Economic Crisis of 2008/2009

[Anh_Minh]

They can lose their job. Recession and all that. And if they have a huge debt to pay for a house that lost half its value... Well, oops.

[WanderingKnight]

Oh, of course. But the same can happen to the "crickets", and I believe being heavily indebted by stupid stuff can be much worse.

[Anh_Minh]

Of course the same can happen to the crickets. But they had fun before losing everything. The ants didn't, that's why it looks like they missed out.

(I mean, if you're going to be broke and homeless anyway, shouldn't you have fun before and let somebody else foot the bill of your excesses?)

[WanderingKnight]

What I mean is that conservative "ants" might have less probabilities of falling down by the weight of debt. Thus you'd see less of them homeless/unemployed/you name it.

[Anh_Minh]

I'm not sure employment has much to do with it. At best, being conservative gives you more of a safety margin to find another job before becoming homeless.

[Reckoner]

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedi...,7721919.story

Really sad and horrifying right there.

[yezhanquan]

Reported in the local (Singapore) news as well. Well, he WAS high-strung. Still....

[Xellos-_^]

Originally Posted by Reckoner

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedi...,7721919.story

Really sad and horrifying right there.

we are going to see more of those in the next couple of years

[4Tran]

From CNN: http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/07/news...ex.htm?cnn=yes

Federal Reserve to buy loans crucial to business to unfreeze markets.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The Federal Reserve announced a new program to help the battered market for short-term business loans - taking its closest step yet to lending directly to businesses.

The program addresses commercial paper, a form of short-term funding that is crucial to many businesses operations.

Commercial paper is sold by major corporations and most of the nation's leading financial institutions. They use the proceeds to fund day-to-day business operations. It is bought primarily by money market fund managers and other institutional investors.

Before the current credit crisis, there was nearly $2 trillion of commercial paper outstanding and was mostly issued for short terms - never more than nine months - and thus had to be renewed frequently.

For investors, it was considered a very safe investment to purchase and one that could be easily resold to other investors.

In the past month, the amount of money outstanding in commercial paper loans has fallen 11% to a seasonally adjusted $1.6 trillion on Oct. 1 from $1.82 trillion on Sept. 10.

The decline in available funding indicates only part of the market's problems, however. Investors have also become unwilling to buy longer-term paper - beyond a week or two - from even companies and financial institutions with top-flight credit ratings.

This suggests two things. The first is that investors are still in panic mode and are shying away from what would be otherwise very safe investments - there isn't any real confidence that the bailout is going to stabilize very much. The second is that if the U.S. keeps printing money like this, you can ignore all my previous comments about how inflation is unlikely to be a big concern. It's really not a bad idea on the Federal Reserve's part, but I have the nagging feeling that it's a sign of bad things to come.

Originally Posted by TinyRedLeaf

That was not a trick question. Market sentiment may not equal the real economy, but nonetheless, the economy is affected by it. Or, to put another way, the economy is, to a certain extent, a massive con game.

Consumers and manufacturers adjust their spending based partly on the expected health of the economy. Yes, while it's true that every statistic indicated a US recession, as long as consumer sentiment remained strong, the country could still manage to limp along. That did make a real difference, especially for foreign companies exporting to the US.

You're right. Subjectivity isn't the reason why a personal viewpoint of the economy isn't very useful. It isn't useful because it's not statistically significant. Even in a bad economy, there can be certain people who are still doing as well as ever, just as there can be certain communities that can still be booming.

As for the general populace, I think that it's fair to say that American confidence hasn't been doing all that well since the housing bubble burst last year. One of the tell-tale signs is that the spike in energy costs have really dampened down both car sales and the number of drivers on the road. This in turn probably contributed to the budget shortfall in California (and maybe Massachusetts as well). It's quite possible that this hasn't affected other sectors as much, but the overall sentiment has been quite negative. This is all borne out in the actual profits reports, so there isn't much question on that score.

[Realist_Classic]

Well, it looks like we might have our first sovereign casualty as the result of the credit crisis.

Reuters and others is reporting that the IMF has sent a fact-finding mission to Iceland. According to an anonymous official, Japan suggested that the IMF step in, while the UK and US have been on Iceland's case to accept IMF funding. Iceland, of course, wants none of the stigma associated with the IMF option and is turning to other Scandinavian central banks for funding.

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/marke...37621420081007

Seems like the government is desperate to shore up its foreign exchange reserves. It reportedly even turned to Russia for a €4 billion line of credit.

[TigerII]

I suspect we will see many, my more deaths in the next few years, whether by hunger, suicide, or murder.

[Xellos-_^]

Originally Posted by TigerII

I suspect we will see many, my more deaths in the next few years, whether by hunger, suicide, or murder.

if you are talking about the US or Europe. Murder-Suicide will go up both at home and in the work place, but not form hunger. The country is too rich for people to die of hunger unless it is by accident.

[TigerII]

You are assuming the current government would be willing to feed the unemployed...

[Vexx]

Originally Posted by Xellos-_^

... The country is too rich for people to die of hunger unless it is by accident.

Very bad assumption ....

[WanderingKnight]

So the Icelandic Icesave bank has frozen its UK customers' accounts.

I hate to repeat it, but this exact same thing happened to us a couple of years ago (2001), and we were supposed to be an example of what not to do. One just has to wonder why things like this keep happening.

[Green²]

http://www.usatoday.com/money/econom...ate-cuts_N.htm

"Fed chief suggests more rate cuts may be needed to boost economy."

[Realist_Classic]

Originally Posted by WanderingKnight

So the Icelandic Icesave bank has frozen its UK customers' accounts.

I hate to repeat it, but this exact same thing happened to us a couple of years ago (2001), and we were supposed to be an example of what not to do. One just has to wonder why things like this keep happening.

Yeah, it must have been absolutely horrible, and that was just in one country. This could potentially get scarier, on a larger scale, because it involves the deposits of people from other countries. Lots of people were attracted to the high interest rates offered, in this case, some 300,000 UK citizens (more or less equal to the population of Iceland itself).

[Anh_Minh]

Originally Posted by Vexx

Very bad assumption ....

No, he's right. Hunger won't kill the poor. Exposure and disease will.

[Vexx]

Abuse of privilege on a tremendous scale:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/bu.../08insure.html

The thing that strikes most is their absolute insistence that "they wouldn't have done a thing differently" ... well no, they were having too much fun and looting the shareholders.

You know... real captains at least apologize and go down with the ship. These are weasels in the metaphorical sense (apologies to real weasels). The last quote by the former shows us how diseased the executive management has become after he retired.

While the long-time chief executive Maurice R. Greenberg, 83, whose personal fortunes dropped by some $5 billion because of the bailout, did not appear, he did provide a written statement.
In his testimony, Mr. Greenberg said his successors were responsible for the record losses that led to the bailout.
“When I left A.I.G., the company operated in 130 countries and employed approximately 92,000 people,” Mr. Greenberg said in a statement. “Today, the company we built up over almost four decades has been virtually destroyed.”

I wonder if we'll start seeing civil class action suits from shareholders with traction...

[Mystique]

Bush urges joint crisis response

US President George W Bush has called for co-ordinated action by leading industrialised countries to tackle the worldwide credit crunch.
* European Union finance ministers agreed to increase the guarantee for bank savings accounts to at least 50,000 euros ($68,250; £38,900)
* The Netherlands, Spain, and Belgium announced they would protect savers' deposits of up to 100,000 euros (£77,700; $136,776)
* Taiwan said that it would fully protect depositors' savings should a bank fail
* The US Federal Reserve announced plans to buy massive amounts of short-term debt from companies in an effort to unfreeze the money markets
* The Icelandic government took control of the country's second biggest bank
* Australia's central bank lowered interest rates from 7% to 6%

Btw, if anyone has an idiots guide to this all, please pm me it, lol.
I see headlines and see the media spread panic, but it makes no difference to my everyday life, the costs of bread, milk, eggs, meat, rice and so on already rose to extortionate levels earlier in the year; that's when i felt something was seriously wrong, otherwise as much as I'm curious bout the politicians getting their pants in a twist, I'm tempted to let it slide.
(What I have noticed tho in the last two weeks is the bastard yen has grown the strongest against the pound for the first time in 4 years that i've kept tabs on it, was curious if that was related to what was going on...) :\