Clever Title

I had the most amazing idea this morning.

I was going to lay it all out here for you to read but I don't feel like changing the nature of the universe today.

maybe tomorrow

Financial Crisis Viewpoint

Let me preface this post by saying that I am not an economist. My views may (and probably are) way off the mark. They make sense to me, however. Feel free to point out flaws in my logic. Mistakes are how we learn.

Interest. Fake Money.

Everyone owes interest on something. Whether it is your bank paying on your paltry savings account or what you pay on your mortgage, interest is everywhere. But if all the loans were called in immediately, all the interest owed all over the world would be more than the actual total wealth of the planet!!

Think about that for a moment. Everybody and every country owes more than they have. The entity you owe all your money to owes that money and everything else they have to some other company or bank. And so on.

So either there is one person who owns everything, or we have created a false economy based on the IOU.

"But I have a positive net worth!" you exclaim. So do I. But that doesn't matter when banks and some Wall St. firms are in debt up to 30 times their actual assets. That offsets any fiscal responsibility you or I may have. These guys will put up $1 million to borrow $100 million to invest it all for a measly 1% return. Of course, if they get it, they make $101 million, pay back the original $100 million and now they have doubled their money.
Sounds great, right? Well, they don't always make money. Sometimes that $100 million investment returns to them only worth $98 million. Now they're in the hole. Big time.
And how do they pay for that mistake? By borrowing more money, of course!

Wall St. firms have been gambling like this for decades and now they're broke. And they can't pay back the money they have borrowed so all that fake money is actually disappearing instead of being pushed around from ledger to ledger.

Have to go... Bernanke is calling.

crushcrushcrush

Some years ago, there was a celebrity blog (now-defunct) that had a strange fascination with Maggie Gyllenhaal. And I didn't get it. I told myself, "Well, she's not unattractive, but I don't see what the big deal is."
Then I saw 'Stranger than Fiction'.

Now I can't even look at a picture of her without feeling like I have some high-school crush.

The world is a strange place.