More Charts on What Went Wrong.

[evildevil]

You know you have a problem when you are buying your own junk and actually believing your own lie. This chart shows how banks ended up repackaging and buying their own own securities during the housing boom. To boost demand for complex mortgage securities called "collateralized debt obligations" (CDOs) some banks resorted to selling these same

Comments

[meus_ovatio]

What could possibly go wrong?

[luvdovz]

Define "wrong". :)

[pastorlenny]

Actually, there are some ratings agency executives that need to be doing hard time right now.

[mahnmut]

I like how you juggle with charts'n'graphs.

[ninboydean]

Poignant that they claim that financiers create "fake" demand. This is how capitalism works. The article is discussing nothing but fictitious capital throughout, and it does create "fake" demand, or market distortion. this distortion is engineered to run a profit.

However, the same is true of compound interest and fractional reserve banking. I wish people would get their heads out their asses and realize that this "fraud" and distortion of pricing is the very foundation of the capitalist mode of production.

Once value was reflected as commensurate exchange in a market. This ceased to be the case when the principles of mercantilism came to define the whole means of production. And we'll never get back to those "good old days of yesteryear."

The only option now is to hold the means of production as common wealth. Or let your financier overseers keep fucking you in the ass.

[reality_hammer]

The amount of fraudulent and/or unethical behavior going on has been a reason I was (and still am) a fan of letting companies go under.

The (false) specter of "the little people" being harmed was always a ruse to cover taxpayer bailouts of people with friends in high places.

Unfortunately some of those very people are "helping" with QEII. And it will largely be in the same way they "helped" the housing market.

[rasilio]

Exactly.

The fraud and stupidity of the financial markets are only a problem because the government sets up a system where the agents of the financial companies are allowed to create huge bubbles using scams like this, earn tremendous profits from doing it, and then shields them from taking any losses whatsoever when the bubble bursts.

You want to fix this, it is really simple. Make the board of directors and top level corporate officers of financial corporations personally responsible for all losses of said corporations should the government have to step in and take them over. Pass another law that automatically wipes out 100% of stockholder value if a company takes government bailout money to avoid a bankruptcy.

Now they can take all the stupid risks they want but they can't escape the price of their stupidity