
Originally Posted by
pacfan

Originally Posted by
Kirkland Laing
And so it came to pass that hours after The Infallible One announced the Kirkland Laing Global Financial System Rescue Plan would be adopted by global leaders within a few days, U.S. Treasury chief Hank Paulson held a press conference and announced that he was implementing the KLGFSRP and details would be announced "in a few days" and European and other world leaders followed over the weekend.
And lo! The Dow has gone up 1000 points and it looks like credit markets are starting to thaw. If they continue to unfreeze it will be no exaggeration to claim that Kirkland Laing, The Infallible One, has single-handedly saved the world from global economic collapse. But you just know people like Bush, Bernanke, Paulson, Gordon Brown and other world leaders will claim the credit. Those arrogant bastards.
Would, by any chance, an acknowledgement and a citation from a poor fisherman mean anything to you?


It means more than any praise from the arrogant Bush or Bernanke.
I've been inundated with emails from the SEC and the British equivalent telling me exactly what I can and can't say in public, public forums etc. Both organisations are expecting a massive public backlash against the financial industry after this crisis (KLGFSRP willing) settles down and bankers will make lawyers and estate agents look popular when people see what we've wrought. But it turns out I now know exactly what I can say re. investments. I can definitely tell you
not to invest in something, so right now I'd say not to invest in any kind of paper or equities, stocks etc. There's going to be an unpleasant recession and they're kryptonite to stock markets. We could easily see Dow 7000 this time next year. Long term if you've taken a haircut on your stocks over the past year hang onto them as in three or four years they'll return to their previous value.
We're not out of the woods yet though. There's lots of things could go wrong. There could easily be another Iceland before the end of the year. The new Iceland could even be England. There's massive banking debt everywhere and Britain is basically a massive bank. A third of the UK economy is financial services and all the dodgy/risky stuff got booted out of the US by Clinton and moved to London (which is why I'm not working in the States anymore.) An example. Banks used to work on a 10:1 debt to assets ration. If you walked into the bank and deposited £1. They'd keep the pound in the safe and lend ten pounds out on the strength of it. That was considered a safe capital reserve. Barclays bank, Britain's biggest, has a 57:1 ratio and owns over three trillion pounds' worth of things called Credit Default Swaps, which are insurance on various kinds of securities, including the very kind of securities that are causing the current crisis. To put that in perspective UK GDP is less than thst. And nobody outside the bank knows how much they owe because there's no oversight or regulation of the global CDS market. And the global CDS market is worth $60 trillion. To put that in perspective the US stock market is worth about $11 trillion.
And a bank like that somewhere going bust and taking a country down with it like Iceland already (hopefully not the US or things will get really bad) is just one of the problems we might see in the next year or so.
And we've also got the possibility of hundreds of hedge funds going bust and triggering CDS carnage on the world, lots of big insurance companies in trouble, the ongoing process of asset selling by banks to deleverage that's forcing all asset prices down (which makes their :1 all the more worthless) and could turninto a cascade, and of course house prices still falling which would make all those bad securities even more worthless.
Governments are going to have to start a lot of spending on public works to stimulate the economy too or a nasty multiyear recession (which we're guaranteed) will turn into a deacade-long slump. There's no point in the KLGFSRP being successful as a slumping real economy will just make the banks go bust all over again and then this cunting crisis would last years on and off. I've had enough already.
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