I'd like to see drugs legalized. This will drastically reduce the weight on the prison infrastructure. Of course, if you have stock in some form of law enforcement, this would be a bad thing. They seem to be all the rage these days, kind of like build-your-own-prison companies. Some kinda new fangled franchise opportunity. First there was the avon lady, then McDonalds, now we have do-it-yourself law enforcement. Rent-a-cops were one thing but now we've outsourced building prisons, and it is apparently very lucrative. So if you own stock in one of these companies, it would probably hurt your portfolio. But if you imagine 50% less prisoners, it means less cops (think of all the paperwork), less cops means less cops with guns, so there's less guns, less cop cars. I mean aside from getting rid of the police state, think about the implications and ramifications for an already overstressed system.
I'd also like to see prostitution legalized. Again, ditto with the cops.
You know the real reason cops wouldn't be down with this plan, because it would get rid of all their kickbacks and free blow jobs and informants.
Um, but, ya know how the tune goes, Fuck the police
Doot doot doot, fuck the police, doot doot doot
Anywho...
Oops, sorry OK, where was I?
Right, so reduce the stress on the infrastructure, tax prostitutes and pimps and drug dealers. About 20 percent of commerce in any given city is off the radar, give or take. You also get rid of the mafia to boot, since they feed off of the rotting corpse of illegal America.
In order to solve the credit crisis, we're going to need to get rid of the trade deficit with China. This will allow us to have low mortgage rates without inflation, on the other hand, the problem is that we have a weak dollar, which is helping cause inflation, but the one good thing about it is it allows us to export more easily. It is one of those a leads to be leads to c but then you can't fix b because c leads back to a dealios. Go figure.
So we need to be able to sell something to the Chinese, or a third party that could sell to the Chinese. GM is in danger of going out of business and might get rid of Buick because it ain't the hot ticket. On the other hand, those Chinese really seem to love Buicks. It is like the new cadillac there. It just screams I'm doing well in the world, look at me. Well, I mean, in Chinese, however you say that. I was learning Chinese, learned how to say hello, but then I forgot. Anyway. So we should break up GM into five or six smaller companies with their flagship brands, maybe nix GMC and Hummer, go green with one of them, maybe Olds and start cranking out Buicks. If GM broke itself up, the gov't could give the new Buick tax breaks and incentives and whatnot. But the trade deficit with China is huge, 800 billion is a lot of skylarks man.
Of course the problem is we don't make anything anymore. Them Chinese they're like looking over our goods and all like, hmm, no no, don't like that, no not that, don't you have anything we can use, come on Mr. Big Shot American give us the goods. Who's got the Motts?!? Eh? You know? And we're all like, hmm, I've got some lovely pinks and blues in the backroom in just your size, it'll be just a minute. But really we ain't got shit.
In a perfect world we'd sell Google to Japan lock stock and barrel for a cool trillion, China would pay Japan to shut it down and we'd all use Baidu.com, and we'd pay off half our debt with China, get some subprime loans from Germany and make better money on our money in the market, or at least the track or Vegas baby.
Time is relative. A crash, a bubble burst, or a soft landing are all figures of speech describing an analogy, comparing market events to some known real world phenomena. Like any good analogy they approximate, no shoe fits just right. The oft overlooked item in each scenario is the timeframe. A bubble bursts in nanoseconds, as a crash takes place in seconds. A soft landing is smooth baby, it might not take too much longer than a crash if you focus on just the touching down, but think about the runway, we're talking minutes from the time the wheels come out, right?
Let's say that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae went bankrupt. What are we talking, 5 trillion in mortgages. Now with any bankruptcy, those assets are going to get written down and sold off. The problem is they are listing them as collateral when really they are debt, they are the mortgages that people have promised to pay back over 30 years. Let's forget for a moment about the doctor with 9 degrees and a house in the hamptons and jag who forgot to pay off all those hundreds of thousands of college loans. So let us imagine for a moment that we're writing off the debt, well we're downgrading the debt obligation, but what we're really doing is saying those assets are worth less than was originally estimated, in this case saying the value of the homes was less than was thought.
So you get a good corporate job, they pay your gas, your hotel trips, you get frequent flier miles from the inlaws and the wifey trades stuff around the house for iTune credits and mp3s and mp4s, you save three months salary for the rock, decide on a band or dj and show up at the church with a tux. Ya fuck her in the ass in hawaii just cause you want to at least feel like you took some kind of her virginity, you come back with a t-shirt tan and 500 mgs of photos that will end up on some wedding site and you'll prolly never see them again, except for a few iconic shots that will end up as screensavers or in the living room, and you go back to clocking in, clocking out.
So you fork over 20g's after you and the wifey save for a few years and you figure it is a starter and you opt for the arm and sub and figure you'll flip in a few years so you don't worry about paying down the principal
and you pump equity out the mother like bum syphoning gas and live off your credit cards till the plastic runs dry. But now we've got negative equity as the price of new homes (or new to you homes) is worth less than what you payed.
So let's say that we lived in commie russia and somehow the gov't could just decide we no longer have free markets and slash everyone's home price in half. Forget about the micro level and the above mentioned joe just married dude and his wifey with the rock and the hawaii pictures, let's think from the macro level at the overall economy. Suddenly Freddie and Fannie owe half what they used to. But see no, you'd think that but it just ain't so. Suddenly they'd be worth half what they used to be, and in this AlisonWonderland world, they'd have a tougher time getting the credit they need. Bizarro.
But the reality in the long term is this is just what might happen. The so-called soft landing. What if home prices fall with no end in sight over the next five year timeframe to the point where they are worth half of what they are worth right now. You see the timeframe. Their value is relative. If we lived in a centrally controlled economy, and I mean not even China but something out of an imaginary economics textbook fantasy world, you could burst the bubble again, cut home prices in half, then you could refiny all the individual home owner loans and cut their payments in half, which would in turn cut the defaults in half, and Freddie and Fannie wouldn't need excess liquidity (though of course their balance sheet would be even more out of wack with half the equity). It really wouldn't solve the underlying problems of the economy, the shift from an industrial and service economy to an information economy, the bear market, the homeless who can't get jobs because they don't have a stable living situation but can't develop a stable living situation because they don't have a job, the national debt, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Ad infinitum.
Let's say you're a teenager living in the ghetto. And you want to become a drug dealer. Where would you even start? Hard to tell. Let's forget about the morality or immorality of the subject for a moment, let's forget about the legality as well. Now things have changed since the 1970's. We've got the world wide web today. You can't tell me it wouldn't be easier to find a grow house, to find supplies online, or even to use alternative ways of hiding the income. Think about mp3s. You find someone with a portable hard drive full of them, buy some blank cds and jewel cases, you get a table and you go out on the street and sell them. Even if your making even money on that venture, you've hidden the profits and have legit sales with the blank cds and jewel cases with cash receipts. Add in prostitution, and you can see where you start to have the basis for a working economy. There are areas of the ghetto that have not responded to turn around plans since the 1970's, still other areas that haven't responded since the 1930's. On the other hand, the antithesis of the kind of developments I'm talking about often take place with religious organizations moving in, which don't so much clean things up but offer more stable environs which can over time develop, but even they need cash from somewhere.
We are living in two different Americas. But more like three or four different Americas, coexisting like some kind of parallel dimensions. This scenario is foreign to white suburbia, but maybe not as much so to rural po white america, and none of us are living the lifestyles of the rich and famous, well, cept for the rich and famous. There are some that say that America is a third world nation masquerading as the world's only superpower. Think of N'Orleans. What I'd like to see perhaps would be the microloans of indonesia and india used in rural and urban america. We take for granted in suburban america paper routes and girl scout cookies, babysitting mall money and lawnmower cash, but really this has a lot to do with american happiness, with greasing the wheels of commerce at the micro level. We are a nation of consumers and spenders, you see why those stimulus packages worked in a temporary time frame and lifted walmart stocks, they were essentially like microloans. But there in lies half the problem. We need to work with the future Jayz's of the world, inner city kids with plenty of hustle looking for a breakthrough, that is where the entrepreneurial spirit of America is today.
But then there is inflation. We could as easily end up like nazi germany. We'd all blame the bankers and the oil men. We'd hang Angelo Mozilo by his thumbs. It would cost 400 dollars for a big mac. It would be impossible to get a home loan and we'd have thousands homeless. We'd live in a police state like N'Orleans after the floods and riots when the police were holed up in the gun section of home depot. Blackwater would come home to roost, armed guards in humvees roaming empty city streets protecting the assets of their employers from
JPMorganStanleyBearSternsCh
ase to Macys 5th, shooting vagrants and rioters alike. Protecting the rule of law. OK, unlikely. But then whoever thought we could get to a point where we had 10 trillion in national debt, GM stocks were trading below 10, Bear Sterns goes from 180 to 2 a share in a week, oil at 130 to 140 a barrel, Madonna with ARod, Rush getting 400 million and he's never batted over 300 for an entire season, starred in a motion picture show, been on Broadway, or sold out Madison Square Garden. OK OK, I didn't fact check, so for all I know he's gone down on Rodman and ARod in a hot 3 way with girl on girl action, gone on tour with Insynch and kicked his drug habit, but what do I know.
Where was I? Inflation, ah yes, inflation.
The reality is we've got runaway inflation, take out for energy and food for core inflation, but average in deflation in housing. Let's imagine for a moment that we lived in commie russia and the gov't decides to tell everyone that their homes are now worth half what they were yesterday. Why? Well, then suddenly Freddie and Fannie owe half what they owed. But really that is backwards, because remember they are listing the debt as collateral. What they owe on is the one percent of defaults they didn't cover their asses for. The home owner who was flipping five properties, got rid of two, but lost his shirt on two and was living in one. Meaning he had a stable home life and a thirty year fixed, but got caught up in the market and took out a second mortgage to pay off credit cards and then decided to gamble a bit in vegas, got some hookers so he got a swiss bank account with UBS, and then he couldn't walk away from the money in housing in Florida condos, so he bought a few properties, but it was all tied into the double mortgage on the 30 year fixed. So when the whole house of cards crashes on his ass, sure he looks like a responsible businessman and family man, upstanding member of his community all that good stuff, on his tax sheet or out mowing the lawn on Sunday, but really there was a lot more going on. When his subprimes crash eventually it is going to lead back to the thirty year fixed. So while Fanny and Freddie don't do arms and subs, too trendy, please, you can't imagine they aren't going to be affected by the collapse of the mortgage industry. Right sure, IndyMac which is FDIC insured and related to Countrywide and the subprime mess has nothing whatsoever to do with Freddie and Fannie, sure sure sure, of course, sure. And further this whole thing with Freddie and Fannie is being blown out of proportion and their stock will pick up later in the quarter. And there is no recession and John McCain is going to be president for 100 years and Bush belongs on Rushmore and the moon is made of green fucking cheese. Sure.
posted by tiggerporn 
