CNN money, yahoo finance, google finance, your broker, whatever float your boat !

Lol I got a gamefly subscription last month because there are games with trophies I see myself playing 2-3 days but I woudn't buy.

Of course I just decided to keep the first game I rented ( Ferrarri challenge, didn't want to send it back before the trophy patch ) so it's not saving me any money so far lol ..

@Ail

thanks

I blame two things


One ,too much liberty on the financial economy.In a world where nearly everything is regulated (exportations ,importations ,liberty of people to live in foreign countries ) the "new " neo-liberal economy wanted the financial economy to be absolutely free.The financial economy is mostly a speculative one ,if you let it loose it can incur in great risks to have their ever increasing profits.

Two ,the greed of the system to get ever increasing profits.If you have a good enterprise with good sales the directives are always pressed by the shareholders to get a 3-4% more next year.It doesnt matter how ,they must do it if they want to keep their millionary job.That pushes the directives of the enterprises in a determinate path.Cut costs (many times firing people or lowering the quality of the product) ,take risks ,search new markets....there isnt a infinite number of new markets to access ,and if all the enterprises do the same to their employees(freeze wages,fire some of them) then theres less customers in the market so your own market shrinks...then you dont know what happens and do the only thing they know ....more cost reduction and firing people.

In a macroeconomic scale I think the problem has just burst but has been 10 years in the making.To get ever increasing consumption from customers and in a wide number of things (leisure,insurances,cars,homes,etc) the capitalist system has used the financial economy to provide the money.In a way they are bringing tomorrows money to the current day to support the massive spending ....the problem is that A)Banks dont have that kind of money and have incurred in financiery engineering to give it out incurring in great debts by doing soB)Sooner or later the people are endebted and cant ask for more money because they couldnt pay the monthly fees and interests of the debt.What happens then ...a massive crack.

Finally the banks business is to give money to people and take back the money with interest .....in the current philosophy of ever growing profits it was clear they would be tempted to loan more and more money ....its their business after all.Once the "safe " loans have been secured they had to keep growing ....so they entered the unsafe loans as the subprime mortgages.

huh? dude.. it's like that here too :\ infact i would expect it to be so in about half the world. give or take 10 percent.

anyways on topic.. There are many to blame for this but instead of finding out who to blame people should discuss how to change the situation for the better. That's much more constructive. Afterwards you can find out who caused it more accurately and make sure it doesn't happen (for that reason) again.

Down another 350

Make that 500.

Ouch, another 5% just got taken out of the market.

You could get out of your sub-prime interest only loan by selling the house.  This worked fine as long as real estate prices continued to rise as you could cover the closing costs and potentially even make money on the sale just because the price rose.  This of course failed as soon as the real estate market slowed as prices stopped rising and started falling.

Predatory lending?  The lenders were trying to make loans that they could then sell.  To get those high risk loans to be sold they had to meet other standards -- as in making them high yield.  It is always more pricey to get a loan when your high risk.  This had in this area nothing to do with deregulation but regulation.  Even with the high interest rate they could have never sold these loans if Fannie Mae did not start buying them, creating a market for them.  Fannie Mae did this as Congress told them that they had to get 50% of their portfolio in minority owned assets. 

The bad mortgages were then repackaged with other regular high quality mortgages and were sold as bonds.  The bonds where then repackaged and sold as other larger financial assests, CMOs.  The mixed nature of them taints them all and they are all throughout the world economy as the GSE claimed them to be AAA quality products which it is now obvious they are not.  This meant no one would buy them and because of regulations after Enron disaster they had to be valued at market value in the US but as the market vanished the value went to 0.  This left them under capitalized and lead a lot of them to crash and have the government step in and take over.  In this atmosphere no one has a clue who is stable and who is on the verge of failure ending overnight lending by banks to banks.

So in that what lack of regulation is your complaint?  Predatory lending, no way that is required as the classification of a loan has to be reveal to an investor in it and high risk ones are all high yield -- high interest risky mortgages.  Banks trading debt, that is facilitated by the federal government by creating the mortgage supporting GSEs.  Low asset capitilization, perhaps your right on that but that was aggrevated by government regulations about how those assets be valued and also you want to see the worst of that look at the GSEs and how little capital backed their investments.

You want to talk about bad deregulation look to Credit Default Swaps.  If those start to go everything could fall apart and the current situation seems to make that seem possible.  They are totally unregulated and scare me to death.

That is what fell apart. The swaps and derivatives. The financial weapons of mass destruction have gone off and will continue to overwhelm the system.