In reply to davidwright:
> (In reply to Cerulean)
> [...]
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> No this crash was not a Black Swan event. It is an event wholly typical of an under-regulated, under-taxed market driven by speculative trading rather than genuine investment. The only people who benefit from market instability are speculative and fraudulent traders.
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I didn't say it was actually, but you're right about the regulation and speculation, to a degree.
> The only people the market was working for prior to 2008 were the spiv like bankers. Everybody else was being taken for a ride. The US, UK and Ireland were the worst hit because they were the places who had altered their housing and pensions policies at the behest of the bankers who were making money out of the trades and the fees. The "ownership society" was pushed hardest by lobbyists working for the financial services sector. They might have acted without realising that the main result of pushing home loans and public sector pension revenues into the stock market was going to lead to a demand pull inflation of the price of assets they held as well as a vast increase in the fees they charged with out any benefit to the people who get worse pensions and have to pay more for their housing as a result. I could think that but I don't think they were that stupid nor were the those who's main daily activity was fraud that disinterested.
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It's very short-sighted to say the market was only working for bankers, how on earth do you think you got all those cheap loan and mortage rates, pensions with 10 different risk bandings, Buy-to-let available to the common man? This is where you cross-over into 'them and us' territory.
I'd also like to know who these 'lobbyists' are and what exactly they were lobbying for...?
And the pensions were exposed to risk because people wanted them to perform better, I'm sure even if employers were making those decisions on employees behalf there would have been some [boring] presentation made about the changes, with an opt-out option. Oddly enough I've just missed our annual presentation about the changes because I was 'too busy', a common phenomena, and then we complain when it suddenly goes pop!
And 'fraud' is a specific crime, not an activity.
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> The European banks end up with much of this cr@p on their books because they were required to hold a lot of their assets as AAA+ rated bonds. Much of the garbage generated by lending tramps a couple of million to buy a beach front condo was rated AAA+ mainly by the people who issued it.
That's not right, the people tendering the products were not the ones rating them.