U.S.A go Red

[Charles]

It has been some time now that the world is looking at the subprime crisis.
After several months, the crisis has now reached a critical level, at such a point that the governement has purely NATIONALISED the 2 biggest credit companies, and a bank , a move that any true communist would be proud of.

So much for the market's invisible hands, and all the bullshit spread by Milton Friedman, Reagan, and all those assholes.

It is with a certain satisfaction (schadenfreude would be the exact term) that I contemplate the whole liberalist doxa go up in smoke, smashed by crude reality, and then the Wall steet crooks bein rightfully denied 700B$ for all the mindless games they played and lost with other's people money.

Your thoughts ?

 

[bates]

This is a serious topic, In Belgium the government already bought 2 banks on 2 days time, and those c***s in the states rejected the one and only idea that at this moment could have solved or slowed the problem.

The good thing about it is that it's a great time to buy new things that don't require a loan, as when the crisis will get solved the prices will go up so companies can recover their loss.

 

[St Helens RLFC]

The world is going into meltdown, its crazy.

 

[Charles]

I tell you it was coming a long way...First, there's the ideology: market's invisible hand, deregulation, State must not interfere with business.

Then you have c***s in banks trying to find every possible way to make money, whatever the cost. Ex: selling houses with loans to people who could never afford it. Come the billions of bonuses for traders, the big stakes for shareholders (thanks to thousands of WORKING people being fired), golden parachutes and all.

Then suddenly when everything goes bankrupt, all the bards of cazpitalism turn to the state to bail them out. What a joke !

Privatise the gain, share the loss. That's their real motto.

I feel sad for all the people who are gonna get affected by that, but all the bankers and traders, a bullet in the neck would be fine for them.

 

[candybum]

Reboot! lol

 

[Prestwick]

I am quite glad that the bail-out bill going through Congress failed. Rewarding the big banks and the institutions (pension funds, etc) who have for years rewarded bankers who have binged on bad loans and toxic mortgages with big salary rewards in the crooked renumeration committee system would be quite possibly the worst thing to do. Banks should not be bailed out with tax payers money, they need to be slowly and safely broken up and the profitable assets sold on to safeguard the interest of responsible savers.

The fact of the matter is, if you are intent on taking out a risky mortgage or are a buy-to-let mortgage (as in buying a property with the intention of renting it out as a land lord) then I'm sorry but you need to learn that the party can end abruptly, that things can go up as well as down. As I don't believe in saddling myself in a lifetime of debt just to own a rickety two bedroom flat in some gritty Glaswegian council estate and as I believe that renting is the only way to go in this climate, I accept that I'll probably, nay, definitely have to pay more in a housing crisis because the landlords mortgage payments will go up. But at the end of the day, I know the risks involved and I know that I may have to get turfed out if the landlord can't keep up with payments and has to sell quickly or maybe even is forced into repossession. I understand the risk.

The people who jumped on the bandwagon and went and grabbed 100% risky mortgages because they thought the boom times would never end, they're the people who didn't quite understand the risks and I don't feel that I should have to pay something to the tune of £10,000 out of my tax bill to bail out the excesses of a load of middle class wannabes.

The UK has staked its future on an extremely unstable housing market and a financial services sector entombed in a sodding bubble in the square mile (Central London), oblivious to the fact that the world is coming down around their ears. As long as the champagne keeps flowing and the cocaine and heroin keeps a'comin' from Turkey they don't give two craps what happens to the average bloke on the street and I bet its exactly the same situation in New York, Wellington, Sydney and Pretoria.

The whole system is rotten, its crooked, its made me vow never to work in the City of London ever again and I for one will toast to its demise and see all of those pretentious and ignorant money men get the sack.

Who here is with me?

 

[Charles]

I am for sure. When you hear the amount of end-of-year bonuses all those traders/bankers get just for putting people in dire straits, it's just obscene. It's the abject failure of the ultra capitalist system and rightly so.

 

[Prestwick]

I have no idea how it works over on Continental Europe but the Anglo-Saxon way is usually to decide executive pay and bonuses on the decisions of "Renumeration Committees".

These committees are staffed usually by the bosses of other banks and corporations and I'll give you three guesses what their decisions are?

Totally obscene, I just pray that it isn't as bad in France, Germany and Italy as it is in the UK

 

[Charles]

France and Italy are deffo worse than UK. Only Germany has a bit of sanity left. The commercial balance of France gets worse every month yet the French CEO's are the ones who have seen their salaries increase the most in Europe (something like 40%+ in 5 years). It baffles me that we don't have poverty revolts yet, it would be legitimate.

 

[Prestwick]

Well it could be worse, the UK and France could be in recession like Ireland...

BBC: Uk Economic growth at a standstill

OH SHI-

 

[Charles]

The myth of neverending growth is only acceptable for people with blinkers , or really stupid anyway. We live in a finished world, with a limited amount of natural resources(which are growing very thin). Trees stop growing one day.

 

[Prestwick]

The cynical nature of the global corporations is plain to see.

When the likes of Dell, HP and other major computer server manufacturers talk about producing ever more power efficient servers for the likes of Google, Yahoo and major datacenter users, when they say "you can lower your carbon emmissions" they really mean "you can save loads of money on your power and cooling budget and look really green at the same time."

If the planet does get saved, it'll be because business sees a way of saving money rather than any pressing need to save the wild owl or get off of fossil fuels..

 

[Charles]

Btw, it's a pleasure to have this private discussion with you Pres...

 

[Prestwick]

Indeed!

We seem to be the only people bothered by the whole crisis anyway

 

[Steve-o]

The Banks here in South Africa are pretty much regulated in terms of credit and loans. We had an internal crisis like this a couple of years ago, and then a bill was passed in parliament dubbed the 'new credit act' and now banks are held liable for giving out loans if the person is not capable of pay it back, or something like that. Even cellphone companies get grilled if they let their clients run up high bills.

I agree with both of you that a bail out is bullshit. It's quite frankly unfair. Because like you both pointed out they got caught 'pants down' with their unquenciable (sp?) greed for money.
I'm seriously doubting some policies in our capitalist world if melt down's and panics happen so often, it seems to me like everything is balancing on a wire nowdays.

 

[Fa'atau82]

Capitalism is the same as anything else, if you give people enough power and money is involved.. the next logic step is corruption. At any stage where you keep adding and adding, it must lose it's objective at some stage is becomes something so big that is has no direction anymore. When you lose that momentum.. that is now a thundering juggernaut, it is hard to stop. This kind of financial 'gigantism' will end after a long and sustained growth but when it ends, it is the imminent demise of the vehicle that makes it possible, i.e taxpayers.

I don't understand too much what goes on in the city, but of course money is there to be made and by any means possible if the amount is workable. There is no moral issue. Unfortunately, if you are not in the the elite 10% that services the other 90% then you will always struggle, because it is out of your hands.

'Never put your eggs in one basket'. Never has this saying been truer. Your money is safer under your mattress than in a bank at the moment.

An example of the system is very apparent with my job. I am a Dental Technician, and i make nhs to private dental appliances for dentists. We have a huge shortage of dentists. Not a shortage of them literally, just a shortage of ones that will work for the NHS and earn less money.

Basically, when a dentist leaves uni they will work in the NHS for as long as their greed allows and then scoot off to do exclusive private only work. So we lose a dentist as they will then price themselves out of the market of the average joe. Of course, now this has happened so much with dentists moving sectors, that we have no choice but to go private to get a fair service as the replacements are really poor and are taken from countries who have poor-mediocre dental training. And trust me, if you see what total BS these dentists dress up their private work as, you'd be disgusted.

Not content with earning a generous set fee for each treatment/appliance fitted, they then also try to rip-off technicians with the payment and plead poverty and pay invoices late. That doesn't wash when they make up to £300 a day typically without much effort, without any other private work and they have their money usually before the treatment has started.

Consider that the dentist will generally charge x10 mark-up on private of what it costs them to buy from me. I charge a dentist £15.00 for a bleaching tray and make a small profit. There is no 'private' standard, it is either faulty or not faulty. This will not stop the dentist charging £1000 for each bleaching tray, which has no 'fitting' required. It's just insanely greedy to even contemplate that amount of money.

A dentist is not content with making with NHS work, and i honestly am not over exaggerating.. they will earn as a '1st year associate' up to £1m in a year, but they still want more and are even greedy enough to start price wars with dental labs to make even more money. Consider that an 'associate' normally pays half his earnings to the dentist he is working for for chair space.

Now, if you think we are short of dentists, think of how short we are of technicians. We are talking thousands of us, not even into hundreds of thousands.. for the entire population of the UK. No-one is going into this trade, because 3 years of study mounts to nothing, but a career of endless redundancies, like i have suffered and financial loss.

It will get to the point where now, endless numbers of even long established laboratories are closing for good because of the late payments and hijacking of our trade by dentists who cream off the profit exclusively and no regard for the future of the trade.

So there is no difference to what is going on at the moment, and this is with a REAL moral-professional trade. Dentists just raise their prices and will survive. No big.

However, i will not.. when i lose the bread and butter nhs work that keeps 70% my business floating above water. I myself, don't even have a dentist.

 

[redunderthebed]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Prestwick @ Sep 30 2008, 09:39 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div>

The UK has staked its future on an extremely unstable housing market and a financial services sector entombed in a sodding bubble in the square mile (Central London), oblivious to the fact that the world is coming down around their ears. As long as the champagne keeps flowing and the cocaine and heroin keeps a'comin' from Turkey they don't give two craps what happens to the average bloke on the street and I bet its exactly the same situation in New York, Wellington, Sydney and Pretoria.

The whole system is rotten, its crooked, its made me vow never to work in the City of London ever again and I for one will toast to its demise and see all of those pretentious and ignorant money men get the sack.

Who here is with me?[/b]

Damn straight Mr.Prestwick.

Ill copy and paste my view on it from another forum.

Lots and lots and lots of people have already suffered from the downturn,until it started hitting wall street in a way which means the bonuses etc will go did they do anything.In fact wall street types where jumping on bushy when he even suggested he would do *anything* for those people who have being victim of these dodgy loans and predatory lending etc saying that he was interfering in the free-market and it was self-correcting yada yada.

For years and years the same people who want this bailout to happen have being fighting any *kind* regulation of the market saying it goes against free market principles etc.Its call free market fundamentalism that has pervaded wall street and has being pushed by people like Hank Poulson (who is the former head of Goldman Sachs and invasion of washington of wall street types does not stop there in fact Goldman Sachs encourages it primarily to protect its own interests)because they know that they wouldn't be able to make money on anything willy nilly if there was a stringent regulation of the markets to make sure that investors etc are protected and the market from itself.

Now there own greed has destroyed them they are crawling back to the thing they have spent the last 20-30 years fighting to keep out of there schemes the government the irony is amazing.

I could see this happening from a long way away greed corrupts all and if we bail them out it will happen again you watch.They dont care about working families or any other properganda they care about there own arse which is on a platter atm.

This bailout could still fail regardless which means they have spent a whole lot of money for nothing.It is mere properganda that this is a silver bullet it is not and there is no guarantee that they will be able to sell the assets they buy.We might still suffer whilst those companies that got the money will in the end laughing all the way to bank.

We might put strings and regulation attached to this bailout but once the dust has settled and the new or changed goldman sachs of the world get back on there feet and the chardonnay is flowing they will be back trying to cut the strings and wind back the regulation like the good 'ol days.

They need to be taught a lesson just like any other business that doesnt have friends in high places if you do not run your business or market in a proper way it will eventually f**k up no matter how good the times are.Short term pain for long term gain dont get me wrong people will suffer but those who dont learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

There scheme is simple and is just as bad as the things that got them to this situation.

Socialise the losses privatise the profits

 

[Prestwick]

There was a fascinating program on BBC Radio 4 on this a few months back with a economic historian, an Islamic banker and a few former city traders who were there in the boom years of the 1980s and late 1990s.

The rot in the UK started in the 1970s when the likes of Friedman, the Chicago boys and co started touting this russian roulette style of stockbroking. Before this, the markets in the UK tended to be far more conservative and the wild buying and selling tended to go on in the currency and commodity markets hence why runs on the pound were reported on much more in the 1950s, 60s and 70s than stock market falls.

Anyway, each of them to a man spoke their dislike of the current way that the 'Square Mile' is run with a rock and roll lifestyle that would make Kurt Cobain blush and such high levels of stress and burnout that you have to be incredibly ruthless and vicious to get by usually. Above all, none of the fairness or the conservatism of anything that went on before 1979 is tolerated.

Socialise the losses and privatise the profits illustrates just how scheming, desperate and ruthless the City is these days...

 

[O'Rothlain]

Everything is fine and dandy! No Problems with the economy!

 

[Charles]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (O'Rothlain @ Oct 1 2008, 03:53 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div>

Everything is fine and dandy! No Problems with the economy![/b]

That would be funny if it wasn't so f***ing true...