by Newfie » Fri 15 Oct 2010, 08:06:43
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cloud9', 'C')an you imagine what is going to happen to the big boyz when they are forced to buy back a trillion dollars worth of devalued real estate? Trust me on this, the housing market has not reached bottom yet and the claw back of assets has not even begun.
I would imagine that there is little to claw back. If I understand they essentially 'sold' insurance policies/derivatives with some face value. Someone paid for that but there was nothing to backup the bet when the failures started to happen. Thus they 'lost' money. But the money was never really there in the sense that someone did work, added value, and got paid. It was only there in the form of a guarantee between who sold the derivative and the buyer. \
Had these deals been allowed to fail then they would have taken down many institutions that invested in them including our pensions, and school board funds, etc. This would have caused a massive loss of faith in the financial system and it would have melted down. So the government stepped in to guarantee the faulty deal. In short, we collectively picked up the cost of the failure and self insured against the loss.
My ultimate point, should I ever get to it, is that there is nothing to get back from the hucksters. Lets say I sold you a $10,000 life insurance policy and you had to pay me $1,000 a year for 12 years. If I sold a thousand policies like this it would be a good bet, I would have income to pay off the early deaths. I would invest the money and make money and still pay you off at the end. But a plague occurred and everyone died in year one. I can't pay off the $10,000 face value, I never collected it, it does not exist. Your estate then faces a $10,000 'loss' in that it is money that was promised. But the value never existed. You can sue, you can win, but there is nothing to pay off with so you are still screwed.
That is where we are now. We have taken bets against our future value and lost.
Sure there are some who got fat on this deal, skewer 'em. I'll bring the fire starter.
But that will not make us whole. We have been lied to. And that sucks. But there is nothing to pay off the debt. So we are screwed.
I don't know if that makes any sense, I struggle to understand this mess in some concrete terms that are meaningful.
My 2¢ and I defer to sounder judgments.