Thoughts on the financial crisis - IS THE WORLD ENDING?

[BaNa]

it's been obvious this would happen for a while, people are idiots

these sorts of things always happen people continue to be idiots

Of course.

People being idiots and withdrawing their money the second something scary happens is what causes failures...

oh hey you may not have been serious when you wrote this im sorry my sarcasm-o-meter is off this late at night.

I have been in awe about how the stock markets work for some time. There seems to be no DIRECT connection between what the company does and what its stocks are worth. It is all in the perception. I could make a company that by all normal means does not do anything at all, and yet if people think it's doing well, then the stocks will soar (OFC, i know, regulations blablabla balance sheet).

I guess this type of disconnect between actual value and stock value is what makes people dump smelly things so fast: not necessarily because YOU are afraid the company will fail, but you are afraid that some other stockholders think the company will fail, which will lead them to selling and you will loose money over the falling prices so you should sell BEFORE they do.

The previously mentioned CDSs make this into an even bigger thing because in effect they act as amplifiers of stock price changes.

[manored]

Oh, to those propagating communism: Cmon guys this isnt 1960 its no longer cool to think communism works, its sad.

Off course it doesnt works, nothing does! :) But if something did worked, it would be comunism...

[BaNa]

Oh, to those propagating communism: Cmon guys this isnt 1960 its no longer cool to think communism works, its sad.

Off course it doesnt works, nothing does! :) But if something did worked, it would be comunism...

>_>

robots?


<_<


hides behind walls of asimov books

[manored]

I mean right now, off course we can all upload our minds into robots in the future and spend eternity buried in the ground or floating around space until all of our auto-repair systems break at once...

[smoth]

thanks for the links bana, I added them up here on my bookmarks toolbar and I will check them out, for now I must clean.

[smoth]

Oh, to those propagating communism: Cmon guys this isnt 1960 its no longer cool to think communism works, its sad.

Off course it doesnt works, nothing does! :) But if something did worked, it would be comunism...

bana, there is a reason I added manored to my ignored list. That ego stroking philosophical wanna be is constantly spouting half intelligent crap that he thinks is genius break through material.

[Dragon45]

bana, there is a reason I added manored to my ignored list. That ego stroking philosophical wanna be is constantly spouting half intelligent crap that he thinks is genius break through material.

i think you just described argh as well

[smoth]

i think you just described argh as well

no way... but... but... FUCK.

[BaNa]

Apparently the solution is to stop being a free-market capitalistic society.


Ballsy move, that.

[Crayfish]

Well, it's still mostly free-market, they've just temporarily regulated one trick.

I reckon this will be an uncomfortable market shake up over the next couple of years, but doubt it'll have drastic long term repercussions. It'll recover again. Just got to work out when the best time to buy a crapload of shares is... looks like yesterday wouldn't have been bad, doh!

[tombom]

"a free market capitalistic society" is retarded and i don't see how regulating one thing makes it disappear

also mantanmoreland lol

[manored]

Off course it doesnt works, nothing does! :) But if something did worked, it would be comunism...

bana, there is a reason I added manored to my ignored list. That ego stroking philosophical wanna be is constantly spouting half intelligent crap that he thinks is genius break through material.

I can see you disagree... care to explain why?

[Jasper1984]

Personally i like free market systems. Many all of the welfare states in Europe work mostly via capitalism.(I have heard them called socialist, but that is BS.) There are basically two ways of looking at capitalism(Or a combination of both):

• As a way of giving citizens freedom to own things, start new initiatives, and express themselves through these. These form rights of persons, and people like libertarians want to take it very far.
• As a tool; a way of handling logistics, where different products go, and quality via consumer choice.

Afaik communism did not use either, and afaik the only way they compensated is by thinking things through and solving the problems from there. I must say, though, not many communistic states had freedom of expression either. And i dare not say there are no other solutions then capitalism.
Trying to 'ban' capitalism internationally sounds like folly to me too. There is no world government, and capitalism currently seems partially used to be fair to the different nations of the world.

I do not think capitalism itself has failed here, though. Since high school already i thought the current shareholder system was a bad idea based on what i knew of it. My knowledge of the system is still very limited, but i still think that. It is just very a bad idea that shares are traded so much. Their original role is supposed to be investment, a simple version would be: Guy A has an idea, guy B has money and likes it. Guy A and B strike a deal where B gives money, and A executes the idea, where B gets a percentage of the money up to a limit with a very good profit for B.
Say B starts to dislike the idea if he wants to 'sell' the deal to C.. fine. But the deal has been struck and it should not stop the execution of the idea, in my opinion.
Being able to 'buy' an organization via stocks sounds like a bad idea too, just because competitors can in some cases do it, and often it just leads to the organization being wasted. Of course, the idea of partial ownership of the organization you invested in came from wanting to have control over how the idea is executed.

Of course, trying to ban this might cause people trying to recreate this by making new contracts. Edit: well, i do not think this story quite covers it, of course.

[manored]

Yeah communism isnt really a good idea because human nature prevents it from working in the way it should work, but if someday somehow we manage to change/counter-act human nature we should surely implement communism.

If you think about it economy is something very stupid... its a system of imaginary values we created to be able to measure work and reward workers accordingly so that people have a reason to work and society survives, but we elevated it to such a level of complexity that we no longer understand it fully so then a problem shows up we are unable to solve it.

[Snipawolf]

it's been obvious this would happen for a while, people are idiots

these sorts of things always happen people continue to be idiots

Of course.

People being idiots and withdrawing their money the second something scary happens is what causes failures...

oh hey you may not have been serious when you wrote this im sorry my sarcasm-o-meter is off this late at night.

I have been in awe about how the stock markets work for some time. There seems to be no DIRECT connection between what the company does and what its stocks are worth. It is all in the perception. I could make a company that by all normal means does not do anything at all, and yet if people think it's doing well, then the stocks will soar (OFC, i know, regulations blablabla balance sheet).

I guess this type of disconnect between actual value and stock value is what makes people dump smelly things so fast: not necessarily because YOU are afraid the company will fail, but you are afraid that some other stockholders think the company will fail, which will lead them to selling and you will loose money over the falling prices so you should sell BEFORE they do.

The previously mentioned CDSs make this into an even bigger thing because in effect they act as amplifiers of stock price changes.

I meant banks, not stocks... I suppose they are related though.

[jcnossen]

I guess this type of disconnect between actual value and stock value is what makes people dump smelly things so fast: not necessarily because YOU are afraid the company will fail, but you are afraid that some other stockholders think the company will fail, which will lead them to selling and you will loose money over the falling prices so you should sell BEFORE they do.

IMO this is mostly short term trading though. The people like Warren Buffet who look at the assets of companies (value investing) actually move against the hyped stocks and masses and those are the ones who actually make the money...

[BaNa]

IMO this is mostly short term trading though. The people like Warren Buffet who look at the assets of companies (value investing) actually move against the hyped stocks and masses and those are the ones who actually make the money...

These things are not independent though, a part of a companies assets are usually its own stocks, so the changes in perception lead to a change in company value too. I do not know much about Warren Buffet but he seems interesting, he has been quite verbal about CDS's too.

[Teutooni]

Oh, to those propagating communism: Cmon guys this isnt 1960 its no longer cool to think communism works, its sad.

Oh, to those saying "lol communism sucks", it has never been tried in a truely democratic country. In soviet russia or china for example, the power remained in the hands of a few individuals. Even if the wealth is, in theory, evenly distributed, the few with the power can easily pervert the system so that in effect, they have all the power and wealth - it's called despotism, NOT COMMUNISM.

In a democratic communism, both wealth and power would be evenly distributed, as opposed to capitalistic democracy, where wealth is in the pockets of few individuals - and those few with the coin can easily pervert the system, and gain power.

I don't know if democratic communism would work, it has never been tested afaik.

[BaNa]

In a democratic communism, both wealth and power would be evenly distributed, as opposed to capitalistic democracy, where wealth is in the pockets of few individuals - and those few with the coin can easily pervert the system, and gain power.

You cannot distribute wealth evenly, let alone power. People have different skills, and some people are of much bigger benefit to the whole than others. Not giving these people additional benefits promotes mediocrity [not to mention that it would result in skilled people migrating away to places that better appreciate said skills]. And either you have some kind of power structure with a hierarchy [unequal by default] or you have chaos. I do not see how you could distribute power in an equal way, the most decentralized version would be the "every man for themself" thing, but that is very unequal too because people differ in both their motivation towards power and their means to achieve it [what would stop a huge strong guy from taking what he likes from weaker people].

Anyhow,

The thread is supposed to be about the ~63 TRILLION DOLLARS in a shady unregulated market, not defunct political ideas that are based in the 1800s.

[[TS]Lollocide]

Yea, giving power to everybody means those guys down the street who read 'The Sun' and solve problems by agreeing with whatever they say and getting drunk and beating people up.