Two more historic US financial institutions became victim to the credit crisis as Wall Street awoke this morning to deep drops. Lehman Bros, unable to find a suitor to help pull it from it's amassed mortgage debt, announced it plans to enter Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Merrill Lynch, with it's share of mortgage problems, agreed to a buyout from Bank of America for $50 Billion. With this purchase, Bank of America is now a true rival to Citibank.

AIG, an insurance conglomerate also suffering from the mortgage crisis, announced it is looking for options to quell it's money bleeding. Their stocks have fallen as much as 45% recently due to rumors of their solvency. As a result, the Dow Jones slid over 200pts.

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Good to know that this is all just because of a few people taking out loans they couldn't afford and not because of years of deeply flawed, deeply lacking governmental oversight on unstable, unmaintainable predatory practices by financial institutions.

Well, the over-borrowing numbskulls certainly didn't help...

But they weren't the cause either...

The blame is shared. Dipshits defaulting on loans can't all be blamed on big business corruption and government looking the other way. Its called "personal responsibility."

well I'll be working till I'm 75 or dead now....

I blame the war. Neither predatory lending practices nor defaulting dipshits would have this effect if the dollar were worth anything in the Global Economy and we weren't trillions of dollars in debt to China.

It may be shared, but the blame isn't equal.

On one hand you have people who may or may not be dipshits who, possibly being dipshits, don't fully grasp all the details of what they're getting into: "Wow, it's really cheap, and it's always going to be that way!"

On the other hand, you have a bunch of people who do know better, like the banks saying to the dipshits: "This is a great idea. I highly reccommend that you do this thing that will create an artificially inflated housing market, and eventually lead to you being in the miserable situation of either defaulting on your loan and losing your house or end up owing more than your house can ever hope to be worth. Sign right here."

You make it sound like the problem was that people were taking out loans for billion dollar mansions and then just deciding that they'd prefer to lose their homes on a whim. Like there weren't people taking on second or third jobs to keep up with the suddenly sky rocketing price of their payments, and still being unable to meet them. "Being homeless sure looks fun!"

I never said or implied that. However, your credit is your responsibility, and you're the one responsible for taking care of it. Just because someone offers you a loan or extends you credit doesn't mean you should accept it or utilize it. When the real idiots out there that don't know any better do stupid-ass things like take every credit card given to them or get a mortgage with a variable interest rate that they can't hope to afford in 5 years when it balloons, who is to blame for that? The credit companies are out to make money...and now they're paying for all these high-risk loans with their own blood. Its tempting to shake your fist at these companies and cheer their demise, but the fact is they are major employers in this country and their death isn't good for anyone, period.

And the war has given us a case of the feel-bads and hasn't helped with the value of the dollar, but this credit crisis would appear to be independent of that. And national debt is nothing new.

I'm saying that there demise is very, very bad. Not just for the US, but for the global market (which both the country that I live in and the country that I claim citizenship with are affected by).


And it was the lack of regulatory oversight on the financial sector which allowed Corporate Greed and Customer Stupidity to team up to cause a major crisis. A large number of financial regulation was put in place in a lot of countries after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and they were put in place specifically to avoid things like that happening again. But overtime (a looong time), people have been screaming "Oh noes! You're restricting free market enterprise! Take away these regulations and the invisible hand of the free market will make everything right!" and slowly the restrictions and regulations have been taken away.

The problem is, that the free market on it's own will lead to things like this. The destruction of major financial institutions and people losing their homes is the free market. However, these things that are bad for everyone. The things those past regulations were attempting to make sure wouldn't happen again are, surprise surprise, happening again. Even though this exact kind of shit happened a couple of decades ago and required a massive tax payer bailout in order to save your economy. And all the free market ideologues (I'm not including you in this statement) that advocated for the loosening of the standards are scapegoating gullible people for the malfeasance of a group of people that DAMN WELL KNEW BETTER BUT DIDN'T CARE BECAUSE THEY COULD MAKE A FORTUNE IN THE SHORT RUN because otherwise it would require them to admit that there ideology was wrong.

And it makes me genuinely angry.

And AIG gets the government monies

After all this tough talk from Paulson about "NO MOAR BAILOUTS!!"

So...is it time to bring up McCain's role in the Savings&Loan scandal, yet? Or does his heroic time in a box in Asia still trump that as a talking point?

How dare you. He is a veteran.

Yep. A veteran who worked to keep the government from regulating finances because it would have been bad for a rich, some might say "elitist", friend of his.

What a maverick.

See this is funny to me considering that Bush started his 1st term with a HUGE cash surplus (i.e. The USA had monies in teh bank), a balanced budget, a thriving small business economy, and no war.

Let's see...what has changed? What has the USA possibly gotten involved in that has not only cost us our national savings account and crippled our economy, but also gotten us signed up for a $100 TRILLION dollar loan from CHINA?

Our current economic crisis is a direct result of the war. If our dollar weren't so devalued in the global marketplace, we may still be in a cash crunch due to both the dipsh!ts borrowing money they can't afford and the banks that lent it to them, but it would not be to this degree.

SERVICE!

For the uber-wealthy.