I think you mean weakly pedantics thread. 
[sub] well it works…[/sub]
But that’s how it works.
ETA: Figure, too, the people who aren’t panicking but are selling short, right to the bottom, and rubbing their hands with glee.
Well there’s your problem, then! Bill Nye did just get his own show again, on that Planet Green network.
Planet Green: responsible for the death of Lehman Brothers. It’s all making sense now.
I feel a little guilty, but I just recently drew my money out of my bank.
Actually, I’ve been in the process of moving from Wells Fargo to Washington Mutual. It’s not a fast process, what with outstanding checks and direct deposits to keep track of, but I’d already moved my savings over to WaMu.
Then everyone here at work started talking about all the trouble WaMu is in:
http://dailybriefing.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/09/10/wamu-whacked-again/ (one of many articles)
So I started reversing the process- I closed my account at WaMu and took the money back to my still-open Wells Fargo account. I wasn’t the only one there doing that- I counted five other people closing their accounts at the same time. Some were fairly irate.
I realize the money’s covered- but at the time, I was looking into buying a house, and I couldn’t take the risk of having that money tied up in any way.
Another part of it is the legion of happy-talkers that rise up every time there is some sort of real world problem and assure us ad nauseum that the ‘fundamentals’ are sound, regardless of whether they are or not. It’s a high noise system.
Yup. The Republicans ripped the speed governor off the locomotive and threw it out the window. Now the train is running off the rails.
But oh no we can’t say that it’s their FAULT. Just natural market forces at work. And we all know that the free market is an ABSOLUTE GOOD, so it’s utterly impossible that it could lead to anything bad happening. If it looks like something bad is happening because of the free market that’s just a short term effect and in the long term it will all be tea and cakes!
I don’t think anyone with two or three brain cells can say its NOT the republicans fault.
Hmm. Rent is due in 2 weeks. I have $100 in my bank account, and bills that total more than that. I can’t find a job anywhere in town, not even a shitty one, and I’ve been trying for a month and a half. So why is it that I should “chill out”?
Because you aren’t unemployed just because AIG is collapsing.
For once, I totally agree with smiling bandit. Bush is certainly responsible for the collapse- deregulation always makes the markets more volatile- but all the people running round screaming that “the sky is falling” are making it fall.
Runs on banks? Are you fucking serious?
I think I can safely hide among the other spelling nitpickers this time.
It’s stock market, not dtock market. Although “dtock” is a good word for the sound that the market makes when it takes a nosedive and hits bottom.
The latest one in the UK has been waiting for years to happen, you can’t just keep borrowing to buy assets and hope the underwriters are the only ones likely to catch a cold.
We have The Halifax - which was basicly a very large building society - which wanted to free itself up from certain rules such as sources of loan funding and security of assets and instead changed itself into a bank.
This meant the original owners, the building society members got a nice payout - so everyyone is happy then.
That building society called Halifax, took over Leeds Permanent building society - cue the payouts again, with mega mi££ions handed out to those who had recommended the deal in the first place.
As a building society it was incredibly secure, borrowing against its own assets instead of using derivatives, underwriters and all those types of financial instruments.
Then Royal Bank of Scotland moved in, and in came poor lending practices, exposures to bad risk.
RBS had to borrow very heavily to take over Halifax.
They basicly went from a well funded, very safe institution, to near collapse in just 11 years.
You also have to remeber that both of these institutions prior to merger were long established, based upon a pretty cautious outlook.
Millions of individual citizens have lost money from the share value they were given as payment under de-mutualisation.
Llloyds TSB in the meantime has been rather more cautious over the last 11 years.
Guess who is now taking over whom ?
casdave
i think you mean The Bank of Scotland not the Royal Bank of Scotland 
Ah, well, that fixes everything. I’ll tell my landlord, “Chill out, this has nothing to do with AIG.” She’ll probably even pay my bills then.
Well, you have to. The shrubberies companies have gone belly-up too.
There’s a big difference between confidence and faith. Investments in which people have confidence do well, because there are underlying fundamentals that are sound. So even if some mob psychology causes people to sell it en masse on a rumor, other investors who are aware of the fundamentals will jump on the bargain price. Right now, we have a situation where the underlying fundamentals have been revealed to be far more shaky than people realized, as evidenced by the larger than expected losses throughout the financial sector and the fact that major, respected institutions made bad enough investments that they ended up going bankrupt.
That is a big deal. And it won’t be fixed by telling people just to have faith and keep their money where it is. Faith has no place in investing. If solid institutions end up getting undervalued right now, you can bet that will turn around the second institutional investors realize there are bargains to be had. Companies aren’t failing simply because their stock price is dropping. Or if they are, then they should fail, for having such a fundamentally unsound setup.
But yes, this isn’t the apocalypse. The market will recover. That doesn’t mean it won’t cause quite a lot of pain along the way, pain which shouldn’t be dismissed so readily by people like the OP.
Bear, Merrill, Lehman, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman are all standalone investment banks that did not associate with a commercial bank after GLB. As to AIG, the entity that is tottering is the investment bank holding company; the insurance operations are fine. Without GLB, Merrill and Bear would be failures like Lehman, since being bought by a commercial bank would not have been an option.
Make sure to play the Merill Lynch card too.
Look, obviously being unemployed and broke sucks. The OP isn’t talking about the general malaise that’s been hanging over the economy for the last few years, though, but the impending collapse of several figurehead financials- which is what has a lot of people really scared, as opposed to just worried.
That they didn’t make the key decisions is exactly the point. Instead of intervening when the problem was small (that would be regulation!) they waited until it was too big to ignore.
As for it being no big deal, I’m glad to see that down home Republican empathy at work again. The thousands of financial services workers out on the street might disagree. The people who lost their homes might, as well as those whose home value is under water, even though they are current on their mortgages. Last night I heard both left and right wing economics profs (one a McCain adviser) say that losing 3 of the five major investment banks was indeed a big deal.
Isn’t it just amazing how all the bad breaks happen on the watch of the incompetent? Can’t be them, must be just bad luck.
Well, your situation sucks, but it has nothing to do with what’s being discussed in this thread.
Those letters aren’t large and friendly enough. But your advice is good - same thing I’m doing.
Now where’s my towel?