My understanding of shit going splat.

[digitaldiscipline]

tirani: riddle me this:
etcet: 42
tirani: Paulson and Bush keep screaming that we're on the edge of finanical diseaster
tirani: have they bothered to spell out exactly what that disaster will be if we don't hand them over 700 Big with no strings attached?
etcet: broad hints at systemic financial collapse; if the holders of those shitty securities take a sharp kick to the nads, they have insurance. the companies that insured them are, in a word, completely exposed, under-capitalized to cover those policies, and utterly fucked.
etcet: in short, the complete collapse of several massive insurance entities, the equivalent of the bank runs that led to the great depression, albeit at one remove.
etcet: that said, i am not entirely convinced this is entirely a bad or horrible thing, and think that, fundamentally, those who engage in risky behavior, at whatever scale, do need to be responsible for the downside to that risk.
tirani: I'm kind of sitting on the fence of "Would it be so bad for all t hose fuckers who did this bad uber risky shit to get their comupance for it?"
etcet: as long as it doesn't fuck me and mine? let 'em burn.
etcet: the talk about the credit market going in the tank is an empty, bullshit threat.

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http://tbm.thebigmoney.com/features/todays-business-press/2008/09/26/sucker-could-go-down
[link courtesy of eBear (matociquala), whose summation is pitch-perfect: The sheer terror inspired by this situation isn't quite enough to cancel out the Schadenfreude.]

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This kind of dovetails with an email I sent to the executive suite at my company this morning:

With all the apparent gloom and doom coming out of the financial and mainstream news outlets regarding the "financial meltdown," there may be a lot of folks, both employees and members, who are worried about how well [COMPANY] is going to weather the coming storm (if one is even coming), whatever it may be. Even as recently as last night, with the collapse of Washington Mutual, it looks and sounds like there is bad news at every turn.

I'm personally operating under the belief that we are more or less avoiding the unpleasantness, due to our status as a Credit Union, and therefore unaffiliated with much of the brouhaha regarding bailout speculation and the ancillary market risks and subsequent fallout. Given our penchant for sensible and responsible stewardship, I suspect that we're more or less immune from the chaos that's dominating the headlines and airwaves, but others might not be as serene about the situation. Is there any value in making an announcement to employees or members regarding our status in the current environment?

My innate "PEOPLE, CHILL THE FUCK OUT" spidey-sense is tingling.

Comments

[smaugchow.livejournal.com]

The shitty thing is, the people who made the decisions to be risky are most likely at the top of the food chain, the bastards who are millionaries already and can't really be punished outside of firing them. Go ahead, fire a millionaire and see how much he cries while he cashes in his golden parachute.

The other 99.9% of the company are bean counters, call center workers, tech support, loan officers, yadda yadda yadda - not really the bad guys. But these are the people who will lose their jobs and won't have that big fat cushion of cash to fall back on.

Then there is the stock. When a big company goes tits up, it's stock dies a horrible death and takes countless 401k accounts with it. I can't retire (ever, probably) for another 30 years so that doesn't kill me, but somebody expecting to retire this year is fucked.

Just playing devils advocate - I'm pretty much on your side on this issue. It just pisses me off that the guilty parties will never be punished.

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

Oh, they get punished from time to time. Unfortunately, when some greedhead who drove his corporation into the ground but collected a fat "executive retention bonus" gets caught and beaten until he'll need a couple of years of therapy to regain such advanced skills as color vision, the police are all over finding the perp. If the greedhead did the actual beating, though, justice is thin on the ground. That's why I'm leaning toward a real inducement to prevent this shit from happening ever again: the taxpayers bail out the greedheads this time, but they get to choose one out of every ten CEOs and board directors who gets an old tire full of gasoline put around his neck and set afire in the parking lot. Watching them stab each other in the back will be only half of the fun: I figure we run a lottery to choose the people who get to flick lit matches at the decimated.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

The BBC's World Tonight (their "hard news" radio show) has had a few "experts" on from the US explaining why things aren't as bad as everyone thinks they are. I'm choosing to listen to them.

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

My spidey sense is tingling along that way, too. I suspect that you have quite a few people hoping to make a lot of money by scaring us Jukes and Kallikaks half to death.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

My outward serenity is buoyed by a dose of canned goods, keychain survival gear and a small chunk of valuable commodities as insurance against outright insanity. That whole "hope for the best while preparing for the worst" thing.

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

I'm a little more prosaic. Of course, these days, if things do collapse, I figure the Ernest Hemingway/Hunter S. Thompson/Robert Howard/H. Beam Piper route is a lot cheaper.