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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Ilaine who wrote (21118)8/12/2007 3:04:59 PM
From: Slagle  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 219578
 
Hi CB,
"big lenders like Countrywide were asleep at the switch"

"At this point we're just looking at a massive wealth transfer from poor to rich."

I doubt anybody at Countrywide was asleep, I think it is intentional, an evil conspiracy, to bring down this country and to harm the middle class. CEO Mozilla is not going to miss any meals and if you think about it all it would take is a mere handful of people like him in critical positions to pull off something like this. He and a few others were the leaders in the aggressive lending practices and the little guys just followed his lead.

If he wrecks his company (and helps wreck the country) he doesn't care, who knows what wider agenda he is serving and how he is being rewarded other than the vast sales of CFC stock he has made.

Think about it CB, in this "information age" there are really no accidents any more. The guys at the top get the whole picture and large moves they make are well coordinated. Think about some of Greenspans very transparent moves, for example, that brought us the stock market bubble and crash.

We have internal enemies, lots of them. You have the domestic left, of course. Lots of them have been taught to hate this country and would welcome a transfer of wealth and power out of the country. You have all sorts of global elites of with all sorts of agendas, most of them contrary to our interests. And there is even an element of this with our big biz "conservatives". These guys have been so frustrated for decades by the left agenda of environmental, consumer, labor, ect. activism, that they have come around to the position that they really don't care either if the country goes down and long ago began feathering various nests abroad for themselves.

Maybe all these groups are not exactly on the same page, but their various purposes line up often enough to produce a common line of attack. OR, maybe it is a more tightly controlled central conspiracy, I am just not sure.

To me, seems that the greatest danger we face is that we get slow-boiled like a frog in a pot and come to accept without a violent reaction whatever circumstances that are being prepared for us. This seems to be what has been going on for the past forty years or so.

OTOH if things went south fast then we might get the needed reaction to produce revolutionary change. I am hopeful.
Slagle




To: Ilaine who wrote (21118)8/12/2007 3:14:48 PM
From: carranza2  Respond to of 219578
 
we ain't seen nothing yet.

Agreed.

The pig will be in the python's middle in the Spring.

everybody, and by "everybody" I mean big lenders like Countrywide, was asleep at the switch

The stories were well-known. They've been known for at least a couple of years. SI is full of them. The Real Estate Bubble Thread is amazing for this.

No verification ARMs, etc. Well known and perfectly predictable resolution. A new generation of idiots who don't remember the S&L crisis.

The RE bubble, like any other bubble, intoxicated many people with visions of easy money, big houses, unending ATM, etc.

Much pain, much sorrow, on the way. And it will ripple throughout the economy and throughout the world.

But there will be lots of opportunities for the sagacious. I am taking a cautious, tentative 2x leveraged position in an ETF which shorts the Russell 2000 as I believe small caps will hurt the most from the credit crunch. I plan to increase this leveraged short position as things go south. I learned it can be done in an IRA, so the tax benefits are even better. There is always the other side of the coin.

How do you figure mass transfer of wealth? I see a lot of bubble value simply disappearing. Many of the structured packages sold by the Wall St. scamsters to overseas investors, hedge funds, etc., will be belly-upping. Can't say that I feel sorry for them. Anyone who buys millions/billions of subprime paper to juice up returns deserves to be decapitated, financially speaking.

Like here in NO, I think the banks are going to be unwilling to foreclose on any kind of massive basis. I see a lot of deals being made, losses being shared by the bank and the borrower. The Federal government will probably intervene somehow if things get truly horrid just as it did in the S&L days, ease the way, kick the bubbling ball down the road so it is someone else's problem.

I see the borrowers who would have never qualified for a loan as having gotten a free ride at the expense of whoever ultimately holds the confetti paper their loans were written on. If they were smart enough to somehow have capitalized, i.e., by selling before bubble burst and not getting into anither funy money deal, good for them. But folks who take teaser rates and ARMs are generally streeetching for the brass ring, and were poor risks to begin with, i.e., not very prudent, so I doubt that many of them figured out how to maintain a permanent advantage from their ticket to the party.



To: Ilaine who wrote (21118)8/12/2007 4:45:35 PM
From: TobagoJack  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 219578
 
it appears that recent reit and commercial real estate transactions with high leverage (many if not most) will also go bad, and if/when so, more badness for banks, insurance co., and funds

insolvency is the issue, and not liquidity

current liquidity-targeting bandaid on punctured veins will prove ineffective

fed helicopters will crash

360 billion usd injection into euro banking system hints at systemic failure, not temporary liquidity incident



To: Ilaine who wrote (21118)8/12/2007 9:26:46 PM
From: Gib Bogle  Respond to of 219578
 
"At this point we're just looking at a massive wealth transfer from poor to rich."

That is, business as usual. I wonder why people are acting surprised.



To: Ilaine who wrote (21118)8/12/2007 10:26:41 PM
From: elmatador  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 219578
 
"I could tell you stories" You are the only one in the trenches that could bring this perspective here, CB!



To: Ilaine who wrote (21118)8/13/2007 6:52:49 AM
From: Maurice Winn  Read Replies (3) | Respond to of 219578
 
...ban off/ Not really CB: <we're just looking at a massive wealth transfer from poor to rich. > What people do is use a euphemism because it's considered rude to identify the real cause. The transfer is not from the poor to the rich. It's from the less intelligent to the more intelligent.

Poor people who are smart will not be having their little bit of wealth transferred to somebody else. They won't have overpaid for a house, leveraged to the hilt with loans, which will end with higher interest payments for a house which declines in value.

The rich who are less intelligent, due to inheriting the wealth from its creator, without inheriting the brains to run it, will find, as usual, a massive wealth transfer from rich to poor. It's not many generations before the transfer takes place.

"The poor", usually is an expression which really means "the unintelligent".

"The poor" who are intelligent and have Virtuous Values will not stay that way for long.

The reason people got the big lumps above their eyebrows is because for hundreds of thousands of years it has been highly advantageous to be more intelligent rather than less. The importance of it has increased in recent centuries until now, when nobody understands more than a tiny part of what's going on and how things work. /ban on...

Mqurice