[geeks] [rescue] E250 temperatures

[Phil Stracchino]

Dr. Robert Pasken wrote:
> The home loan industry sold the amereican
> consumer a bill of goods and now they want to be bailed out. My comment 
> is too bad so sad, you screwed up and now you have to pay the price.

+1.  The banking industry has been screwing everyone in sight for thirty 
years for the sake of profit.  Now they want to talk away and leave all 
the people they cheated and/or talked into mortgages they couldn't 
afford holding the baby?  Fuck that shit.

Here's an excellent article on the subject:

http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/28/news/economy/disaster_sloan.fortune/index.htm

The money quote, for me:

"In the parallel system a different ethos prevails. If you take big, 
even reckless, bets and win, you have a great year and you get a great 
bonus - or in the case of hedge funds, 20% of the profits. If you lose 
money the following year, you lose your investors' money rather than 
your own - and you don't have to give back last year's bonus. Heads, you 
win; tails, you lose someone else's money."

There's no incentive in the system for them to behave responsibly; and 
so, driven by greed, they haven't.  Gee, guess what - when the system is 
structured to reward people for taking reckless chances with huge 
potential rewards but no consequences if it doesn't work out, guess 
what?  They'll take reckless chances.  Duh!


I've been saying for about 20 years now that the entire financial sector 
is living on borrowed time, because they've been playing a massive shell 
game based on voodoo economics where debt is considered equivalent to 
money, and money that doesn't exist except on paper is considered as 
tangible an asset as physical property.  But one day, someone's going to 
overextend even that, and the whole house of cards is going to collapse, 
and everyone's going to see that the banks palmed the pea years and 
years ago and have been shuffling empty shells back and forth ever 
since.  It's not an exaggeration to say that the financial structure of 
the entire industrialized world could crash.

This is just the first time I've seen a major financial analyst publicly 
admitting the same thing.


-- 
   Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
   alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
          Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                  It's not the years, it's the mileage.