HeavansKeeper
Posts: 1254
Joined: 5/14/2007 Status: offline
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One word: Brilliance. It was the biggest racket in the history of Earth. The largest caper ever pulled. For a century the United States, its "private banks", largest companies printed money. For a hundred years, every dollar officially made created 10 bucks in loanable capital. This means our strong banking system was printing money 1000% as quickly as our mints. What did we do with the money? Buy wars. Expand businesses. People like money too much for it to get destroyed. It goes somewhere. I have a stock, and its pricey. Once I sell it, I have liquid assets. It's in my best interest for that stock to plummet the day after I sell. Why? Because now my competitor (who I was golfing with 24 hours prior) has nothing. And I still have his money. The Bulls and Bears are thieves. Take, for instance, the .com boost in the late 90's. Who funded that? Foreign investors. (I don't want to spit out unverified claims, but as I recall it was heavily Asian investment). So basically people were throwing money to anyone with a business plan. Billions of dollars, recklessly being tosses around. Zero product, zero infrastructure, zero sales. Just a good idea. Good ideas (with zero materials, factories, and trucks to move stuff) are free to make. And people bought them. Everyone hoping to make an overnight million "just like yahoo!" All this foreign money invested, and the floor falls out. Effectively every .com goes bust. Where did the money go? Foreign investors paid for those IPOs, 20 bucks a pop, 30 bucks... Not to mention venture capital. It went into yachts, Ferrari's, fancy restaurants, cocaine, and other necessities for 90's dollar jockeys. True, a lot of money got "lost" but most got stolen... Right into American bank accounts. Same thing happened... circa 03 with entertainment companies and French investors - I didn't really follow it. Same thing happened this time. Except there was no foreign interests to fuck. So who'd we fuck? You're not a capitalist until you'll fuck your countrymen for a 1/4 of a %. We fucked the American upper-middle class. A notable size (big enough to fuck, anyhow) of the NYSE was owned by upper-middle class America. Lawyers who bought some stock and tinkered with e-trade, grandma's who took out mortgages on that gaudy Victorian-Gothic and shoved the money into Meryl-Lynch... Everyone had a vested interest in the market because anyone who's anyone had a few grand in the beast. So much so, they started getting smart. Middle class Americans figured out the stock market prints money. Fat cats can't have their pockets tightened because Mrs. Goldsplatz figured out she's getting 3% a quarter on her nest egg. So all these yuppies buy stock. It's very a la mode. We go poker style. We reel em in slow, growing the pot. "Oooo! Google's at 400! Mmmmm! Apple's at 190! Better get in while it's hot!" Then the piggy was ripe for plucking. Like with the Asian investors in 01, how do we drop the floor on the new fish? Easy. You make a crisis. A sub prime mortgage crisis. (A bunch of banks lend out money at borderline usury rates to people with bad credit (i.e. likely to default, lose the house, and get fucked by the bank)). 30,000 houses default on their $100,000 mortgage. It's a serious issue. A serious 3 billion dollar issue. (30K x 100K = 3B). "The Fundamentals of the economy are strong!" One. Day. Later. Half a day, seeing as the market was already closed for the day... Half a day later, the United States falls into shambles. "OMG! The bank is going to lose all my money! All the banks are out of money!" Yes, the banks were in a tight spot, no funds coming in, and they were up to the tits in unsellable $100,000 homes. But it was a 3 billion dollar problem. Fear, starting with a big hiccup in bank stocks, yanks the holders out of the market like you can't believe. Pulling out like prom night in the bible belt. Dad's saying "Honey, we can ride it out!" Mom's yelling "Just get the money back before we lose it all!" And the selling starts. Selling only happens when someone buys... Everyone's selling. Who's buying? Curious. Could it be the corporations so happy to sell at 400 and buy it back at 150? Hrmmm... In any case, the market crashes. Fear and 3 billion missing dollars. Every yuppie making a livable wage by grinding out on the stock market just lost 30-50%. 99% if they were big on banking stocks. "Wage earning" homes, homes whose income comes from hourly rates, were not harmed that day. Meanwhile "Investment return homes" homes whose income is gathered by small % returns on investments... They got the strap-on. One. Day. Later. "We need 7.2 TRILLION GODAMNED FUCKING DOLLARS" That's 7,200 billions to fix a 3 billion dollar sub prime mortgage scandal. No biggee, Barack's good for it. Or should we say college yuppies with their BARACK ATTACK bumper stickers and Che Guevara T-shirts (stolen joke, by the way). HOPE. No sir, not hope. Hope and tears don't pay bills. 7.2 trillion tax dollars my generation will be forking over into our 80's... That pays bills. Where did that money go? Where did it come from? No one fucking knows! All I know is that CEO's bought more planes, boats, and happy endings that week than in the 80's. And the icing on the cake... As stock plummets, somehow that means the company will make less money (even though stocks are based on potential profits, not the other way around). Fine, whatever, GM takes a nose dive (this is before the bankruptcy goes through). "Bailout" becomes a phrase blonde bimbos at the gym start using. How much was GM's Bailout? At least 50 billion, right? Maybe 100? (That's more than THIRTY TIMES the cost of the sub prime mortgage issue). So the countries in trouble. "What do we do, Mr. President? By the way sir, the grey hair looks very dignified." And here's my favorite part... The part no other country had the cassava melons to do: In a time of economic shit storm... WE PRINT MONEY! For some unknown reason other countries still value the green back. And now we're the only boy on the street with enough walking around money to buy up the world. Don't worry, though. Eight years from now we'll fuck China over on the money we owe them, and we'll be in the green again. **Please note the use of "we" as we are a team. United we stand <3**
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The Loving Owner of HisHeavan ... You've waited your whole life for this moment...
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