I watched all five episodes – thanks for the link. Ever read ‘The Asylum’ – Leah McGrath?

I did it again. Long day…

Well Hawkeye, at least you can spell your own name.

But yes, I agree. The pace of change is picking up and the fear seems to percolating downwards rapidly. I attended a PositiveMoney meetup last week and there were several people there just looking for advice on how to protect themselves in the face of the oncoming collapse. Seems like the BBC isn’t fulfilling its remit!

Jamie

Seems like you’re always 3 steps ahead of me!

I reckon I’ll need to move a bit quicker in 2012 as the pace of change is picking up now…………

PositiveMoney have put together a good resource on moving your money to a more ethical bank:

http://www.positivemoney.org.uk/2011/01/move-your-money-to-a-mutual/

I switched to the Co-op about 6 months ago and feel much better as a consequence. Their customer service is very good too.

But rather than leaving any money in the bank I’ve been using what (if any) is left over at the end of every month to buy a silver bullion coin.

The decisions remain to be taken in Japan, too! 1989 to 2011! LONG TIME! LOVE YOU LONG TIME!!!

Depressions hang around like unpaid whores. Payoff! Who loses for every debt is someone’s asset! Who has not got the juice? GS decided that Lehmans had to go, pour encourager les autres, but mainly to enable GS to make loadsamoney!

Who else has to go? The alternative is austerity for the mob. GS will be the last! Should take decades though…….. Who is there to take these tough decisions…..?

Quite. My reporting of the news did not imply any approval of the ratings agencies, far from it. But like it or not, the impact of that news will certainly be felt.

It would surely be better if the business of rating countries were given over to an international not-for-profit body, though as the example of FIFA shows, that too could be open to corruption.

IMO the ratings agencies vary between 50% & 100% in the political derivation of their sovereign debt ratings. (S&P’s absurd downgrade of US gov debt hit the 100% mark.)

With that in mind, the downgrade (or threats) of Euro governments’ debt has a single purpose in common with all the other ratcheting up of pressure.

That purpose is to steamroller an even greater straightjacket of ersatz euro fiscal union which gives the banks even more power over the financial affairs of states. And do this as permanently as possible with the shortest possible period for public debate & challenge.

It gets right up my nose that despite a few murmers of ‘democratic illegitimacy’, most mainstream media still portray the ECB, various finance sector players & political leaders all as the ‘honest brokers’ they are certainly not.

Those credit ratings agencies certainly have chutzpah – given that the debts they are downgrading link directly back to the AAA-rated debts they were rubber-stamping for huge fees back in the noughties – subsequently off-loaded onto government accounts.

Shouldn’t we ask why we allow private firms who wouldn’t know a conflict of interest if it hit them between the eyes to continue to pontificate on anything more than the the credit worthiness of a whelk stall?

Perhaps we should get some independent agency to go over the track record of S&P, Moody & Fitch to see if they can hold a candle to Michael Fish’s predictive capacity?

We’ve seen the biggest collapse in financial history, which was not only not predicted by the ratings agencies, but fuelled by them (they couldn’t see that the housing market couldn’t keep rising forever) – what would have to happen before their competence was brought into question?

It’s a crucial point, because their downgradings threaten to produce a self-fulfilling prophecy. Just as their misrating of AAA on the way up gave investors a false sense of security, leading to more borrowing and higher asset prices, their edicts on the way down will inevitably signal the shorting of certain bonds – effectively facilitating an organized serial attack.
——————————————————————————–

“Furthermore, the recent track-record of rating agencies has been nothing short of lamentable. In the words of Paul Krugman, S&P’s decision to downgrade US debt is analogous to the story of “[a] young man who kills his parents, then pleads for mercy because he’s an orphan.” America’s deficit is largely a result of stimulating an economy that crashed following the financial crisis of 2008. S&P, along with its sister agencies played a large role in assigning AAA credit-ratings to collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) and other mortgage backed securities, which have subsequently turned into toxic-waste. S&P also gave Lehman Brothers an A-rating right until the month it filed for chapter-11, and perhaps worse still US treasury officials spotted a $2tn mistake in S&P’s calculations, which the rating agency acknowledged, but proceeded to complete the downgrade anyway.”
http://goo.gl/XACqi

“Further complicating the issue is that the major agencies make money by charging private issuers for a rating. They are paid by those they judge. Critics say this created perverse incentives such that at the height of the credit boom in 2005 to 2007, the agencies recklessly awarded Triple A ratings to complex exotic structured instruments that they scarcely understood.

They have profited handsomely. In the three-year period ending in 2007, the height of the credit boom, S&P’s operating profit rose 73 percent to $3.58 billion compared to the three-year period ending in 2004. The comparable gain for Moody’s over the same period was 68 percent to $3.33 billion.”
http://goo.gl/4okaP

“as investors are well aware, the credit ratings agencies have a track record — and it is not pretty.

For whatever reasons — including some pretty outrageous conflicts of interest — they have systematically under-predicted almost every major debt crisis that we’ve had in the last fifty years.

The big misses included the Third World debt crises of the 1980s, the Japan debt crisis of the late 1980s, the Asian and Russian debt crises of 1997-99, the Argentine debt crisis of 2001-02, the global banking crisis of 2007-2009, and the Euro-debt crises of the last two years — as well as private corporate debt fiascos like Enron and AIG.

Now, badly burned by all these miscalled balls, the umpires at credit agencies have decided to call more strikes.

From Eastern Europe and the “PIIGS” to the US federal government, and state and local governments, they have recently been over-predicting one fiscal crisis after another, demanding radical reductions in deficits.”
http://goo.gl/7p9KV

EUR Tumbles: S&P About To Put Europe’s AAA Club (Including Germany, France And Austria) On “Creditwatch Negative”