peculiar alchemy (1); peculiar slash (1).
naked capitalism Wed 2010-08-04 20:59 EDT
It wasn't all that long ago that the media and banking industry commentators would worry about the coming train wreck in commercial real estate. But peculiarly, that topic has more or less receded from view...But as predicted, the decay in the commercial real estate loans continues at an impressive pace...
Fri 2010-04-02 17:25 EDT
...In 1996, the average monthly sewer bill for a family of four in Birmingham was only $14.71 -- but that was before the county decided to build an elaborate new sewer system with the help of out-of-state financial wizards with names like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. The result was a monstrous pile of borrowed money that the county used to build, in essence, the world's grandest toilet -- "the Taj Mahal of sewer-treatment plants" is how one county worker put it. What happened here in Jefferson County would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for the peculiar alchemy of modern oligarchical capitalism: A mob of corrupt local officials and morally absent financiers got together to build a giant device that converted human shit into billions of dollars of profit for Wall Street -- and misery for people...And once the giant shit machine was built and the note on all that fancy construction started to come due, Wall Street came back to the local politicians and doubled down on the scam. They showed up in droves to help the poor, broke citizens of Jefferson County cut their toilet finance charges using a blizzard of incomprehensible swaps and refinance schemes -- schemes that only served to postpone the repayment date a year or two while sinking the county deeper into debt. In the end, every time Jefferson County so much as breathed near one of the banks, it got charged millions in fees. There was so much money to be made bilking these dizzy Southerners that banks like JP Morgan spent millions paying middlemen who bribed -- yes, that's right, bribed, criminally bribed -- the county commissioners and their buddies just to keep their business...
American cities; brought; Greece; Looting Main Street; nation's biggest bank; predatory deals; RIP.
Wed 2008-03-26 00:00 EDT
Winter (Economic & Market) Watch >> Rebuttal of GaveKal's Bully "Wealth & Platform Theory"; platform companies "outsource American jobs to safe production locales like China and Thailand, who then pollute the global environment and fail to account for the negative externalities (true costs) of their production...the peculiar slash and burn notion that the US can just eat its young by outsourcing jobs to foreign polluters, while failing to invest in capex and just merrily borrowing from foreigners against its Bubble induced wealth."; 2006-12-26
economic; GaveKal's Bully; Market; Platform Theory; Rebuttal; watch; wealth; winter.
