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9175. marjoribanks - 9/30/2008 2:07:21 PM Well, there's no doubt that it was a flat out mistake for so many of my best and brightest contemporaries to go do MBA's and become finance jigglers of one kind or another. A number of them cashed out, made their "nut." But so many of them are leveraged up to to their ears, and now stuck fighting for a place in the few seaworthy lifeboats.
Two of my brothers-in-law among them. Luckily they (took my advice and) heavily paid down their mortgages in 2006 when they both reaped the benefit of that year of record bonuses.
But why the fuck are they in finance, is the fundamental question. They should not have been, it was the lure of easy money that duped them.
Relatedly, it is going to be really ugly in Britain in the next few months. A huge part of Britain's sustained economic surge was due to record City profits and paydays, and the finance sector sucked in a preponderance of the smartest, best-qualified graduates in the country for a solid 8-10 years. They all went out and participated in the greatest real estate boom that the UK has ever seen - London real estate prices are bat-shit crazy out of control - and now it is going to be very, very bad indeed. 9176. jexster - 9/30/2008 3:35:29 PM Now Angela Snirkel is BEGGING us to pass a bailout. Let the Euros Fail too or make em pay
A shattering moment in America's fall from power
The global financial crisis will see the US falter in the same way the Soviet Union did when the Berlin Wall came down. The era of American dominance is over 9177. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 9/30/2008 4:02:07 PM This has been a cheery read!
9178. anomie - 9/30/2008 7:13:12 PM I wish the Euro would fall against the dollar a little. Maybe that's the silver lining in a European recession. 9179. jexster - 9/30/2008 11:52:55 PM Nouriel Roubini's RGE Monitor!
I figger the best way to know if you are, as WONKERS would say, being JEWED is to ask an Ayrab
FREE TRIAL!
9180. jexster - 10/1/2008 2:04:15 AM That's a heapin helpin of bengan bartha
Corporate AmeriKa just lost a chunk of wealth the size of India's economy 9182. marjoribanks - 10/1/2008 6:15:39 AM Wizardo,
I was shimmying back-and-forth in my seat to the great, great calypsonian The Mighty Sparrow's entertainingly wonky tribute to Obama, when I saw one of your images embedded in this video.
BTW, calypso has always been an extremely political musical genre. 9183. marjoribanks - 10/1/2008 6:16:58 AM What happened to my post 9182?
9184. wonkers2 - 10/1/2008 7:23:15 AM Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Robert Frost
9185. wonkers2 - 10/1/2008 7:23:37 AM Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Robert Frost
9186. wonkers2 - 10/1/2008 7:25:14 AM 9187. wonkers2 - 10/1/2008 7:26:16 AM Fire and Ice 9188. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 10/7/2008 4:59:29 AM 
9189. jexster - 10/9/2008 6:58:54 PM SEOUL, Oct. 9 -- With its toxic securities and its insistence on open markets, the United States has a lot of nerve and a lot to answer for. That, at least, is what South Korean Finance Minister Kang Man-soo argued as he prepared to leave for a weekend meeting in Washington of finance officials searching for ways to calm the global financial crisis.
Where is the love?
We liberated them with American blood and just like the French, they spit on Old Glory 9190. alistairConnor - 11/8/2008 1:16:14 AM ha. Heard President (of Europe) Sarko on the radio tonight, after the Euro 27 summit preparing for the G20 in Washington next week. He was making pointed remarks about "we know where this world crisis came from, we who are facing the consequences demand to be heard, we want our place at the table, the days of a single world currency are numbered".
Apparently the Europeans have decided that the new world economic order (regulated capitalism) has to be signed and sealed in 100 days, starting next week.
Should give Polson and Obama something to think about. 9191. alistairConnor - 11/8/2008 1:17:03 AM I just voted... at least I think I did... by fax, from my kitchen table in France.
Midnight here... midday on election day in New Zealand.
I'll follow the counting over breakfast.
I've got a strange feeling it's going to be tight as heck!
(but I'm usually wrong about these things)
9192. alistairConnor - 11/8/2008 1:55:58 AM This full-page ad was in NZ's largest circulation daily today
Starting from the top right corner, counting down six and left two, you can see my elder daughter up a tree, overhanging a beach.
9193. marjoribanks - 11/8/2008 8:41:19 AM 8am on the 5th here (late night USA time on the 4th) and I made my way up the beach to the shack where we normally eat breakfast. It’s long holidays for Diwali here, and I have been profitably teaching my two older boys to boogie-board in the waves that lap up on our favourite stretch of sand.
This is a remote spot. There are visitors but there is very little concrete infrastructure. Instead bamboo huts and palm-thatch cottages, and thick jungle all around that reaches to the bay. Rugged, beautiful, other-worldly, it does not feel anything like civilization.
The television is working for a change at the beach shack. Breakfast with CNN, and then that astonishing moment when the election is called for Obama. The shack is empty but for us, and the waiters and cooks are bemused at the high-fives going around the table.(I’ve been discussing politics with the older boy (almost 9) these past few days)
And then that goosebump moment, as we all fall silent, and Barack Obama emerges on stage with his family.
Cynical I am, seen it all I have, burned by politics I do feel – but what an unforgettable, spine-tingling moment of high drama to see that beautiful black family take centre-stage in America.
The emotion was literally too much to bear, and I am not ashamed to say that the tears flowed and came again as Obama made that superb, nuanced speech. I thought of W.E. du Bois and James Baldwin and Richard Wright and Malcolm X and Jim Brown. I thought of my one-time mentor and colleague who helped desegregate the top tiers of American newsrooms whose fierce anger at racism still colours his emails at age 85. I missed Harlem at that moment, and thought of Bayard Rustin and MLK.
Then, so far away from America that it might well be another planet, the staff of the beach shack filed out of the kitchen and stood around me in silence, visceral reminder of another day when the world gathered around their television screens, and a literally palpable global feeling grew that “we are all Americans.”
In my own lifetime, I did not imagine there would be another chance like the post-9/11 one – so full of potential for a better new world with the nations of the world standing together, so pregnant with hope – but here it has happened again. Congratulations America, you've still got it.
9194. alistairConnor - 11/8/2008 12:57:29 PM Yep, it's clearly an epochal moment, beautifully captured, Marj. I just got off the phone with my sister in New Zealand, we were both still elated about Obama, the loss of the election in NZ seems minor in comparison. 9195. alistairConnor - 11/8/2008 1:03:05 PM So : in NZ, after nine years of Helen Clark's Labour government, we get a centre-right/hard right coalition government.
The hoped-for result was for a weakened Labour to hang on, bringing a strengthened Green Party into coalition and government. Not This Time.
My main satisfaction at the results : the 5% threshold has finally done for charismatic, mildly corrupt centrist Winston Peters. The wily beggar has bitten the dust after thirty years. Christ, he turned out to harder to kill than Rasputin. My nightmare scenario was that a Labour/Greens coalition government would have to rely on him for a parliamentary majority... another 15000 votes, and that might have been the case... I prefer honorable defeat.
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