The financial collapse

People are saying that this is the biggest downturn and crashlanding faced in the global financial markets since the Great Depression. Apparently house prices are dropping, interest rates are being slashed, share markets are crashing, currency values are tumbling, people and companies and now even national economies going bankrupt etc. There's been all sorts of hyperbole, reports, blah blah, which I will not go on about.

I haven't felt anything. So far, there's only the petrol price increase, and the associated costs of living that goes with the territory. I don't dabble in the share market, I haven't bought a house recently. In fact, it is good news in a way because when house prices have fallen enough, and if there really will be a recession as predicted, in the next 2 years I can afford a better place. Similarly, share prices are cheaper to pick up, and since they will then keep going up, I guess it's a good bet for some gains.

What keeps me laughing though, are the news reports of all those Wall Street types who have lost their jobs, those banks and bankers who are eating dirt now. And all these investment bankers and so called bankers and richie rich people having to eat humble pie.

What makes me bitter?

Well, what I do for work, is we are involved in producing something, an actual physical product, and we have to sell it, and the consumer is able to touch/taste/see/feel/hold it, and then they pay us for it. So we are making something first, and then selling it. It is hard work, but it is honest money.

In the case of all these people, a couple of bad experiences have forever made me think a certain way of them. #1, most of these people are cocky, arrogant, and think that they are better than the rest of the world because they make more money. Well, it is not honest money. Selling financial products is like hot air; when the crap surfaces, the product is not even worth the paper it is signed on. Selling virtual numbers, dealing with virtual numbers, where fortunes are made and lost with a key stroke, not dealing in something SOLID. When I was in uni, and taking commerce subjects, you should see the arrogance and disdain the commerce/finance people had for engineers. Sneers and stifled giggles were not uncommon. I was asked a fellow basketball player what he worked as. He looked at me slowly, gave me the once over, and cockily said, 'I'm a banker'. And proceeded to ignore me. Well, in the interest of being friendly, because everyone in the group was chatting about our work, and I did not want him to feel left out, I asked "So what do you do for the bank?". I mean, you could be a cleaner, or teller right?

And he paused tying his laces. Turned his head slowly to look at me. And repeated, like I was a dumbo, "I'm a banker. You know what that is?". I was so incensed I proceeded to give him a couple of hard forearm shivers and kicked his ass. You meet a lot of guys like that while playing basketball in PJ. Cocky, arrogant, educated, thinking they are God's gift to women just because they can speak good English, were educated in the UK, and work as an investment banker. Oh puh-lease!

Then there were those uni-mates who graduated, worked in banks, and now everyone talks of them in such wide eyed respectful gushing tones, about how much money they are making...doing what? Being high class salesmen who flaunt pieces of paper at rich men with disposable incomes, in return having a smoke and a drink. No dignity, if you ask me. Everyone is just doing the paper chase. Everyone wanting to get money with minimal work but not by using their brains. Just pushing whatever product their boss tells them is the flavor of the money, with scant regard to what happens once the deal is done. Thats exactly how my mum lost about 20k Sing dollars. And these are the same type of products that banks are trying to sell to me.

Basically, buy this unit trust. It's good. But we don't monitor for you, so if you don't monitor it, there is a possibility the value might drop to zero and you lose your capital. WTF? If we were so free to monitor it, we neednt buy it from you - stupid. It's not that I am venomous towards bankers. Far from it. Those guys who actually do the qualitative and quantitative work, I have respect for them. The back end guys, the operational guys. But please don't try to tell me how respectful and wonderful and intelligent investment bankers/currency traders are. I will never be able to respect guys who sell pieces of virtual paper. If you are going to sell something, do it the old fashioned way, mate - make em, then sell em.

I just hate people who think that they can jump queue and one up the rest of us and are better than us, purely by participating in what I see as not much more than a get rich quick scheme by the greedy, for the greedy.

The only tragedy here is that while the top echelon of these types, the head honchos at Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, etc are walking away with literally hundreds of millions either in savings/payouts, the life savings, the tears+blood money of all the Ma and Pa investors who were merely trying to procure some insurance for their kids' college education funds, are now left in the lurch.

It was absolutely disgraceful and disgusting that Hank Paulson wanted that 700bil bailout fund. Ultimately, the big guys at Wall Street are now insulated, and used that money to fund some private champagne celebratory parties, instead of using those funds to guarantee or at least liquidize and pay back some of the funds to the Ma and Pa investors. And, these are taxpyer monies. The next step, mark my words, will involve wholesale guarantees of bank savings by governments.

Sharks...the whole lot of em.