What "Side gigs" will you be doing to make ends meet in a "post collapse" world?

[Jotown]

 

Which is another way of saying that many of your financial institutions are just as greedy and incompetent as many of ours.

+10

 

The banking system that we all are victims of is a world banking system not just a United States banking system. The global economy and the world banking system are just as guitly here as Wall Street. People in the know have known since 2005 that this was coming and none of the goverments the world over did anything about it.. We have all been swindled by our leaders and the world banks.

 

The same greed and incompetence that plagues Wall Street is happening on your street too; no matter which country you live in.

 

The world is going through a drastic financial re-structuring that will be good in the long run but painful for a while still (at least through 2012). So hang onto your seats its going to be a rocky ride. Blaming the US may be easy, but it won't be completely accurate.

 

Good luck to all of you mates.

[UstadKhanAli]

 

I love that band. Ron and Russell Mael have maintained a flourishing creative edge since the 60s. I still look forward to every new album they put out.

 

 

 

Have they been around that long? I know that they were in the film "Rollercoaster"! Anyway, I met Russell briefly when he came over to my studio to pick up the tapes and transfers on DVD-R. Super nice guy. My drummer really likes their stuff as well.

[Super 8]

Professional hitman....dun dirt cheap.

[Dean Roddey]

 

The world is going through a drastic financial re-structuring that will be good in the long run but painful for a while still (at least through 2012).

 

 

I can't imagine it will be that long. I'd bet it will be all but forgotten (for better or worse) by this time next year, and that the stock market will have come back up to 'normal' levels by then, given that it's not a widespread business issue, but a credit crunch and financial systems problem.

 

Hopefully it'll have some healthy side-effects at least for a while, and credit will be issued much more for those who have a pretty good chance of repaying it. And hopefully Congress will require much higher liquidity levels of these types of institutions and even more so of the large re-insurance type companies and whatnot. So that we all live a little less on credit.

[spokenward]

 

I can't imagine it will be that long. I'd bet it will be all but forgotten (for better or worse) by this time next year, and that the stock market will have come back up to 'normal' levels by then, given that it's not a widespread business issue, but a credit crunch and financial systems problem. Hopefully it'll have some healthy side-effects at least for a while, and credit will be issued much more for those who have a pretty good chance of repaying it. And hopefully Congress will require much higher liquidity levels of these types of institutions and even more so of the large re-insurance type companies and whatnot. So that we all live a little less on credit.

 

 

This points up one of the things that is different from the recent business cycle type recessions. Big box retailers have relied in the past on the promotion of their affiliated credit cards and the easy access to credit.

 

The HSBCs and MBNAs that carried those credit cards loved a slightly dodgy credit app. Those customers were more likely to incur fees and late charges.

 

There are too many variables this time - too many jobs that will be lost.

[UstadKhanAli]

This one feels different, more alarming than economic meltdowns. I know some pundits are saying how much worse the 1987 "Black Monday" thing was, but this one feels really serious because of other global factors. I freely admit that I could be wrong, but this one feels rather alarming. Not so much for me personally, as I'm luckily doing well financially, but for the USA in general. Again, I hope I'm wrong.

[Dean Roddey]

Something like 700+ S&Ls went under in the 87 debacle, right? That's pretty enormous. I'm sure that the one that we're in at any given moment always probably seems different or different, since we're in it now, whereas the ones we went through in the past have gotten fuzzy with distance.

 

And maybe also because probably a lot of us were fairly young at the time and less directly affected by it. I was in my mid-20s. Death and destruction probably meant little to me at that point. And, actually, the company I was with grew substantially in that period now that I think back about it.

[Magpel]

Heh, the thought has crossed my mind. I guess I'll just give what's left of my body, obediently, to the more competent men in the nieghborhood--cut wood, dig ditches, care for children. Then, at night, around the community fires, after the elders have spoken and the sacrifices made, I shall entertain with oral histories and long-form ballads...only problem is that in my art-obsessed college town, everybody wants that gig.

[UstadKhanAli]

 

Something like 700+ S&Ls went under in the 87 debacle, right? That's pretty enormous. I'm sure that the one that we're in at any given moment always probably seems different or different, since we're in it now, whereas the ones we went through in the past have gotten fuzzy with distance.

 

 

Yeah, I was really young for that one, although i had this temp job with Shearson-Lehman on that day, and the chaos and drama going on that day made a huge impact on me.

 

I don't know, and part of it is because we don't even know the impact that this current financial crisis will have. And as I said, I'm financially stable, fortunately, but it just seems like this could be big thing. But again, I don't know for sure.

[rstlz]

paperboy

[Dean Roddey]

This may be unrelated, but something I found interesting was the my local PBS radio station (KQED) seemed to have no problem meeting it's fund raising goals right in the middle of all of this. In the post-bubble pop, they would have to seriously beg and plead and get pretty close to desparation, and it went like that for a while. This one seemed to go through on schedule pretty easily while the whole thing was exploding.

 

Seems kind of out of sync with the reports of enormous consumer paranoia and circling the wagons.

[slight-return]

woof could be a tough analysis - we'd prob have to do a more comprehensive analysis to see how well it correlates and what else may covary

 

a couple of things we might want to look at is

-Is there a change being a major election year

-Is the perceived nature of the condition perhaps stimulating outlets that position themselves as somewhat more "independent"

-Is there a phase difference with charitable contributions as opposed to other discretionary spending (does "the pinch" happen at a different time or do we need to pass a certain threshold for that to happe)

-Is the behavior localized to KQED or is it national

 

that's just from the hip - man, I'd prob hit up KQED or NPR directly to see if they have better data or some ideas in that direction

[dooshbag]

In fact holding down a job will be key through this....when is it not. The things mentioned here really are not that lucrative....and if things go really south....barter will be big.

[Ed A.]

Well I'd love to tour the southland in a traveling minstrel show.

[jamesp]

Last couple of down cycles I've done more door repairs. Most jambs just aren't up to much in the way of kicking.

[MichaelSaulnier]

It's hardly that bad. But the thing that freaks me out is that, there are something like 100 million home owners in this country. So, just as a wild guess maybe there's 300 million home owners world wide or something like that? Probably more, but it's a conservative estimate and makes the math easy. As I understand it, there were something like 3 million homes in the US that were affected by this issue, right? So 1 percent of the homes in that case were at issue. So one percent of one single asset out of all the assets in the world. And that was enough to whack all these banks.

 

The number of foreclosed or even "trouble" loans is only about 6% of all loans. That by itself would not be anywhere near the level to cause all this problem... and it would be possible to bail this out fairly easily. (This may ultimately grow, and yet still reasonable to recover from).

 

The real problem was that through a series of paper only transactions in derivatives and insurance against bad debt that was leveraged as high as 40 to 1... it doesn't take long for the losses to wipe out your equity... and more.

 

Once the derivative trading started, while the "boom" was still on, the 40:1 leverage offered fantastic profits to the companies that traded in them. It was like a gold mine, backed by the "safest of all security"... real estate.

 

Housing prices hadn't had a decline in nearly 30 years... in some cases nearly the entire lives of the youngish traders in these companies. Once the street heard that others were making these returns... they wanted in also... to the extent that the market for these derivatives reached TRILLIONS. Well, guess what... if each trillion of highly leveraged bets lose just 5%, that's 50 BILLION... per trillion. And there's TRILLIONS!

 

Even so, if this all were only about the portfolio's of the derivatives losing a small amount of money, a few hundred billion should be able to put out the fire. But at the same time, once the market no longer could effectively tell what the value of bundles of tens of thousands of mortgages were worth, and therefore the derivatives based on those bundles could not be assessed... those bundles became worth not 5% down, but pennies on the dollar.

 

So... mark to market... 80% down, 40:1 leverage... ALL GO BOOM.

 

Billions in assets were wiped out. Now no bank TRUSTS any other bank.

 

If they lend the other bank money... as they do in the billions each day... there's no guarantee the trading partner is there tomorrow to pay back.

 

No one wants to be left holding the bag, like when Lehman blew up.

 

I mean doesn't that say something about the level of incompetence that these banks would have so many eggs in this one small basket that they couldn't ride out something like that? I can understand make Freddy since it specialized purely in that market I guess, but all these other banks? And just the greed and/incompetence that allowed all these institutions to get themselves into a situation where they had such little liquidity, when they are the institutions that are supposed to know how to manage their money.

 

During the big balloon... when there was NO WAY the market was going to go down... if you didn't jump on this profit bandwagon... you were considered... STUPID. Your investors and board would be on you... why aren't you taking advantage of this huge profit opportunity... like every other "smart" company on the street.

 

So basically the "herd" was pushed into this by the need of greed!

 

It also doesn't hurt that the leaders of the institutions that did these deals, made HUGE multi-million bonuses for their "success" in delivering returns to the stock holders.

 

OTOH though it would also seem that that means that other than this one immediate and specific issue, and the credit crunch it's created (and the panic that always occurs unfortunately), that the actual problem is relatively small in big picture terms. It's just that the people who provide the legitimate credit people need got themselves in trouble, causing an sharp and immediate issue in a specific industry, not in the business world as a whole. And that the issue for other businesses in the immediate term is access to credit, not that their business fundamentals were falling apart.

 

Well, sort of. One other effect of the housing bubble burst was that millions of people lost a lot of equity in their homes. Millions no longer felt "rich" from the constant increasing value of their homes. In my area, San Diego, a typical homeowner saw their personal wealth fall by a hundred thousand or more... so far... with no end in sight.

 

So how does that impact the rest of the economy. People delay buying things they absolutely don't have to have. Cars, vacations, furniture, high end clothing... on and on and on. The US consumer accounts for over 60% of GNP... if they don't keep up with their spending, the bottom falls out of the market.

 

And those consumer don't rely on all cash, of course. So the credit crunch is not only hurting companies that want to borrow, but also limiting the number of consumers that can qualify for a loan.

 

Besides losing their house, foreclosures also cost people their credit. Now they don't qualify for ANYTHING. So no more credit purchases from them.

 

So the economy as a whole slows down. Trickle down style.

 

Not to be just utterly cynical, but how do the rich get a lot richer a lot faster? Bring the market down by a huge notch, wait for it to hit bottom, and buy up stuff like crazy, knowing perfectly well that it's not any sort of fundamental problem with most businesses, but a technical problem and it'll be back up soon enough (for the folk with the liquidity to wait.) Which is another way of saying that many of your financial institutions are just as greedy and incompetent as many of ours.

 

This is a "time tested" strategy for the "rich to get richer"... many times in history this has happened, although some of the "rich" sure didn't plan for it to mess with them... all of the investment banks I'm SURE never thought it would be at their doorstep.

 

But, not to worry. The leading banks will be helped to the end by the Gov't... after all, it's their people who are running the Treasury dept.

 

M

[Dean Roddey]

Oh well, at least when I die of starvation (because killing and eating my neighbor only carried me over for a few days), I'll understand why....

[MichaelSaulnier]

Do you like neighbor with bbq sauce, or are you more of a "rub" kinda guy?

 

M

[Dean Roddey]

If you saw my neighbor, you'd understand that there would probably be considerable rubbing involved. I imagine she probably tastes most excellent.

[Music Calgary]

 

The robots that take over the earth will be fascinated by the analog museum I will have created.

 

Watch your head though:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Williams_(robot_fatality)

[UstadKhanAli]

Yeow. That could be painful.

[St. Mallarmé]

 

or

 

 

or

 

[Music Calgary]

or or

 

I'll take, "What is number 3?" for $500 Alex. Not the smoking though, I just want to wear that guys red hat. I think that would really relax me. Impossible to stay tense in a hat like that...

[St. Mallarmé]

"What is number 3?" for $500 Alex.

 

That's simply the red model of the here common Stetson, basically the same as that one in black...

 

 

... the secret is that we wear on workdays the red hat with black pants and yellow jackets, and on sundays the black hat with yellow pants and the red jacket, or vice versa

[Dean Roddey]

Is it just me having another financial brain cloud or are people just being completely ignorant and dumping stocks now for absolutely no sound reason related to fundamental soundness of the companies, and taking a huge loss in the process? Given that the biggest rule of the stock market is don't sell it when it's down, it just kind of wobbles the mind to see people dumping stocks like crazy when they are way down, from companies that have nothing to do with this current situation and which are sure to come back up once things get sane again (at which time they'll then start buying stuff back at the high prices.)

 

Don't make no sense to me.