[Skybird]

Originally Posted by UnderseaLcpl

Don't forget that the high risk loans that created this little fiasco were only created because of government backing of financial institutions. The free market had little to do with it, other than many investors jumping on the federally-backed money-train. Can't blame them. They saw an opportunity and took it. That's what the market does, and why the state should have as little influence on the market as possible. Ensuring that all exchanges are voluntary and non-fradulent should be their main concern, not subsidizing, backing, or penalizing business.

I remember it different. Financial and economic statistics show america and americans do not save money, both private households and state do not save, but spend and consume like crazy instead. Credits for houses were given by banks to private persons without sufficient securities or saved money. Property prices went up, house owner could not pay the credit anymore, bank was left with foul credit, property priuces fell, et voila - a loss for the bank. Even more, the expectation that property prices would continue to go up until judgement day attracted gamblers and speculators, which invested and by that drove up the prices indeed and helped to crash the mortage market after the bancrupcty of housekeepers no longer able to pay. State regulation had nothing to do with it, but the free play of market forces led to surreal, irresponsible speculation and greed for more. Reasonable criterions and minimum own capital were not needed to get credit, and speculators were not kept in check. Free market is no cure for this - it is the cause of the mess.

I must say this is a mentality problem indeed. No other country in the industrialised word has a saving rate of households that tends to go towards zero. no other nation compares to this very bad habit.

Like private households, so the state. the state debts are aiming at ten trillion dollars already, that is a 1 with 13 zeroes. Yearly budgets are deficitary. the greatest national economy of the world - run by just five percent of global population - today makes three fifths of it's wealth not by a productive economy, but by financial transaction exclusively. as a side effect of that, many jobs had been exported. just 40% of the national income is coming from production of goods and either exporting them or consuming/selling them at home. Beyond that, america saves nothing from this national income, but consumes it, even more, 5% of global population not only consume all income from that biggest economy of which 3/5 are not productive anymore, but additionally consume 5-6% of the wealth created by the economies of the rest of the globe - and also completely consumes these without saving. A major share of the globe'S economic potential is busy with nothing else than feeding the inlimited hunger of America to consume: 5% of the population of this globe. That is total madness.

And this gluttony is the real problem for America - and for the globe. You simply consume more than you can produce and can pay for, and the debts rising for that reason and the habit of living on growing tic is what lead us to where we are, and it does growing damage to other economies as well which by that have to pay for you. The financial crisis and the way it was created and boosted artificially, is not the core of the issue - it is the symptom of the even deeper crisis behind it.

5-6% of the world's wealth outside america's economy is getting eaten up by America, and without compensation or producing something with it. It is wealth simply disappearing, not being invested and brought back into the circulation of wealth to create new productivity, at best it gets invested into more finacial trafficking opportunities. It's getting eaten up. - Now, if you only kill 5% of the yearly monetarian value trafficking through the american financial market, economists calculate, this would mean a critical shortage that would lead to a total collapse of the american economic and financial system, like your body must not lose all blood it holds to get you unconscious, but leaves you without consciousness long before you even have lost just half of your blood. A loss of 5% of the financial blood in america'S veins would already cause that unconsicousness, and mean a vital, life-threatening crisis. Just take eaway every 20th dollar from that - and your economy and financial markets are dead as dead can be. Total crash. Doomsday. Game over. Worst possible scenario. But you still raise your astronomical debts, and still you do not save any money, and still you mistake financial transaction and collecting the profit from that with a productive economy. but in fact 60% of your economy is producing nothing more than a process of moving bits and bytes from one database to another, and getting a fee or profit for that. That now is your existential basis!

America is in desperate need to learn not to live any longer beyond what it can afford and can pay for, and to learn how to economically manage it's national budget which it needs to come along with without borrowing even more money and without eating up even more global economic ressources that are not it's own. As long as this does not change, the crisis we have today will not find a final end, nor will it stop to live on, and even deepen. - If I have three thaler, and an apple costs one thaler, I can buy three apples. buying three leaves me with no reserves for other purposes. Buying three and leasing two more leaves me with debts. Doing this repeatedly leaves me with growing debts. I either distribute more newspapers so that I get payed with two additonal thalers plus X to pay for my debts I already made - or I buy less than three apples, not to increase my debts, and to pay off my existing debts.

really, that simple it is. It is common sense. Simple reasonability. Healthy management.

Instead we have foul and worthless state bonds getting pumped on the market, even more inflation, growing prices globally from that, and a stellar defense budget because america cannot let go anything of what it tries to keep for itself, even more it tries to claim more, and needs a higher defense budget which not really does justice to the description of a defense budget, since Iraq for exaple was a war of attack and a war of choice.

Putting all this together, america is the worst economic manager on the planet, and ruins itself and kills it's future chances by not knowing when enough is enough. and then comes some smarthead like Subman and accuses atheists to be the one to blame. How could one not burst into bitter grim laughter about all that.

Well, after all our exchanges of words recently you should know me a bit by now, so dont take my criticism as aimed against you personally. More and more we non-americans just loose a bit our patience with a political actor that America is, who does not seem to ever start asking critical questions about itself and if it's ways of going really are that wonderful for the world and even america itself, while that same world at the same time increasingly feels the negative effects of that system and increasingly has to pay for the blowbacks from it, and are expected to spend deficitary investements into keeping that system alive so that america must not change and can do business as usual, at everybody else's cost, and keep on living by taking more than it can compensate for by itself. As a country, you are not making yourself friends by continuing to behave like that, and the growing global anti-americanism is a clear indication for that and is directly linked to this - it is by far not just blind ideological hate and unfair greed for american wealth. It's that you are living at other nations' and peoples' cost - and that anti-americanism is caused by this, is just logical.

It all is like playing sim city, and not caring to develope in a way that your game money income can pay for the growth of your city, but using a God-cheat or a cheat for infinite money - it is cheating. In other words, America is a cheater. and although it enforced the unlimited money printing licence by getting the oil price linked to the dollar - it still is not enough and can't hold out with the money it gets, and consumes more and makes debts. That is gluttony indeed.