On a semi-related note.

http://sadguysontradingfloors.tumblr.com/post/53519557/i-cant-add-a-caption-to-this-that-could-possibly

If I had the cash I would start buying shares in games companies like EA, Who cares if they have dropped 40 odd percent in the last month in a year or so chances are they will have risen over the past value giving a profit.

PS: when I first saw the name of the topic I though it was about the building in GC2 then I saw where it was.

Oh yeah, people pulling their 401ks and investments are short sighted. The market will recover, well all just need to calmdown. The bailout was supposed to give people hope but people keep pulling.

No, the bailout is to keep the mortgage market from collapsing.  Individual banks are in trouble, the banking system as a whole would just get to make more money buying up the bad assets for cents on the dollar from the failures.  What wouldn't be good is housing prices returning to reasonable, and credit only being available for people that aren't sucidal loans.  That would end the social engineering projects they have going that have built this bubble to start with.

It's a bubble, there is no worlwide collapse coming.  We got to have a burst instead of a deflation is all.  The wealth that didn't exist has already disappeared for the most part.  If they can just avoid taxing themselves into a depression and killing off the investment opportunities it's causing, the world will be just fine.  Unless the fucktard OPEC members decide they really like $160 oil, in which case the massive slowdown it caused will continue and the Africans and Asians will go back to eating bugs and grass before it ends.

I am so depressed because people like Spartan think the worst is over.  NO, it's NOT.   With the fear of a global recession, people would be more careful about their money.  The credit market is pretty much done and gone.  Less people want to shell out during Xmas = middle class crisis.   And without the strong middle class market, America is just another country. 

Nah, this has been brewing for a long time, before Bush. I wouldn't blame a political party for this.

It is kinda dissapointing that our stock market depends so much on psychology.

Exactly. Bush jr is the tail end. To me it pretty much starts with Nixon.

Some people go as far back as Roosevelt. Why blame a party anyways? It's not as if the Republicans have been in power the whole time.

From what I can tell, all of the factors that have made this possible have been accumulating under both Democratic and Republican leadership. It's not any party that is to blame, it's just that whoever was in power didn't see it coming.

Which is sad, because I've listened to both Democrats and Republicans that have seen this coming for a while. They may have disagreed as to which factors are the most important, who is to blame, and how to fix it, but it does seem that they all agreed we couldn't stay on this course forever. It just seems that nobody could get the attention of Washington.

I'm a lapsed anarchist and a partisan Democrat. I like to blame both parties but want mine to win back power so we can do our usual job of getting a few important things done while we busily decide who is going to shoot who in the foot so we don't have all that responsibility for too long. Plus, I think we're generally readier to acknowledge our warts and call a fellow partisan "fool" if that's what we believe. What seems to have taken down the modern national GOP is a severe case of groupthink (as opposed to our moderate one). They have made the very act of disagreeing with authority just cause to question someone's patriotism. That's not good for hashing out complicated problems.

As far as history and the current crisis goes, the Great Depression and the New Deal are definitly a major node, but we had a long history of panics before that, and both taxing and the monetary system were big fights during our founding (the Articles were *such* a mess). Which is a backwards way of saying I think it better to look at specific laws and policies than to find a president to blame.

One of the things I hope for most and expect least out of an Obama presidency is a national confrontation with our excessive expectations of the office. It's true that to an extent the stock markets are a set of mood rings for the rich. But it's also true that too many of us too often try to use presidents as puffed-up heroes and villains with oversimplified stories that help us avoid the hard work of understanding and addressing policy problems. They're only people in the end. George Washington understood that deeply, despite his great love of being the belle of the ball--he shocked his fellows by choosing "Mister" as his salutation and actually deigning to shake people's hands at those parties he so loved.

p.s. Re Nixon: a number of "true conservatives" probably hate him more than you might think--on some scales, he was one of the most "liberal" presidents of the last 50 years. He experimented with wage and price controls, supported methadone clinics, and went to Beijing. Me, I'm still bitter about those hearings interrupting my Saturday morning cartoons *forever* and Nixon ending up with a pardon. Robbing a kid of cartoons just because you can't hire top-quality burglars and have an unfortunate fetish for recording audio in your office--harrumph.

@Psy - strange but true. What is in someone's heart is not necessarily what they live by. Just knowing is what is important. Moreover in a perfect world I would love a lot less of social and economic control but I'm practical enough see that would not really happen due to vested interest and as long as those making the rules are pretty much from one class and the system is set up in such a way that getting involved seriously requires one to basically sell their soul to special interest.

So the game is very rigged if you will - that is not right. Hence my democratic practices as a citizen. It is the lesser of two evils as the old saying goes...