill meter. The stock market is filled with happy people who are making lots of money and lots of professionals who want to be my friend (except for short sellers, who just hate everybody). The stock market has happy news business reporters who tell me it’s OK to make money with stocks. The economy looks depressed enough to hang itself, but not until it talks you into going first.
Therefore, all you need to do to profit beyond avarice is to buy companies where a) insiders aren’t selling and b) companies where insiders are selling. You can’t lose. The stock market will protect you from the economy.
April 26th, 2009 at 9:52 am
So wait…I’m to believe that the economy is crashing because corporate managers were too stupid to see the dangerous bubble they had created, and I’m also to believe that corporate managers are so brilliant that they’re anticipating problems ahead and dumping stock like crazy?
I love it…everyone who agrees with me right now is a genius. The same guy, if he disagrees with me tomorrow, is a moron.
April 26th, 2009 at 10:00 am
franklin411 Says:
April 26th, 2009 at 9:52 am
reply:
——
Point [well] taken. Since these people are confirmed stupid, this is absolute proof of a market that has nowhere to go but up. The economy may be noxious, but the stock market is soaring. It’s become the official Happy People Club. Happy people attract happy people. This is the real secret to success.