Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

"soooooooo....what insights can you provide on our recent calamitous financial situation?....buddy. hey do you remember that time with the animals and the one mean teacher?? oh man! but seriously, you're like the only person i know that might even know"

their whole thing is risk management - theyre v conservative by hedge fund standards and claim that their strategies protect yr $$$ in a down market - im really curious to hear if its working

i could prob just ask someone whos in more regular contact w/them

I'm flying up to Maine to be with family for a few weeks so if the shit hits the fan it was nice knowing yall

wish i was in finance right now - how fascinating!

hahahaha no, no you don't

ah what do u do lamp?

If you were in finance right now you wouldn't be in finance right now.

i would so be in finance i would be the king of finance so there

Steve Coll has a pretty good post summing up one of the major problems with the current regulatory framework and implicitly makes a pretty good case for further gov't intervention in the markets

xpost ice cream until recently i was an associate at a large FI but now i work in PR

japan can't cut its rate, it's already grazing zero. Guess the big fear next up is deflation.

why is this shit always going down in October?

does fi stand for finance something - were u there when shit stared to get crazy - what was it like ???

ice craem congratulations on yr promotion, for you are now... http://www.helstar.com/

ty ty i could not have done it w/o the posters of ilxor.com

lol omg it's all over

does fi stand for finance something - were u there when shit stared to get crazy - what was it like ???

FI = financial institution i worked in lol credit risk mgmt proof enough i suppose that the wrong ppl we're running the black boxes i quit like 1.5 yrs ago now (!!) tho and the place i worked is in pretty good shape but i cant really take credit either way. most of my friends from school work(ed) in finance and it is... not good now. most ppl are jumping to private equity/hedge funds i think

do u understand derivatives

F'(x) = f(x)

what does a math dude do in pr

sudoku?

i work for a lot of finance lawyer guys, asked one of them jokingly about this a few weeks ago, he was pretty much like don't worry about it, our economy's the strongest in the world, etc. etc. but who knows

ah no one know anything fuck it

^^^ perfect for job in finance

seeee

been talking with a very successful veteran broker throughout all this, who was very concerned about bad mortgages 3 or 4 years ago, and who has been completely on point so far, and who says that neither he, nor anyone else he knows has ever seen anything like this, that it is of a totally unprecedented order and magnitude, that there is no telling whatsoever what the bottom will be, except that we're nowhere near it, and that there is absolutely no way to fix or even mitigate it at this point.

</bummers>

Forget the 1930s shitbin; this guy's all about the 1870s shitbin:

In fact, the current economic woes look a lot like what my 96-year-old grandmother still calls "the real Great Depression." She pinched pennies in the 1930s, but she says that times were not nearly so bad as the depression her grandparents went through. That crash came in 1873 and lasted more than four years. It looks much more like our current crisis.

see now theres no way we cant mitigate it - thats saying that it doesnt mater what anyone does - which just seems patently absurd to me

panic's hard to mitigate

were the problem just panic itd be substantially easier to deal with

effectively/materially/substantially mitigate i guess

http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/instrument/1.0/%5EN225/chart;range=1d/image;size=239x110

http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/instrument/1.0/%5EN225/chart%3Brange%3D1d/image%3Bsize%3D239x110

panic's hard to mitigate

Especially with a non-existent president

effectively/materially/substantially mitigate i guess

― negotiable, Thursday, October 9, 2008 10:34 PM (39 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

basically hes saying were fucked and theres no way were not going to not be fucked - i can see that - still fucked is a pretty wide spectrum

yeh the problem is founded panic, which has to be hella hard to mitigate

Most panics are rational. It is what comes before that is irrational.

As for the 1873 thing I read an article a couple weeks ago comparing this crash with the 1836 one - tho I cannot find it now

i have a hard time believing this situation can really resemble an event 80 or a 170 years ago too much

I dunno, all the basics are there: human nature, greed, people in over their heads, shitloads of cash at stake

sure but those qualities are too general to be prescriptive or particularly useful in any way

...black people involved in the rainbow of politics

lol did anyone read the steve coll post i linked? basically i think improved regulation/greater transparency of derivative markets as well as continued gov't intervention is the only way to mitigate right now? part of the problem is surely pyschological rather than structural and finding a way to put a known value on the losses will do more to restore equilibrium than anything else

(xposts) yeah, he doesn't know. but the fact that he's gone totally zen, and that, despite knowing the market and the variables involved as well as almost anyone, he is clueless about how this will/can end, make his non-predictions somewhat alarming.

bubbles and panics have a lot of things in common. I mean, the standard wisdom on the great depression is that it was exacerbated by government inaction. Yet this time they're acting all over the shop to the tune of trillions of dollars and still there's no credit and markets are tanking. I'm not saying it's even likely that we'll be 1873 or 1930 again, but I don't think it's v. hard to believe in resemblances between them. More complicated now, sure.

I have no idea whether this crisis really resembles one past crisis or another, but the argument reminds me a bit too much of the one about whether Iraq is more like WW2 or Vietnam or Korea or the Spanish American War or whatever.

we all gonna die

So like, just to try to find any ray of hope at all, if this money hasn't actually taken effect yet and its failure is only psychological, is there a chance that once the money does take effect it will slow the crisis a bit?

I remain to be convinced that getting the debt markets moving again is a viable solution to a problem of excessive debt

btw i am really enjoying the term and concept shadow banking system

I remain to be convinced that getting the debt markets moving again is a viable solution to a problem of excessive debt

― Kondratieff, Thursday, October 9, 2008 10:55 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

theyre just trying to keep the economy from totally collapsing at this point - nothing so ambitious as eliminating excessive debt