The technological imagination from the early Romanticism through the historical Avant-Gardes to the Classical Space Age and beyond
quarta-feira, 29 de fevereiro de 2012
The Mother of All Bubbles - Gordon Gekko - Wall Street: Money never sleeps
You wanna know what the mother of all bubbles was? Us. The human race. Scientists call it the Cambrian Explosion, from the Cambrian fauna.It happened 530 million years ago... when all of the sudden, there was the seemingly rapid appearance of most major groups of complex animals.And from it was born humanity.It was an explosion of life. Scientists will tell you it was unprecedented, excessive and by the standards of evolution-time... happened in a flash.Suddenly the world had millions species... just like that.
(Gekko)
Just a little note: what Gekko is also ironically underlining, it is not so clear at first sight, is that during the Cambrian explosion the living beings built also an external skeleton, a so called “exoskeleton” that supports and protects an animal's body, in contrast to the internal skeleton (endoskeleton) as a shelter, or "bunker" as their own “house” to finally colonize the earth, since there was already an ozone layer. This process shows how beautiful, imperative, persistent and intelligent life itself is in geological terms in contrast to our short sighted perspective.
José Galisi-Filho
You're all pretty much fucked!
You do not know it yet, but you are the "ninja generation". No income, no job, no assets. You’ve got a lot to look forward to.
Someone reminded me the other evening that I once said, greed is good. Well it appears greed is not only good, it is legal. We are all drinking the same cool-aid.
But, folks, it is greed that makes my bartender buy three houses, he cannot afford with no money down. And it is greed that makes your parents refinance their 200,000 dollar mortgage for 250,000 dollars.
Now they take that extra 50,000 dollars and go to the shopping mall so they can buy a new plasma TV, cell phones, computers and an SUV. And hey, why not a second home while we are at it.
Gee Wiz, we all know the prices of houses in America always go up. Right?
It is greed that makes the government of this country cut the interest rates to 1% after 9/11 so we can all go shopping again.
They got all these fancy names for trillions of dollars for credit, CMO, CDO, SIV, ABS. You know I honestly think there are only 75 people in the world that knows what they are.
But I will tell you what they are, they are WMDs. Weapons of mass destruction.
When I was away, it seemed that greed, got greedier. With a little bit of envy mixed in.
Hedge fund managers came home with 50 to 100 million bucks a year.
So Mr. Banker, he looks around and says.
My life looks pretty boring.
So he starts leveraging his interest up to 40%, 50% to 100%. With your money not his.
Yours. Because he could.
You are supposed to be borrowing not them.
And the beauty of the deal is no one is responsible.
Because everyone is drinking the same cool-aid.
Last year ladies and gentlemen, 40% of all corporate profits came from the financial services industry.
Not production, not anything remotely to do with the needs of the American public.
The truth is we are all part of it now.
Banks, consumers they are moving the money around in circles.
We take a buck, we shoot it full of steroids and we call it leverage. I call it steroid banking.
Now I have been considered a pretty smart guy when it comes to finance.
Maybe I was in prison too long, but sometimes it is the only place to stay sane, looking out from the bars and say, hey is everyone out there nuts?
It is clear as a bell to those who pay attention. The mother of all evil is speculation. Leverage debt. The bottom line is, it is borrowing to the hilt.
And I hate to tell you this, but it is a bankrupt business model.
It will not work. It is septicemic, malignant and its global. Like cancer, it is a disease. And we got to fight back. How we going to do that?
How we are going to leverage that disease, back in our favor?
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