http://www.financialarmageddon.com/

[snip]

"As far as Wall Street is concerned, few seem worried in the least about warning signs that suggest the good times are nearing an end.

What accounts for this current anomaly, a kind of bipolar disorder? Some might argue that it’s the inevitable byproduct of decades of manipulation and distortion of the money supply, interest rates, financial markets, the social contract, the legal system, societal mores, public opinion and more. Others might say it represents a fleeting lapse in the national consciousness, like a daydream in the middle of the afternoon. Some might wonder if it reflects a collective last-gasp panic to stay afloat before the economic tide rushes out.

Whatever the reasons, the pattern of the past suggests that current circumstances won’t remain as they are. Either the dour social mood will catch up with developments in the financial realm or economic and market conditions will stage an abrupt and dramatic reversal to the downside. Given the serious structural imbalances that exist nowadays and such unpleasant realities as the interest compounding effect, which will turn already large piles of borrowed money into towering infernos of unpayable debts, odds are that it won't be the former."

Kevin Phillips summed it up this way:

The financialization of the United States economy over the last three decades—in the 1990s the finance, real-estate, and insurance sector overtook and then strongly passed manufacturing as a share of the U.S. gross domestic product—is an ill omen in its own right. However, its rise has been closely tied to record levels of debt and to the powerful emergence of a debt-and-credit industrial complex. Excessive debt in the twenty-first-century United States is on its way to becoming the global Fifth Horseman, riding close behind war, pestilence, famine, and fire.

If you present your debit card and you have insufficient funds the transaction will go through anyway BUT the bank will then sock you for ENORMOUS NSF fees.

Recently happened to me. Two small transactions totaling a $21 overdraft (delay in processing my deposit, mind) and Capital One hit me with two charges of $32 @. That's $64 (in excess of 300%) for the use of $21 for less than 24 hours.

Try figuring the APR on that one.

just about as 'fair' as say Ohio 2004 or Florida 2000.

"It all comes back to cash. Environmental, health care and war policies divide moneyed interests. But nothing unites them like trade pacts crafted to drive wages and public interest laws into the ground. Every corporate campaign donor rallies around that, especially when politicians and the media morph the trade debate into a caricatured contest between anachronistic protectionism and enlightened internationalism, rather than what it really is: a choice between pragmatic reform and selling out." - David Sirota

"But again, one would have to be blessed with some infinitessimal scintilla of integrity such as would inspire them to actually find out what the facts are, rather than just braying on a topic about which they are monstrously and willfully uninformed. But ignorant ideology is always so much more exciting when it is untroubled by the tedious effort of involved in learning facts."

-- gherstein

With the small quibble that it's 'infinitesimal'. Righteous indignation occasionally overpowers spelling.

"American politics has been hijacked by a tiny coterie of right-wing economic extremists, some of them ideological zealots, others merely greedy, a few of them possibly insane."

- Jonathan Chait

That would be Dear Alan G. of course.

Here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3peAYJSJSg

'Income inequality in the US today has reached extremes not seen since the 1920s, but the trend started three decades earlier. More than $1 trillion a year in relative income is now being shifted annually from roughly 90,000,000 middle and working class families to the wealthiest households and corporations via corporate profits earned from low-wage workers overseas. '

Super Capitalism, Super Imperialism and Monetary Imperialism

Henry C.K. Liu

http://www.henryckliu.com/page143.html

Say what?

Leonine, adjective,

1) of or relating to one of the popes named Leo, esp. Leo IV and the part of Rome that he fortified.

2) a kind of Latin verse, generally alternate hexameter and pentameter rhyming in the middle and end.

- Oxford American Dictionary

ditto Chambers Twentieth Century

Who knew the Pigmen were so literate?

'But a crisis caused by repeated asset inflation can probably not be cured by even more of the same. As the Fed tries to solve the problem by pouring gasoline on the fire; as the Presidency and Congress continue a war America can't afford; as everyone fiddles around the edges with technical fixes to problems that go deeper than that, the situation would just get worse and worse.' - Ian Welsh, The Next Hoover

http://agonist.org/ian_welsh/20071001/the_next_hoover

I highly recommend it.

Now if you'll excuse me I have to go pursue the intriguing question of how some Popes named Leo got themselves entangled with contract law...may have to refer this to wordsmith.com.

'So, the whole colorful motley of hedge-fund gunslingers, private-equity barons, bond insurers, CDO traders, and fixed-income investors — the whole out-of-control business of steepling M&As, of vast share buybacks (and hence of main-market equity market performance, as well as emerging market re-rating) — the whole self-aggrandizing swagger of the Bulge Bracket bonus bonanza — all of it — every last red cent of it — has been, in turn, cause and effect of the build-up of the storm system which now threatens to sweep this Big Easy of false prosperity away, leaving little but the matchwood of shattered dreams and disabused expectations in its wake.' - Twilight of the Gods By Sean Corrigan

http://www.mises.org/story/2706