The coming financial crisis

[Diomedes]

You don't care about the gas station owner having to raise their prices to make a profit. But when it's a food co-op that you patronize...then it's cry me a river? ha.

If you had bothered to read what I posted, you'd see that I cited the gas stations as an example of the same problem which the sign at the co-op made me think about, and if you had read, you'd also see that I'm not crying a river for the co-op either.  I'm talking about a rigged system, and pointing out that using cash is pretty much the only way around it.

You're acting like a fleshpop, as usual.

[PoopyfaceMcGee]

The point is that giving it up the kazoo to the oil companies or the banks/creditors is only going to hurt the everyman if done under our current attitudes and consumption habits.  Overuse of fossil fuels and "free" money is ruining people's lives, but the usage pattern doesn't even begin to pause until a severe problem is uncovered.  People are stubbornly making really stupid decisions more and more, and it's costing all of us quality of life.

P.S.  By the way, here comes the bailout!  Once again, we have more money we don't have going to people that don't deserve it.  Hell, I'd rather they announced $300 billion in support for schools or health care in distressed areas.  How about some love for the flood victims in Iowa?  Congressional asses are all pandering with no long-term vision at all.

[PhillyPhreak54]

Our retail portion of the branch has stopped taking Amex because of the cost per transaction.

I am like Wing, I rarely carry cash with me and if I do its only about $20. I use my Continental/Chase debit card for everything so I can rack up air miles that I will likely never be able to use.

I do believe that the CC companies need to be reigned in somewhat though. You'd think they make enough off of the fees that they have for every thing plus interest.

[phattymatty]

use those miles up soon son.  i just booked a flight to europe and another to cancun within the next half a year just to  make sure i get to use them before the airlines decide to just make them go away.

[Seabiscuit36]

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid86195573/bclid212338097/bctid1612702175

Drew Carey on Nafta

[PhillyPhreak54]

use those miles up soon son.  i just booked a flight to europe and another to cancun within the next half a year just to  make sure i get to use them before the airlines decide to just make them go away.

I am going to start spending them. But the restrictions they put on there piss me off.

[PoopyfaceMcGee]

BAC to axe 7,500 people after CFC acquisition

[Seabiscuit36]

BAC to axe 7,500 people after CFC acquisition

Bought their mortgage contracts, no need for their lenders.  Nice to read about it on CNBC before anything here.  YAY.  Im so farging happy i've lost my ass in stock over the past month, now i wonder if i should jump out at a 10dollar loss since im 100% in

[PoopyfaceMcGee]

Buy and hold.  Buy and hold.

[Seabiscuit36]

i figured 35 would be the worst, obviously you can see why i dont deal with stock. 

[ATV]

June 30, 2008
Worse Than Grandma's Depression

     This isn't so funny anymore. Intimations of a July banking collapse rumbled though the Internet this weekend while mainstream news orgs like The New York Times and CNN pulled their puds over swift boats and Amy Winehouse's performance technique. Something is happening, and you don't know what it is, do you Mr. Jones...? to quote the master.

     What's happening is that American society is sliding into a greater depression than the one Grandma lived through. On the technical side, there has been unending controversy as to whether we're gripped by inflation or deflation. It's certainly deceptive. Food and gasoline prices are rising faster than the rivers of Iowa. But the prices of assets, like houses, stocks, jet-skis, GMC Yukons and pre-owned Hummel figurines are cratering as America turns into Yard Sale Nation.

     We're a very different country than we were in 1932. In that earlier crisis of capital, few people had any money but our society still possessed fantastic resources. We had plenty of everything that our land could provide: a treasure trove of mineral ores and the equipment to refine it all, a wealth of oil and gas still in the ground, and all the rigs needed to get at it, manpower galore (and of a highly disciplined, regimented kind), with fine-tuned factories waiting for orders. We had a railroad system that was the envy of the world and millions of family farms (even despite the dust bowl) owned by people who retained age-old skills not yet degraded by agribusiness. We had fully-functional cities with operating waterfronts and ten thousand small towns with local economies, local newspapers, and local culture.

     We had a crisis of capital in the 1930s for reasons that are still debated today. My own guess is a combination of a bad debt workout that sucked "money" into a black hole (since money is loaned into existence, but vanishes if the loans are not systematically paid back) plus a gross saturation of markets, meaning that every American who had wanted to buy a car or an electric toaster had done so and there was no one left to sell to. (The first round of globalism -- 1870 - 1914 -- had shut down after the fiasco of World War One.)

      Our debt problems today are of a magnitude so extreme that astronomers would be hard pressed to calculate them. By any rational measure our society is comprehensively bankrupt. From the federal treasury down to the suburban cul-de-sacs so much loaned money is either not being paid back, or is at risk of never being paid back, that the suckage of presumed wealth has passed through an event horizon out of the known universe into some other realm of space-time, never to be seen again in this realm. This would seem to be the very essence of monetary deflation -- money defaulted out-of-existence.

      This condition is partly disguised by both the loss of credibility of US currency and real-world scarcities of oil and food, but the upshot will be something at least twice as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930s: people with no money in a land with no resources (with manpower that has no discipline), hardly any family farms left, cities that are basket-cases of bottomless need, comatose small towns stripped of their assets and social capital, an aviation industry on the verge of death, and a railroad system that is the laughingstock of the world. Not to mention the mind-boggling liabilities of suburbia and the motoring infrastructure that services it.

     The banks have been doing their death dance for an entire year now, pretending that their problems are those of mere "liquidity" (i.e. cash-on-hand) rather than insolvency (no cash either on hand or in the vault and nothing else to sell to raise cash except worthless "creative" securities that nobody would ever buy). But the destruction of money (resulting from loans not paid back) is now so intense that the game of pretend has reached its terminal point. The question for the moment is exactly who and what will be crushed as these institutions roll over and die.

     Complicating matters is a global oil predicament that is really not hard to understand, but which the organs of news and opinion have obdurately failed to explicate for an anxious public. Call it Peak Oil. There are only a few elements of it you need to know. 1.) that demand has now permanently outstripped supply; 2.) that new discoveries are too meager to offset consumption; 3.) That under under the circumstances, the systems we rely on for daily life are crumbling. I've called this situation The Long Emergency.

     Our chances of mitigating this, and of continuing our current way-of-life is about zero. I've tried to promote the idea that rather than waste remaining resources in the futile attempt to sustain the unsustainable (i.e. come up with "solutions" to keep suburbia running), that we should begin immediately making other arrangements for daily life -- mainly by downscaling and re-scaling everything from farming to commerce to the way we inhabit the landscape -- but my suggestions have proven unpopular even among the "environmental" elites, who are too busy being entranced by new-and-groovy ways to keep all the cars running.

      So where we are at now is the equivalent of standing in the slop by the ocean shore under a gathering hundred-foot-high wave that is about to come crashing down on our heads. Since I sure don't know everything, I can't say how this will all play out in the months ahead, especially with the presidential election coming at the exact moment that voters will be turning on their furnaces for the cold and dark winter beyond. I would venture to say that so far our society as a whole has done a piss-poor job of comprehending the situation. But there is still the possibility, with four months of politicking left, that the nature of our predicament can be articulated in a way that few can fail to understand, the way Mr, Lincoln articulated the terms of the Civil War on the eve of its fateful outbreak.

http://www.kunstler.com/index.html

[Cerevant]

For those who considered fleeing the country...a new law says that if you give up your citizenship, all of your US assets are taxed as capital gains.

Guess you guys are stuck with me.

[rjs246]

That is some farged up shtein.

EDIT: Never mind, that law only takes effect if you actually get rid of your citizenship, not if you just pack up and leave. Who cares?

[Cerevant]

Because if you keep your citizenship, you have to pay fed taxes on any AGI > $82,400.

[rjs246]

So what you're saying is that the only solution is to abolish the IRS? Fine.