Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

0.5% interest rate cut by the Feb ECB and BoE

american workers live a curiously dogged and unliberating life - two weeks for vacation means one week spent with family at christmas and then - if you take no random days off the rest of the year - one week for some kind of other vacation. that's not enough time to recharge, not enough time to rest, not enough time to see anything

kondriateff is going to say that's a huge mistake but - why?

(re: rate cut i mean)

Yeah really how much vacation does Francis Fuckyamama get?

Is it getting cheaper to holiday in Iceland?

Will there be pretty Icelandic girls coming over here and stealing our jobs?

hahahaha http://www.sorryimissedyourparty.com/2008/10/partys-over-wall-street.html

Will there be pretty Icelandic girls coming over here and stealing our jobs?

― Matt DC, Wednesday, 8 October 2008 13:55 (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I just bought iceland, I can send you Briggitte Gundmundsottir of Ólafsfjörður for low low prices.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/10/memo-to-government-housing.php

Yea but Tracer we have weakened productivity!

If we all club together I reckon we can buy Iceland.

KERRY KATONA MEAT RAFFLE! GET IN!

relieved at UK bank move:

http://content9.flixster.com/photo/32/48/92/3248927_tml.jpg

How can you be productive if you hate your job because you can enver get away from it, and spend 4 hours a day surfing the internet??

Visiting my grandfather last night, he informed me that he learned from the radio that this whole economic crisis can be traced back to two laws: the Community Reinvestment Act signed by Carter, and some other law passed under Clinton, whose name he couldn't remember. He said these laws required banks to loan to low-income borrowers regardless of whether or not they could afford it.

I didn't want to get into it, so I just said that it seemed strange that a law passed 30 years ago could have caused the crisis we are in now.

Did he say Boxcar at that point?

Boxcar? No, he just kind of reaffirmed that it was in fact caused by those laws, and we left it at that.

"learned from the radio"

i wonder which reputable program he was listening to

Me too. I imagine it was some conservative leaning program. He's generally pretty conservative, but I don't think he listens to Limbaugh.

that shit is everywhere

not to break godwin's or anything but a party trying to race-politick its way out of an economic collapse is ahem something to be concerned about

ok I love Iceland, but Iceland's main prongs of their economy has been a) lots of desert glacier offroading, and b) "omg this is where BJORK and SIGUR ROS are from! it's like soooo rad". Iceland has been proudly neutral to anything political all this time, with the occasional "lol we be whalin' and getting mad ass drunk" aside. Good luck to whoever wants to help out Iceland.

All the ex-Icelanders that moved to Scandinavia are probably just lolling right now.

I'm fairly sure I just heard on the radio that the British government is considering suing Iceland to cover the costs of paying back Icesave account holders. But I wasn't quite paying attention.

Britain threatens to sue Iceland to protect savers
By JANE WARDELL – 3 hours ago

REYKJAVIK, Iceland (AP) — Britain added to the financial chaos engulfing Iceland by declaring Wednesday it planned to sue over lost deposits held by thousands of Britons with Icelandic bank accounts.

The news from London even overshadowed an emergency loan Wednesday from Sweden to Iceland's biggest bank.

The promise of legal action by the British government to recover deposits belonging to 300,000 British account holders with the Icesave Internet bank came after its parent, Landsbanki, was placed in receivership.

"We are taking legal action against the Icelandic authorities," Prime Minister Gordon Brown told journalists in London. "We are showing by our action that we stand by people who save."

British savers have deposited millions in accounts through collapsed Landsbanki's Internet operation Icesave, which has suspended withdrawals.

Treasury chief Alistair Darling said the British government would also guarantee all customer deposits at Icesave, even if they were above Britain's standard 50,000 pound ($88,000) protection plan because Iceland was refusing to meet its guarantees.

"The Icelandic government, believe it or not, have told me yesterday they have no intention of honoring their obligations here," Darling told the British Broadcasting Corp.

Darling added that savings bank ING Direct UK had agreed to buy more than 3 billion pounds ($5.3 billion) of deposits held by around 180,000 British savers with two other Icelandic-owned banks, Kaupthing Edge and Heritable Bank, which is owned by Landsbanki.

Icelandic Prime Minister Geir H. Haarde, who has complained of a lack of support for the country's financial crisis from other European nations, is due to make a statement on the crisis later Wednesday.

ok I love Iceland, but Iceland's main prongs of their economy has been a) lots of desert glacier offroading, and b) "omg this is where BJORK and SIGUR ROS are from! it's like soooo rad". Iceland has been proudly neutral to anything political all this time, with the occasional "lol we be whalin' and getting mad ass drunk" aside. Good luck to whoever wants to help out Iceland.

― obamaloverholeinyohead (Mackro Mackro), Wednesday, 8 October 2008 17:28 (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Also massive aluminium smelters attracted by cheap electricity and lax environmental standards.

and fish

and buying up UK fashion retail chins, which I think is where the problem lies

A good debunking of the CRA blame-game by Daniel Gross:

Subprime Suspects
http://www.newsweek.com/id/162789

jim cramer was on colbert two days ago and he kept repeating that rumor too, that the government was lending to unsafe buyers

Well, it's true that Fannie & Freddie did purchase too many unsafe loans (they called them Alt-A). But making it sound like that was the whole story, or even the main part of the story, is where this narrative takes leave of historical reality.

yah i mean thats what he was doing - watch the episode on colbert
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/187307/october-06-2008/jim-cramer

ok I love Iceland, but Iceland's main prongs of their economy has been a) lots of desert glacier offroading, and b) "omg this is where BJORK and SIGUR ROS are from! it's like soooo rad". Iceland has been proudly neutral to anything political all this time, with the occasional "lol we be whalin' and getting mad ass drunk" aside. Good luck to whoever wants to help out Iceland.

― obamaloverholeinyohead (Mackro Mackro), Wednesday, 8 October 2008 16:28 (50 minutes ago) Permalink

they're heavily invested in canada's north atlantic fishery, so it could prove a disaster for, say, newfoundland. i think it's mainly landsbanki.

just in the non-glib spirit that iceland is not unconnected to the rest of the world...

Lehman Bros Chairman Dick Fuld gets punched in the face

sorry if this has been posted already

hahaha wow, no apology needed, that should be posted in every thread

“From two very senior sources – one incredibly senior source – that he went to the gym after … Lehman was announced as going under. He was on a treadmill with a heart monitor on. Someone was in the corner, pumping iron and he walked over and he knocked him out cold. And frankly after having watched this, I’d have done the same too.”

McCain's newly unveiled mortgage plan seems interesting. I guess the specifics are only beginning to trickle out, but it seems to be a rather surprising plan for a putative conservative to offer:

McCain's Plan Calls for Government to Buy Mortgages
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aBLgWTu.IKn0&refer=home

He seems to be endorsing something Obama hinted at in a news conference in September, and that Hillary Clinton has also apparently been pushing for. Combined with McCain's suggestion of Warren Buffett (an Obama supporter, and known to be no fan of the Bush tax policies) for Treasury Secretary, I guess it could be read as McCain moving left on economic issues.

Brad DeLong isn't a fan of McCain's new plan

Hmm, that's interesting. I hadn't read that McCain is now suggesting that taxpayers should take the full hit for the bad loans - I thought his plan would at least include a haircut so that lenders would still have to take some of the losses. Seems like not such a good plan after all.

McCain doesn't want to be president.

And he's doing a great job at that goal right now. I seriously think he doesn't want to be president anymore.

"Ward determined Fuld deserved the beating based on his testimony before the committee."

^^^ <3<3<3

Posted without comment: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7660409.stm

US debt clock runs out of digits

The US government's debts have ballooned so badly the National Debt Clock in New York has run out of digits to record the spiralling figure.

The digital counter marks the national debt level, but when that passed the $10 trillion point last month, the sign could not display the full amount.

The board was erected to highlight the $2.7 trillion level of debt in 1989.

The clock's owners say two more zeros will be added, allowing the clock to record a quadrillion dollars of debt.

Douglas Durst, son of the late Seymour Durst - the clock's inventor - hopes to replace the Manhattan clock with its lengthier replacement early next year.

For the time being, the Times Square counter's electronic dollar sign has been replaced with the extra digit required.

For its part, the digital dollar symbol has been supplanted by a cheaper version - perhaps a sign of the times for the American economy.

Some economists believe the $700bn bail-out plan for ailing US financial institutions could send the national debt level to $11 trillion.

The clock's owners say two more zeros will be added, allowing the clock to record a quadrillion dollars of debt.

The last growing market in the US.

So this morning tells me that the UK plan is the gold standard for sorting out the clapped out financial system, will the rest of the world follow?

the gold standard for sorting out BANKS - possibly - except the UK's equity stake in these banks doesn't give them any actual say in how they're run

It gives them a say in as much as do what we say or you don't get the money, and there is always the threat that the preference shares can be converted into normal equity at a punitive rate.

However the more concerning thing is that we now have global negative real interest rates and I am trying to bone up on the implications of this.

i cannot help there. perhaps kondriateff has some ideas.

what's crazy to me is that we're running full-steam into government ownership of both 1) investment finance 2) retail finance and 3) homes (i.e. mortgages) but not because there's any great plan or ideas about what to do with these things

Where will this end? They have been comparing this to the 30s but on the other hand they claim it's not recession (yet) cause we're still growing (har har). So how long will this last? How bad will it be? :-(