hey the stock market plunged 500 pts today!

america is DIEING.

ITS SO AWESOME

i'm cool with it. this country had to end eventually.

my company gets 20% of their work from merrill. People here are shitting themselves.

that sssssucks. i can't even imagine what this BAC integration is going to be like.

DEPRESSION!! YAY!

i was telling donut that this mess is being exacerbated by the unwillingness of the firms on the hook to pay the piper. they're all trying to jockey around for position, and ultimately, they're going to take it in the ass, whether they like it or not.

also, a lot of this mess is actually caused by our shitty rating's agencies. (the companies that rate corporate debt) these stupid firms have the cash to keep operating, but if the ratings agencies downgrade the debt rating, it forces the companies to come up with more cash almost overnight. obviously that's not so easy when you're talking about tens of billions of dollars. it's stupid.

And yet watching some news, some people (so called experts) are saying the US economy is turning around. Things are now getting better, MY GOD! I heard from some others though say the next inline mortgages 'Type A' or something like that are the next ones to likely fall. As they figure many people of this type either have lost jobs, or over-stated their incomes when getting a mortgage.

And in Canada which because we did not go all out with unfettered capitalism and still have some regulations especially over banking and mortgage lending the very Conservative Govt. (fucking ahole Harper) which now is able to use said regulations as a buffer to make sure the inevitable spill over from the failing US economy will not be as bad were the ones who originally wanted to throw out the regulations here too. FUCK EVERY GREEDHAND, RIGHT WING UNFETTERED WANTING CAPITALIST! How much misery do they want for all their ignorant and arrogant greed.

alt-a mortgages are already fucked, because a lot of the alt-a stuff involves non-owner occupied property. commercial is the next expected shoe to drop.

without us govt intervention, AIG's last day as a viable entity will be tomorrow.

frankly, AIG needs to go. any company with a trillion dollar balance sheet is too goddamn large by any measure. if they don't raise 70 billion dollars by tomorrow, they're going to have to file for bankruptcy.

we've got some fucked up regulations that are exacerbating this situation, also.

tomorrow will be another shitstorm. a few people are calling it a potential financial armageddon. i think that's a bit of hyperbole, but it ain't pretty.

alt-a.... THANKS! that was what some experts were talking about today.

The problem is from politicians to bureaucrats to radio/t.v. experts etc. they all dance around the truth and deny telling what the people need to know. The deregulation and the drive to unfettered capitalism built on debt really pushed by Reaganites and the subsequent neocons is a failure and we have a long way to go before it's done. Expect the next decade or more to be pretty abysmal for most people. The best advice I'd give others is just to be modest in life, expectations, manage your debt carefully, be modest with how much debt you have, be modest with how you handle and invest your money. Time will be needed to flush this out and it means our lifestyles going backwards for a decade or more and hopefully society will come back to capitalism that is based on sustainable and real growth, not the greed hand shit we have been seeing for years now.

it's not so much lack of info as it is complete ignorance. most of the american politicians aren't qualified to understand the financial industry here - a sad truth. there are only a few people in our gov't that have any wall st experience, so they don't really know what to do. they get on tv and spit sound bites about 'ending greed' and 'fixing america', etc., but there's no cohesive plan. granted things are unraveling quite fast, so i can understand they need time to come up with something.

another problem is that this is an election year, and nobody wants to do anything until the new administration is elected. fortunately that's only a couple of months away.

McCain had Phil Graham on his side and that so-called expert was 100% wrong.

The problem today is reminiscent of the late 1920's, greed wise, with short sightedness but of course it also different in some ways. The end result will be the same a major shrinkage in developed world economies with the USA being by far hit the worst and a decade or so pain and adjustment.