I have curiosity for knowing like it affects the economic world crisis to other persons of the world. The truth is that I am very worried for since the things go. I am Spanish, and alone in my province the crisis has stopped almost 5000 persons without work in September. In the company where I work, the workers we have had to lower our wages to try to help to the company. I for example have reduced my salary in 600E and my quality of life has suffered seriously.Really I am very worried for since the things are developing in the world.

I was reading about Spain and the crisis in real estate that has spread to the rest of the country. Pretty grim stuff.

Europe in general should weather it reasonably well, over the long term. Short term is going to hurt though....for many.

I'm in Michigan and things are not good at all here either. So far I and those I'm close to are getting by. But everyone is worried about losing their jobs. Getting a new one isn't easy. There are always dozens of people applying for any job opening. Even the part time minimum wage ones.

Here in Seattle the usual minimum wage jobs are easy to come by, but anything office related has massive competition. Wife has been out of work for a month now.

Things are not good in Florida. Small businesses are closing up and bigger companies are down sizing. I have had to cut 2 people in the last 2 months.

Greed is a much too simple argument for what caused this issue. It's much more complex then just "the market being greedy". What we are really seeing is the full cost of the government program that attempted to push home ownership up past the 65% mark in the US.

Although a little one sided, this lays out the case for why the banks were not at fault for what happened. They were forced into this by public policy.

That's not to say that the banks were blameless in the whole mess, but rather that there was a breakdown in the whole system. Consumers were stupid and didn't think about the long term commitments they were making, Investors were buying items they didn't understand in an attempt to make up for years of not saving, regulators pushed banks to be less conservative in their lending and The Federal Reserve did not aggressively addressing the undo asset inflation brought about by low interest rates and the plentiful cash from China....

Ok, I'll stop now as I'm sure I'm boring you all....

While most of what you said was true, the other downside not properly addressed by this is that we had a regulation in place to keep financial institutions from buying each other up and becoming too big. The point of the Glass-Stegall Act was that if one financial institution failed, it would have a lesser impact on the economy.

That, and that speculation was controlled and credit was closely monitored to prevent over-extention of the market.

Since Bush Sr.'s push to get that act repealed in 1989 finally took place in 1999, it's been a slow slide towards destroying the value of the US dollar and over-relying heavily on credit. It's not one particular party's fault - it belongs to both parties and a portion of the corrupt upper management of these companies failing to do their job correctly.

I put the blame on the morons who knew they couldn't afford stuff, who knew they wouldn't be able to pay back what they borrowed.

Wife has a friend who declared bankruptcy before the rule change. (and my wife and I are believers if you got yourself in a hole with overspending bankruptcy doesn't teach you anything) who is now again in financial straights. What an idiot. No major medical, nothing like that, just oh the dept is gone, lets party it up AGAIN.

And yea, I'm an opinionated asshole. My wife's friend and her husband are IDIOTS.

What kills me about this dealy, (well, one of the things) is that there is so much shoulder shrugging. No one seems to have hard numbers, who owns what, how much and so on. Either this is ignorance on a criminal scale or its fraud. Either one would suck.

Some years ago, this guy made a sales pitch to me about his method for getting into the stock market. Way before my eyes glazed over due to the complexity of all the kind of trades and "products", he showed me a graph of stock market performance from the 40's 'till now.

It was a wobbly line, but his point that it was going upward and I could CASH IN big time by doing various trades. I asked him, where does it end? Does it just grow FOREVER until every street beggar is driving a Rolls?

Yes, that's kind of simplistic. But still, he had no answer for me, just kept waving the chart around.

The last part of my rant is, if economics is a science, how come all the day to day stuff is so unpredictable, why are people caught by surprise and wiped out? I know some things change because of world events, war hurricanes etc. But shouldn't someone have seen that this problem was coming???

How come no one can agree on a way of trading work for goods and services that works for everyone, instead of the tiny few?

Of course, when I start talking like that, I get called a Commie....

I'll just chime in by saying that the idea of a totally unrestricted, unregulated free-market is the dumbest idea EVER concieved. It's roughly akin to giving a psychopath a butcher knife and saying "Now, don't you go stabbing anyone with this!" and then walking away. What the hell do you THINK is gonna happen?! Nobody should be surprised by this turn of events. NOBODY.

/rant

PS. If you're into losing sleep, take some time to do a little reading on the subject of "fractional reserve credit". Oh I promise, you won't be happy. And yes, it IS as bad as you think...

Well the two biggest parts of this crisis that really get to me are what's happening with the oil/gas prices and what happened with the CEO of Lehman Brothers. I saw a short interview of him, don't remember the anchor woman, but she basically asked him if he felt alright earning so much money while Lehman was going bankrupt.

His response was to ask her if she was going into the hearing that he was headed for, which didn't in anyway answer the question. So she reasked the question and he completely ignored her for the rest of the walk down the hall, even though she started badgering him.

The report also included a portion of his interview infront of the senate and he was basically asked again about why he made so much money with what was going on and he almost smuggly avoided the question. The fact that nothing will happen to him while many people have lost large sums of money just frosts me!

The thing about gas prices, if you buy what they say that it takes 5 to 9 months for a barrel of oil to go through the system to reach the pump, if you look at the price of gas and compare it to the price of a barrel of oil, even 5 months ago, why is the price going down? On the flip side, when the price of a barrel of oil started going up, why did the price at the pump go up? It should have taken 5 months for the price to reach the consumer!

Ok, done ranting!

Skunk

For we who grew up tall and proud
In the shadow of the mushroom cloud
Queen

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I have no factual basis for it, but I thinking the drop in oil prices is about the election. I think its either something the people in office are doing to make it seem like things are getting better, or that its something the oil companies are doing to minimize support for candidates that want things like windfall taxes on oil companies. I really expect a price jump in gas soon after the election.

I don't know if it's connected to the election or not, but I think it has more to do with keeping people dependent on their product through a time of economic crunch.

If they kept gas at the price range of three months ago, right now when people can barely pay their mortgage, consumers are going to forced to make a decision - drive their own cars, or carpool/take mass transit. The second choice takes a huge chunk out of the oil companies' profits and begins to move the consumer away from dependency on oil.

With lowered gas prices, people can still afford to drive their own cars and keep the oil company profitable.

The one thing the election has done is brought to the forefront of the people's minds the words alternate energy and independence from foreign oil. Our oil companies realize that the writing is on the wall - writing they inspired by jacking prices while making multi-billion profits. The media and Internet has downright criminalized them, the government is now knocking on the door (to take away tax breaks), and there's a lot of regulation talk.

So to stay off the political and social radar that would cause problems, they're even more inclined to reduce gas prices until the market gets back on-track and the people are focused on something else.