So, umm... the Stock Market
 

Has recently imploded, Wall Street is in the shitter. Lehman brothers (a firm that survived the Great Depression) just filed for bankruptcy this weekend, and Merrill-Lynch was purchased up by Bank of America. The remaining firms are suffering as well, Dow Jones dropped 504 points a few days ago. There's tens of thousands of jobs lost in New York City alone, and a bunch of others across the nation.

So um, the US economic depression everybody was expecting seems to be happening, which is actually kinda scary.

WILL THE EUROPEANS, AUSTRALIANS AND NEW ZEALANDERS PLEASE SHOWER ME WITH APATHETIC RESPONSES

I plan to move to Antarctica anyways, so meh.

Actually anything affecting you affects us ten times more seeing as everyone who's anyone owes the USA billions.

Also this wouldn't be happening on such a huge scale if people were a bit calmer, listened to the reports, learnt their history and actually stopped taking their money out of the bank and putting it behind their sofas.

Fear and distrust in banks and companies will only escalate the problem.

The first Great Depression began with banks foreclosing. I don't even want to think about the one that's right around the corner.

Luckily Australia is somewhat sheltered :D

Alcar...

Fucking Americans, with their fingers in many pies.

Oh well, back to Asia.

I don't understand economics, yay!

I've moved to Europe. The world is over anyways.
Bring on the depression.

NO! Because Europe is crashing just as hard because of this! :p

Luckily the only stocks I have are of good solid world wide banks which hopefully won't crash as fast as these did. When I checked them a few days back I expected to see: Sorry, your money is gone.
But they had barely dropped an inch so I'm happy.

Let's hope history doesn't repeat itself for America though.

Only the western half of the country. You and I are quickly heading towards screwedville. Besides, now with the economy slowing, interest rates will drop and, in response the exchange rate has already dropped; just when I get a job and can afford to purchase stuff from the USA.

Well, I'm concerned about the 2-3 grand I'd been saving up, I admit. To withdraw it and contriubte to the headless chicken effect, or leave it in and hope that people see sense?

Mandatory TV broadcasts about the original depression and what NOT to do now should be aired round the world. Seriously.

Alcar is always heading there.

Ha, ha.

I'm in Thailand, the economy fluctuates so much that it could be 20 baht to the dollar one day, and 40 baht the next day.

This nothing new, so Thailand still doesn't know what to do if it changes this much (people hording their rice as soon as the crop isn't as good as last years' [no joke]), but they're use to the fluctuation.

Well, you should wait until you think things are as bad as they will get, then invest it all in a bank. Then, over the next few years as things recover, you'll make a mint.

Disclaimer: Nathan {surname redacted} knows bugger all about economics and his opinions should not be taken as a legally binding guarantee of success.

I don't know about the stock market, but diary products are so fucking expensive over here now. Like $10 for a block of cheese. A big block was half of that not too long ago.

Why are you writing on cheese?

It's easier than stone. Our people don't use paper- it is considered tapu.

Time to move to Perth!

That took me a while to get.

Alcar...

I still don't get it...

Me neither...

He mispelled 'diary' as 'dairy' and decided to leave it in so Nate could make a joke.

P.S. Being 16 and being almost excempt from economy is awesome.

Meanwhile, good ol' Bullet Magnet is making a killing in short-selling!



Seriously, this is all the fault of greedy bastards (ie, just about everyone in developed and most developing nations) who survive on borrowed money. For the last several decades we've all been spending money that doesn't exist, and now its all catching up with us.

Incidentally, economies are abstract, whimsical entities that do not really exist outside of the minds who understand it (ie nobody) and those it affects. And our entire civilisation is built on this shit. Is it any wonder?

Really, such obsession with the movements of small green pieces of paper!

I don't get why we can't just push like a "redo" button everytime this happens.

They are. They are printing 800 billion dollars extra to patch this entire thing up. Presses are working overtime to ensure the Dollar is going to be worth less then my morning urine in 2009.

No more than we could to a dying man. Only the dying man is invisible and everywhere.

Ooh, what a recyclable metaphor.


People do not forget what they're owed, nor do bankrupt businesses magic their finances back.

Money may be imaginary, but everyone keeps on imagining it, which makes the effects they expect it to have become real. You exchange imaginary entities and expect to receive real goods in return. Fortunately, the person who is gaining your imaginary entities also expects the same result, and you both act it out as if in some peculiar role-playing club. The result: you gain real products and everyone imagines you have less of this particular entity, which is why you can't just pretend to have more.


Then some people realised that money is imaginary, and that if you could get everyone to pretend they have more money than they usually imagine they have in a dangerous example of doublethink, they could exchange it for more goods than they could otherwise accumulate. So everyone starts to lend imaginary money to people while "knowing" that everyone imagines the money hasn't really gone anywhere at all. This can then be repeated, so imaginary money is imagined to be multiple places at once.

And periodically, enough people realise this, seeing through this particular veil of the charade and notice that things are more fucked up than usual. This situation is solved by fucking real things up as well, so at least reality mimics our fantasies to some degree before the economy becomes so far removed from reality (and it was never really near it to start with) that we start living in the fairyland of milk and honey while the supermarkets run dry and the fields go fallow.

All in all: we trade security in the future for gratification now. And here we are in the future, where's our security? Oh yeah, we traded it for gratification. Which, it seems, doesn't last very long.




:D How abstract am I, eh?

To fallow up, money is just something me move around to get actual things.

Money is just little slips of paper or hunks of metal, that have very little worth in and of them selves, but we give them more value than just the worth of the material. that worth doesn't truly exist in any physical form, but only in our mind (as Bullet Magnet said). With this worth not truly existing, the thing that we call money or currency, is just passes between hands (or minds) endlessly.

Person A gives $X to person B for material M. Person B than uses $X to get material M, while Person A sells material M again for $X.

or

Person C sells material B for $Y, to person D; who sells material B for $Y to person E; who sells material B for $Y, to person C.

The problem is that people than expect to be able to sell there products for more than what the paid for, but that money just doesn't exist, so somebody ends up losing money, and than somebody else, in tell only one person has any money, at which point it will become worthless.

Then the problem with making more money is that the more money you make, the more accessible it is, at as such it losses its value in ratio to how much is made.

The stock market tries to market success and failure as money, which both only have worth if we give them worth, sense they're both concepts rather than real materials. But this imaginary money is directly linked to the success of a company which is in turn linked to how many materials they can get and sell; so as we use up materials there becomes less to sell, and it becomes harder to succeed. Thus, as they sell products, the chance of making money goes down, in both the stock market and in material goods.

In short, we can't all make money. We can try to circulate it so that no one loses any, but that would take every one managing their materials, goods, and services well; which is nearly impossible.

More likely than not, every one will end up losing money, (except Bill Gates).

Muthafucka I sold you smack and I get it back 2nd hand in the form of crack for the price I sold it to you for? Damn

Oh, and I forgot about interest. Once money exists primarily as information in an electronic form, as opposed to physically represented, it can be more easily manipulated. Hence, charging interest on loans starts generating money that doesn't "exist", that the bank can spend or loan to other people while the borrowers scramble to make up the hypothetical money with real money, if they an even do that. The chances are that they'll make it up with money that's been put around the loop several times already.


It's like taking a single coin into a time machine and giving it to yourself in the past, who does it again with both. You can end up with a fortune (and an army of clones), but really only one coin. And eventually its all going to disappear inside the time machine with your duplicates.

This is going to bite us all in the butt at some point, be it in 5, 10, 20 or 50 years. America is going to make itself into a third world country at this rate :S.

Double post but who cares. The entire world economics are imploding 0_o.

The US government has effectively terminated the rescue plan they were gona use to fix the situation and Wall Street crashed so fucking hard after that, that we felt it all the way over here in the Netherlands! We had one of the largest banks around almost go bankrupt if it wasn't for the joint effort of The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg. They now bought 49% of the place for a grand total of 11,5 BILLION dollars!

Seriously who's great idea was it to give people money they can't pay back? If that dude is still alive someone pay him a visit! :fuzmad: