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Oh Yeah, Everything Is Fine!

September 18th, 2008. Published under General. 1 Comment.

AIG just got bailed out by the government in the latest round of companies who have been decimated by the greed of investors, builders and bankers in the mortgage and credit crisis.

Ten banks in the United States this year have gone belly-up. I’m happy to read that my bank (USBank) is one that is going to weather the crisis. Hopefully.

A more recent casualty: The Bank of Scotland had survived European revolutions, agricultural depressions, two world wars, stock market crashes and too many recessions to mention. Now it has succumbed to the greatest convulsion in financial markets since 1929.

This shit isn’t just happening in this country. The ripple effect of this economic meltdown is now spreading across the rest of the world and god knows when it will end.

But there are some people (*coughMcCaincough*) who think that the economy is “fundamentally strong” and that everything is fine - I’m not sure they’re in touch with reality. A quote from an article asking whether or not the economy is strong states:

When the two largest financial institutions in the nation, which guarantee about half of the mortgages, fail and have to be taken over by the government, when the fourth-largest investment bank files for Chapter 11, and when the Federal Reserve effectively nationalizes a massive insurance firm that is a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the economy may not be fundamentally sound.

In an economy where consumption constitutes 70 percent of activity, retail sales falling two months in a row may indicate that the economy may not be fundamentally sound.

Oh yeah, completely sound!

I truly am hoping for a turnaround, but I’m a bit fearful of where this is heading and that the true impact of all the unchecked greed of the past 5 years is yet to come.

I hope I’m wrong.