AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHG!

This is SO good!

I've a feeling we'll need this thread over the next few months, as we would need a thread for any disaster of epic proportions.

I blame Bush

(and my most recent comments in the US election thread would probably fit better in this one)

I was gonna title it

World Economic Meltdown -- Brought To You By Your Good Firends In The United States Of America -- but that's a bit long.

True enough, though.

It's REALLY gonna hit here in a few months once the retailers start projecting loss. You see, this past Christmas appeared nearly normal for U.S. retailers. A little slackish, but not to bad.

That's because yer average U.S. big screen HDTV buyer or iPhone or PSIII buyer (hundreds of other costly items) had only just caught wind that things were going to start getting rough. They'd only just been laid off or had their med insurance cost double. So, in the style of undaunted American Optimism, they thrust their jaws into the cold economic wind and yelled,

"Fuck it! We're having a nice Christmas!"

And they topped off their debt-load and then some on top of that. So now, we're looking at the worst Christmas debt hangover in history. Retailers are turning down their furnaces and laying off the jaitorial staff. There's no cutomers to keep warm... nor to dirty their floors.

None of the stuff they bought (dunno if I'd call it bought, actually... took home) was made in the USA. None of it. So when the 1st and 2nd quarter projections from retailers come out, basically saying,

"We ain't sold shit."

manufacturers all over the planet are going to go,

"EEP!'

and stop making stuff and lay off all the people they had making it.

And a horrible, worldwide disaster it will be. Worse than 9/11. Easily.

It will certainly kill more people than 9/11 and the resulting wars did.

It will certainly cause more wars than 9/11 did.

You're just a little ray of sunshine, Trog.

Mister Happy!

"They all have very good names."

"You mean they're responsible companies?"

"No, no, it has nothing to do with their reputation. They have actually very, very good names, the names they think up for them are very good."

Win!

Thanks Yanks!

...not.

Today BOVESPA (SP stock market) sunk 6.36% and people is figuring out that's only the first wave of the tsunami.

And the Nikkei bites it again!

If Eurpo follows suite again, the DOW loses a grand tomorrow (if they don't halt trading).

Some NYSE minus 1000 music:

Sleater-Kinney--Jumpers

Why is the world going into an economic meltdown that will kill hundreds of thousands?

Do you have an article? I got tired of the old British guys.

The old British guys actually did a really nice job of describing it, but here's the version for the attention-span-challenged.

Here's what the US banking system has been doing, leading to a massive bubble in both housing and the stock market:

1. Give home loans to anybody who wants them without checking their capacity to pay, on property with insanely inflated valuations. Make the introductory interest rates tiny so they can pay them, but then have the interest rates 'reset' to exhorbitant and unaffordable in a couple of years.

2. Take all this extremely risky and bad quality debt and bundle it up. Sell it on to investors as though it was really good quality, low risk debt. They will reap large rewards while thinking they have low risk.

3. Rinse and repeat.

It all works, in a Rube Goldberg sort of fashion, until (as the old British guys said) some fool asks how much the properties are really worth - or until the interest rates reset and millions of people start defaulting on their mortgages and being foreclosed. Then the whole thing falls over. The banks discover it was all high risk debt and is now basically worthless, and start writing off hundreds of billions of dollars worth of investments.

And hello global credit crunch and meltdown - because all the cheap credit that came from this practice (exacerbated by Greenspan keeping US interest rates too low for too long) dries up and borrowing gets much more expensive. And the money for mergers and acquisitions dries up.

At the same time oil spikes to over $100 a barrel (not unrelated to Bush's Big Middle East Adventure) which also slows the economy and spikes inflation.

(sorry, not sure how short this is!)

quote:

Why is the world going into an economic meltdown that will kill hundreds of thousands?

Bravus handled the reason for the meltdown perfectly.

Now... why is that going to kill hundreds of thousands? Poverty. Greatest killer in the modern age. War. We need oil, you have oil. Fucking give it here. War and poverty form a feedback loop. One of the outputs of that feedback loop is disease. Another is environmental ruin.

Costs money to live on a safe, clean, peaceful comfortable planet.

And this planet is out of money.

More thorough answer: watch Children of Men

Who is likely to do well out of this?

Prophets, demagogues and other shit-stirrers, mostly.

quote:

Originally posted by John Maddox Roberts:
Who is likely to do well out of this?

Well? Or better than everyone else?

I dunno. Them that presently have lots will keep more. Them that gots little will have a little less, but they're pre-adapted. The middle-class is fucked.

They always are. They'll have less and not know how to act about it all.

quote:

Originally posted by BlueShift:
Prophets, demagogues and other shit-stirrers, mostly.

They should have degrees for that.

They probably do.

quote:

Originally posted by Trogdor:

quote:

Originally posted by BlueShift:
Prophets, demagogues and other shit-stirrers, mostly.

They should have degrees for that.
They probably do.

Management majors?

Honestly, I suspect it will end up as a bit of a global game of "hot potato," with various interests seeking to minimize their exposure. I've got no clue who will come out on top of that, though. You'd think the nations with a solid manufacturing base, agriculture, and access to natural resources would be well positioned to ride this sort of crisis out, but that hasn't always been the case in the past. A big crunch has the potential to bring other problems which had been simmering quietly to full roiling boil.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BlueShift,