Economic Collapse: An Education

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

Bill Black, one of the guys responsible for jailing a number of the S&L people back when that was all we thought we had to worry about, showed up at the OWL, and had a little 'news' to share.

My encouragement to watch the following clip came from something posted on a Facebook wall.

"Bottom line: you NEED to watch this video, cuz nobody has said it better, so far. Gets it all down to bullet points and brass tacks."

This is compact, fits all into just under four minutes.

After watching the clip, I naturally wanted to learn more about this fellow, so clicked through a few more of the available clips on YouTube.

(Honestly, don't expect anyone to really continue beyond this point, at least not without a barf-bag. Really not liking where all of this is heading. Guess this kind of thing happens to those of us who've had our heads in the sand for just a little too long.)

God-this-is-depressing.



I spent some time watching the following clip, which startled me enough to remain glued to my monitor. The title is Economic Collapse.

Length: Roughly 10 min.

The next clip down the mental chute, was this one... shows what's been allowed to more or less continue until now.

(This ride lasts about another ten minutes)

And then, recently having been trying to 'learn' a little about what is going on in China with regard to their bubble, I found his remarks a little more disturbing (the following clip). 

And then...

Are you still hanging on?

Near the end, he talks about 'gratuitous, self-inflicted wounds' in light of municipal bonds at the 9:50-ish point.

(Again, roughly ten minutes) 

But a lot of this is kind of old news.

I so remember my first economics teacher in college and how unexcited he was about students' attitudes, especially the ones who were chomping at the bit to learn about business. He didn't really seem happy about a lot of stuff that he appeared to understand. One of the books we read was Liar's Poker, a book that, according to the Wikipeida entry:

"portrays the 1980s as an era where government deregulation allowed less-than-scrupulous people on Wall Street to take advantage of others' ignorance, and thus grow extremely wealthy."

From liar's poker to liars' loans.

Will we ever learn?

"Why'd we come all this way...?"


(Now excuse me for a moment while I stick my head back in the sand so it doesn't explode.)