Yep. I go through this just about everyday on my 20min commute each way, + a few road trips… I.e. - I haven’t really turned on the radio for months. Drivetime is a GREAT time to reflect…there is a whole lot more to consider, but I’ll discuss that with you in person over beers sometimes as its hard to nuance via the internet.in a nutshell - thank the boomers (WWII gen) for going off into existentialism & living by the concept that “Existence precedes essence”… cliffs: we as individuals became self-centered and the only other people we cared about were “The Jones’”…
Yeah, this has been keeping me awake at night for years, literally.
So far there is a lot of good stuff in this thread.
The obvious things have been covered but there are sooooo many variables that it is truely impossible to predict.
Do not take this as conspiracy BS because these are true variables…
Unions
population - massive increase or decrease
Nanotechnology
Cultural change - I have been bringing this up for years (do you need a $400 ipod, etc)
Global currency
One nuke in the wrong hands
Tsunami… just sayin
These are just a few off the top of my head. The list goes on and on.
I think we will get caught off-gaurd (good or bad) because nothing ever goes as planned. lol
I love drive time reflection with a nice cold beer.
What wait who when why where we’re were bear hair.
I num num num at the thought of our economic and social standing in the world.
I almost feel that we as a country will split into two classes, the uneducated poor and the educated wealthy. I guess that could go world wide though no?
As much as it would socially destroy my children if I ever have any, I’d love to get them into some sort of accelerated school program so they can graduate high school by say the age of 15 so they can have their doctorate by the age of 23. I feel the time spent in public school was a waste of my time and that I could have consolidated high school into a solid 1 year program.
Ugh maybe I can start a business of molding your children into elitists, thus becoming elite myself.
why do you assume that not bailing out the banks would have been so disastruous?
your opinions, which i do not disagree with necessarily, are hinging on that fact; that this was the better option, when clearly it has enormous flaws.
The credit markets were absolutely frozen. Commercial and industrial loans, mortgage loans, forget about it. If we didn’t step in fast, the result would absolutely have been disastrous. We saw from GM how quickly companies come up short in a recession when they can’t get credit to sustain day to day operations. You would have had hundreds of GM’s. Then you would have had unemployment well into the double digits. Then you would have had more foreclosures. Then housing prices would decline even more. VERY bad cycle to get into.
Its fun to think of how things will “continue to go” but there will always be a curve ball in the equation that we will never see coming. IMHO, we’ll see a pretty massive one in our lifetime (significant disaster, epidemic, Obama administration lulz, etc). The key is, just as you were saying Fry, it will either need to involve the US or China (or the rest of the world as a whole).
On that note, how cool would that be for the US to fall into one of those “good circumstances.” Oil Shale ftmfw!!!
letting poorly run companies go bankrupt is not a disaster really.
however, what we have to understand is that credit markets, mortgage loans, etc. etc. are not forces of nature… it’s not like we have to sacrifce virgins and hope that it rains (credit).
these are man made edifices and all functions are a matter of human decision.
credit is withheld because SOMEONE decides to withold it, not because it isnt available.
It is total rhetoric when a politician, a CEO, etc refers to the markets like they are beyond the control of man.
The opposite is true. The markets (all markets including forex, gold, stocks, credt, interest etc) are functions of man made decisions and nothing more…
The problem is largely because of the divide between people who do know that and people who don’t know that. The people who do know that were able to ‘speculate’ and create market environments desirable for themselves while everyone who doesnt know ‘that’ stood by and thought god was smiting them.
If there were no divide, if everyone understood that all markets are a function of man made decisions, then there could be solutions instead of bail outs.
However, in this case, nothing was learned and all that was gained was gained by few at the expense of the majority, us.
I guess it comes from my own personal assumption that an economy can never exist in steady-state, and it has momentum. Maybe it’s more (what’s the word, not rugged, shit, umm) resiliant than I think?
The companies getting credit crunched were not, for the most part, poorly run. They ran their forecasting and operating models without accounting for an unprecedented difficulty in obtaining credit. A lot of your statements are correct, from a general perspective. But the devil is in the details. There are probabilities of default by industries, and companies like JP Morgan and Toyota were having difficulty obtaining loans because of the plight of companies like Shittybank and Chrysler. The markets are functions of man made decisions, but decisions made by people reacting to external stimuli. If the Middle East has an earthquake, oil goes up. That’s a man made decision to pay more for oil, but based on external factors.
well, putting all that aside, with respect to the GM’s of the world the credit crunch, recession and all things related was not an accident and was not unknown prior to.
it was the predicitable result of man made decisions and was seen by many men many years in advance. it is not possible for institutions the likes of GM (who has a massive finanicial services arm mind you) to have not expected it.
i could go on about why that is the case, but the net sum is that at the highest levels of ownership it has made good sense to create this divestiture from the auto side for sometime… this way the recession takes the heat and not the many families who through many layers of bureaucracy actually own GM et al.
