I live beyond my means but not by that much. Sure I have some credit card debt but who doesn't? (rhetorical) I could easily pay it off within months but unfortunately it's too hard to resist buying fresh jawnz and yummy foodz This financial crisis isn't affecting me much, but I know it is affecting a lot of people around the nation and that sucks. I just hate that it's all I hear about nowadays and it makes me feel bad for how I live my life

WAYWT - $100+ jeans = Anton!

I'm thinking really hard, but we just aren't hurting. I mean I had nothing better to do than stand around at Diesel waiting to buy my 9millionth pair of jeans.

^On your bday no less!

the checkout people loved my superstripes!!!

everyone does

it's not about living beyond their means

the problem is becoming people losing their 401k and will not be able to retire

what this means is people my age will be competing with 75 year olds for minimum wage jobs because that's all that will be available soon.

Just to correct this: What You call black thursday is known as black friday in the old world. When the crash took place in the US, we already had friday in central and western Europe. Sorry, I should have switched notation as most of the users here are US citizens.

I never said, that the 1929 crisis had anything to do with housing market.

1. Fact is that gouvernments in 1929 did nothing to stabilize the level of trust among market participants. They were believing that the market would fix it itsself very quickly. That was obviously wrong and lead to panic among market participants.
One does not know, wether interventions would have made it better. But we can try this time.

2. What we had this time was overinflation of market prices in the housing market. Very similar to the crisis of 1929, the distortion is just coming from the housing market this time. And it is paired with ridiculous financial products, what makes the crisis spread even more.

3. We already saw some panic initiated actions on the US market. Poeple withdrawing money from their banc accounts. I do not remember the name of the bank which is the most prominent example, where clients withdrawed severel billions of dollars within one or two days.

Do You really believe that? I think that is a bit naive. Sorry no personal offence meant, but how old are You and what do You do for a living?
We can already anticipate consequences for the real economy. The US already have their recession, Europe might follow soon, even though not equally bad.

And a last word about kicking poeple out of their houses. One is doing that, but it does not help paying the bills, because of the crash of prices.

And a last last word on cash flow. Do You know how expensive borrowing money is at the moment? In Europe banks charge an additional risk interest of 7%, when lending money to each other. That equals 11% in total, ridiculous...

Maybe we will see a change in politics. The school of Milton Friedman is proved wrong once again. Hopefully the FED will change its politics in the future and never ever let one like Mr. Greenspan get in charge again.

I'm not sure if you got this information off a candy wrapper or what, but it honestly couldn't be further from the truth. The problem is not inflation, its that mortgage companies lent money at a sub-prime rate to lenders who did not qualify for either a) the sub-prime rate or b) a lone all together. Despite this lack of qualifications, the companies lent anyways, and are now feeling the repercussions of the fact that these people CANNOT afford these leans. These repercussions include, but are not limited to, a large amount of capital being held up in houses whose owners cannot make payments on. Inflation is the overestimating of worth, NOT the stupidity of lenders. Sorry.

Whats you're point? People aren't withdrawing money and buying gold to stick under their mattress. They're moving money around from high yield high risk to lower yield lower risk investments. It is the sensible and correct thing to do. As long as the money is still present in the economy, it really doesn't make a difference in the larger picture.

Your entire argument of "look what happened in 1929, we don't want this to happen again" is analogous to saying Ii ate a hamburger and it started to rain, so I won't eat hamburgers any more so it won't rain." Yes there was a crash in 1929 of the stock market. Things have changed however in the 70+ years tho believe it or not. Just because the government didn't dumb billions of dollars into the economy at that time doesn't mean that doing so this time would have made any difference.

Any yes, I do believe all this, as do the econ professors over at Harvard that I talk to at lunch every day. Funny how people who are actually educated in the matter know what they're talking about.

You are just repeating obvious facts. Mortgage companies gave credit to poeple, that did not qualify for any credit. Nobody is denying that.
But not only mortgage companies but credit-card caompanies as well. Several companies granted loans on one and the same house. No need to discuss about that point. If there had been better regulations, or any at all, (like in most european countries), this would not have happend.

Problem is, the houses of lenders not able to pay their prime, are not worth what mortgage companies/banks/credit-card companies expected them to be. Prices for houses were rising with ridicolous rates in the US (GB and Spain as well). This has come to an end. And now things are worth much less than expected. And those companies calculate with expected values.



Not yet.


But that is not for sure. Do not underestimate psychological effects.



Again that is just nonesense and bares any solid argument.



That is just what i meant. Spending that money now does not necessarily mean that we can fix the system, as well as not spending money will not necessarily lead to a crash/great depression.

By the way I am not primarily about spending money in general, when I talk about the gouvernments doing something. What is important now, in my opinion, is that we find global restrictions and regulations, that help prevent something like that in the future.


My opinion: These guys (alongside Milton Friedman and Co) worked very hard to get the gouvernemts to loosen restrictions and regulations. Why should they change mind suddenly?

And I am totally with You when critizising the plan to just bump billions of billions of dollars into the system. Those guys that did the miscalculation should suffer from the crisis. But not doing anything is at least very risky.


Just a last word: Look at the Dow Jones as an example (other indices show the same development) within the last 6 months it dropped from about 13000 to 8000. That is a minus of about 40%. Think about it.

By the way: Very pleasing discussion!

srsly u guys..

u guys srsly..

oh yeh I remember 1929. I was there, and I had my laptop and kept track of the market.
Let me see.. oh yeh, I ve found that old file on my 1.44 floppy disk (yeh I had those already back then)

Enroll in the 401 Keg Plan ASAP:

401 Keg Plan.com

that chart, shows that things got far worse in the early 30s?