fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice …
October 16, 2008, 5:12 pm
i’m no economist paul krugman, but doesn’t it seem crazy that we all care what the completely insane stock market is doing right now? after a week of ridiculous ups and downs, hasn’t its temperament completely lost relevance at this point? plus, why are we gauging the economy based on what a bunch of wall street frat boys think and do? aren’t they the ones who got us here in the first place?
in related news, i clicked on a new york times link about a high school football player dying. this is not a story i normally would click on, i just needed to not read about what the dow was doing in the past 10 minutes. sign of the times.
Oh yeah, its def Wall Streets fault! Let’s be real here, is it Wall Street’s fault that the majority of Americans spend more than they take in, is it Wall Street’s fault that Americans trusted a business that likes making money off of your money, over their gut instinct? I don’t think so. It would be like me going to Vegas and Atlantic City, loosing my money and blaming the casinos. Don’t get me wrong, Wall Street got greedy, real greedy. But so did the Americans trying to flip houses. They are one of the main reasons why we are in this mess, they couldn’t afford to pay back thier loans. Americans need to accept that they are to blame just as much as the greedy CEOs. Speeding way more than they could afford, having 10+ credit cards, and then another 5 more to pay off those 10 credit cards…
But on a more serious note, yeah, its sad that kid passed away. I heard it on the news this morning, he is actually from NJ and I think its like the 9th kid who died this year that was related to football…
hm. that’s a bunch of BS. a relatively small percentage of people lost their homes and what not, but the way those bad mortgages were sold and repackaged and speculated upon at the top is the reason why everything is so f’d up. let’s say hypothetically that the same number of people had loans they couldn’t really afford, but the securities and financial instruments created by wall street that are now poisoning every financial institutions didn’t exist, all we would be dealing w/ right now is a sour real estate market. but since wall street took the initiative and used these risky mortgages and made them the foundation of billions upon billions of transactions, financial catastrophe was soon to follow.
which doesn’t even touch on the fact that it was wall street who ASKED FOR MORE LOANS, no matter how risky they were. it wasn’t poor/stupid americans who were asking for money. banks were looking for people to loan it to. and banks were looking for people b/c wall street was looking for more loans to repackage into securities that they could speculate on.
so yes. it’s wall street’s fault. maybe the common man created the real estate problem, but the real estate problem is not the reason why we are in a historically ridiculous situation right now.
also, think about what is going on right now. WORLD ECONOMIES ARE IN CHAOS. do you really think that a couple million foreclosed homes, most of which belong to low- to middle-income people, could really cause this? since when could 1-2% of US homeowners cause this much economic destruction? you give the poor and huddled masses way too much credit.
If you honestly think the real estate market has nothing to do with the mess we are in right now, you are dead wrong. I never said it was the single reason, I said it was one of the main reasons. And if you disagree, thats fine, but the fact it is, people need to start accepting their wrong doings and stop pointing fingers, because its everyone’s fault we are in this mess, not just Wall Streets.
oh it’s definitely partially the fault of dumb average people, but if you made a pie chart of blame, i’d say their slice would be one of the smaller ones. the way people were consuming, a recession was basically inevitable. but the problem scaled to the levels we see now b/c of wall street.