Make all derivative financial instruments illegal.
Outlaw torture.
Sounds like a good idea to me. Please consider sending in your suggestions to contribute to "50 Things To Do That Costs No Money".
a blog site from a friend of ours in Oklahoma. He is a long time
Catholic Worker so he knows how to live on the cheap and help people out at the same time.
Surf around his site and check out all the other good stuff while you are there--very practical. Please send your favorite websites that will help us all get through Great Depression 2.0. I keep reflecting back on my time in Iraq during the sanctions period. I keep coming back to the thought--"a broken economy looks like war". We're really going to need each other.
best regards,
Mike and Barb
Northwoods Peace Initiative We'll figure out a good way to post them on line. Another good suggestion came from
Here is the next big bubble to burst
The Worst Is Yet To Come: Anonymous Banker Weighs In On The Coming Credit Card Debacle I recently had a client apply for a credit card. She is a homemaker, with no personal income. The house she lives in is in her husband’s name. She would have asked for a $3,000 credit line, just to pay miscellaneous expenses and to establish some credit on her own. So the computer is told that her household income is $150,000; her mortgage/rent payment is zero. The fact is that her husband’s mortgage payment is $7,000 a month (which he got with a no income verification loan). She had a good credit score, but limited credit since she has only lived in this country for the last three years. The system gave her an approval for a $26,000 line of credit! This has got to stop. People are going to be learning hard lessons over the next years. It would help, though, if the banks could change their behavior now, before things get any worse. Tomorrow is already too late.
Credit-card industry may cut $2 trillion lines: analyst
The U.S. credit-card industry may pull back well over $2 trillion of lines over the next 18 months due to risk aversion and regulatory changes, leading to sharp declines in consumer spending, prominent banking analyst Meredith Whitney said. The credit card is the second key source of consumer liquidity, the first being jobs, the Oppenheimer & Co analyst noted. "In other words, we expect available consumer liquidity in the form of credit-card lines to decline by 45 percent."
Oil prices will spike again just when we least expect it
Economists Without a ClueIn the months and perhaps years ahead we will see a titanic battle to the finish between the free marketers and the state controllers over who is right about the economy, and about who is capable of restoring the beatific condition of perpetual growth. Sadly, neither camp has the answer this time around. Humanity has reached a significant physical limit to growth—Peak Oil—that will spell ruin to all economic philosophies that fail to take such limits into account.
Ex-official says Mexico may have to halt oil exports
John Padilla, director of finance and advisory for IPD Latin America, argues that with Mexico's oil production falling, and its demand for gasoline and other petroleum products on the rise, Mexico could cease to be an oil exporter around 2010 or 2011. The United States currently imports 11% of our oil from Mexico.
You gotta read this. Anecdotal tales of brilliance and defeat by some of Wall Street's Whiz Kids.
The End
To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.
