Category Archives: Finance

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God may not play dice with the universe, but the Masters of the Universe shoot craps with everything. (Photo by WoodleyWonderWorks/Flickr)

This is not about TEOTWAWKI (The End of the World as We Know It), nor about the Crash of the Industrial Age (Wait! The acronym for that’s CIA!) that we expect. But it is about a very hard time we are all about to go through, most likely beginning before next year is out and ending God knows when. Most probably, it will not end, but like the last Great Recession simply deliver us to a new plateau of diminished expectations that will become the New Normal. This imminent event is being forecast by a rising chorus of voices like those who warned us 10 years ago that a prosperity based on subprime mortgages, and financial derivatives thereof, could not stand. These voices — actually some of them the very same people — are telling us that we face not one, but two, train wrecks that will be nearly simultaneous, in that one will bring on the other. Continue reading →

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Most new cars sold in America today are submarines — they live under water.

The Masters of the Universe — those energetic guys and gals who brought the world’s economies gasping to their knees six years ago — are at it again. Having successfully avoided punishment (for the most part) and staved off any meaningful interference by regulators, they have gone back to their favorite modus operandi: predatory subprime lending to finance big-ticket purchases followed by bundling and securitization of the shaky loans. Not houses, this time. Cars. Continue reading →

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This was then (2009), but retail stores are right now closing at a rate not seen since then. Just one of many signs that the recovery is not recovering. (Photo by Ed Yourdon/Flickr)

Would it not be a hoot if we who expect the crash of industrial civilization, while we are staring intently at the usual suspects (peak oil, climate change, food shortages, grid failure, the San Andreas Fault) and waiting for one of them to start the avalanche, get sucker-punched by the Masters of the Universe? Would it not be excruciatingly funny if the very same people who almost burned the world alive in the first decade of this century managed not only to escape repercussions but to incinerate it in the second? The dial is moving from possible to likely as the ethically challenged whiz kids of Wall Street continue to play, unsupervised by adults, with the same matches in the same gasoline-soaked structure. Here’s what they’re doing, compared with what they did. Continue reading →