luckily by now I am mostly in cash. I just have to worry about the inflation that the fix will inevitably cause.

Remember the good old days of peace, prosperity, sound economic systems, and budget surpluses? 2000 seems so long ago.

is about 3 years old. it went from a high of about 8,100 to it’s current shiny 6,920.68 for a 14.37% loss on the year (8.44 on the quarter), despite my contributions of nearly 2 grand on the year, that 14.37% loss should actually be higher. wonder what it would be if i didn’t have 26% in guaranteed investments. glad i’m only 26 because i’m pretty sure in a few years it’ll be back to where it was, plus some after buying stocks cheaply right now….i hope. unless i lose my job before then, then i’m at a straight up loss.

i’m depressed now.

from being a spendthrift these last few years. I’m just waiting for it to bottom out.

That may account for, oh, lets say .05% of the losses.

the Stock market has done better under Dems than under Republicans since WW2. An Obama presidency is likely better for the stock Market than a McCain presidency.

George W. Bush will likely be the first president since the War to have the Dow lose ground rather than gain ground under their presidency.

if you believe:

1) This whole economic mess was created exclusively by the subprime mortgage market
2) All Republicans are free of fault in the Freddie/Fannie failures
3) The market is preparing for an Obama presidency by selling off

heavily indebted folks deserve a lot of the blame.

On the other hand, so did the business that lent to them. Whether you are talking about Bill Heard, or Ameriquest, or any of the other companies who were shoveling out the debt. The system was awash in low interest money, and companies felt they could lend at high enough rates to the non creditworthy to make a buck. The guys writing the subprime stuff weren’t doing it because the government was forcing them to at gun point. They were doing it because they thought that if they charged high enough rates, and could borrow the money cheaply enough, they could make a buck.

Personally, I’ve always felt we needed to end deductions for interest paid. I don’t think we should encourage a debtor nation.

I think we’re going to see a lot of reform come out of this both on the personal level and by the government. Most of our grandparents were children of the Depression, and I’d venture to say that most of them were enormous tightwads because of those formative experiences. I don’t think people have to go as far as my grandparents in particular did (they wouldn’t finance anything. They paid cash for their house, even), but they may consider heading in that direction. I grew up on the poor side — broken home and all that — and I’m much more frugal than most people. I have zero credit card debt. I did finance my car but put an enormous down payment on it. I don’t buy a lot of shit I don’t need and while I could have purchased a home over the last few years (lots of people advised me to), I knew that it would be better to rent until prices came back down to Earth. As a result, I’m not too worried about the future as long as my business remains solvent (which is a pretty big question but I think I’ll survive).

On the government’s part I think there needs to be credit card reform. Some of the things they do are totally unreasonable and they are part of why people can’t pay their mortgage payments. When I was in college with no income, I had a ton of credit cards with limits up to $10k each. Something smells fishy, you know?

But when it comes to housing, people don’t know shit about buying a house. Their brokers were pressuring them to buy and were saying there’s no way they could lose money on it. “God’s not making any more of it”, etcetera. While people should be smarter than that, they’re not and were getting bad advice. Some people just have no business buying a home in any shape or form. This is perfectly acceptable in NYC, where a lot of people rent for their whole life. In other places, though (like here), you’re nobody if you don’t own a house. Put all of that together with the loans that were being offered, and it’s no wonder why all this went down the way it did.

At the end of the day, what is underlying the CDSs are bonds secured by mortgages. Unless you expect 90% of the homeowners whose mortgages underlie the securities to default, and expect the homes which underlie the mortgages to be worthless when they are foreclosed upon, you should be able to get more than 10 cents on the dollar.

The intrinsic value of the assets underlying the securities are worth more than 10 cents on the dollar. It is just that no one knows if they are worth 70 cents or 98 cents on the dollar, and thus no one will buy them, driving prices down farther, which makes no one with reserve requirements want to buy them because of the mark-to-market requirements which would mean the entity has to have them on the books at a value well below the intrinsic value.

I’m surprised that a Warren Buffett or a George Soros (or a Microsoft, for that matter) doesn’t pay $10 billion for $20 billion (face value) worth of mortgage securities, and just sit back and collect the payments until either the market returns or the mortgages are ultimately paid off.

You are talking about the credit default swaps. I thought you meant the collaterized debt obligations.

Yeah, the credit default swaps are a mess, and this is a perfect example of why the insurance industry is as closely regulated as it is…

Along with not enough in high school, not nearly enough is being done by most parents to educate their kids on some basic budgeting principles.

As for the schools, the constant emphasis on testing and measurable results is giving us kids who don’t know how to think. No Child Left Untested is yet another stupid idea. And whatever happened to local control of schools? Why all of a sudden is the Federal govt. so heavily involved in schools? And this is from the party that claims that government is too big?

over the counter credit derivatives are some of the most educated geeks in our country. their academic credentials were only matched by their greed.

modern Republicans with facts. The majority of them are from the Sarah Palin school of conservatism.