Wall Street Has a Gambling Problem

[evildevil.livejournal.com]

Angry doesnt even begin to describe what I feel. The fact that Wall Street is willing to blame the consumers rather than take a hard look at themselves and what went wrong makes me wish we could return to teh old days when we used to arm people with pitchforks and torches to release our anger...

Edit: I dont know if you can watch the video, it is working fine for me, here is the link for the interview: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-november-16-2010/exclusive---bethany-mclean---joe-nocera-extended-interview

(if you are in canada trying to watch the video, here is a link telling you how: http://theintrepid.blogspot.com/2009/10/how-to-watch-daily-show-and-other.html)


I mean how do justify madness like this?

The following flow chart reverse engineers the mortgage on the Ekstrom family residence. It took Dan over one year to take it this far and it clearly demonstrates what happens when there are too many lawyers being manufactured.

Take a look at this chart and then decide how long you think it will take for Barney Frank and Eric Holder to sort everything out.

Comments

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

I like the black hole on the right side. That must be CERN.

[ninboydean.livejournal.com]

Capitalism consistently evolves into advanced financial formulations meant to be distanced from production and based on fictitious-capital - that is capital whose basis is in money and, in effect, confidence.

These industries are doomed to crash, but its not a danger for the capitalist participants insofar as they can foresee and divest at the right time. All that bullshit about derivatives, securitizations and other forms of fictitious capital "helping industry by directing investment" completely ignore this aspect of the financial markets.

It's basically an overextension of value, or a mis-direction of value, from the real production-capital-value and consumer-value relations which exist in the "real" market. This "real" market is comprised of players who cannot readily divest of values - owners of fixed capital and consumers. Further, this mis-direction of value is increasingly beholden to confidence, which makes it incredibly volatile, unlike value which is tied to consumer goods and production capital, whose relation to confidence does not fundamentally dictate its value, but rather dictates marginal changes in a value-model which is largely fixed.

As a side note, this I why I love Jon Stewart. He makes an honest attempt to get to the root of these systems. NBC, CNN and their ilk can only rephrase these issues into childish partisan concerns.

[mijopo.livejournal.com]

FWIW, I'm usually disinclined to spend 15 minutes watching a video and your discussion of the graph seems to make no sense without it. (What is the Ekstrom family residence, what's so important about it? Who is Dan?)

If you want to stimulate some discussion you might summarize some of the key points of the video, possibly with pointers to the time in the video in which they're explicitly discussed or find web pages that also communicate the facts about which you're getting upset.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

This only matters to us because the government, and therefore the taxpayers, are underwriting the whole deal via FreddieMac and FannieMae and a Congress willing to pick up the pieces via TARP, etc. If this was just private people making bad decisions and investing in crazy, complicated financial instruments than it would only make the investors themselves angry. By attempting to insulate everyone from risk we allowed this entire fiasco to happen.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Did you embed the correct video? Actually when you refresh the browser, you get different items. Oh my.

[mijopo.livejournal.com]

For others who were as confused as I was by the big chart that got pasted into the OP, here's a story that gives it some context: http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20101118/cm_huffpost/785315

[reality-hammer.livejournal.com]

Take a look at this chart and then decide how long you think it will take for Barney Frank and Eric Holder to sort everything out.

That made me laugh.