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alot of it can be traced back to other places than "freedom" and "market speculation" i mean, ok, course there was some shady things going on, but austrains would argue government created the conditions for this to happen. failure of middle class wages has a lot lets to do with "corporate greed" than it does with runaway inflation and destruction of the dollar's purchasing power.

housing prices is a long long story to write out, but lets start with clinton and others promoting home ownership of minorities, which included the creation of fanny mae and freddy mac, and new banking regulations which required bankers to give loans to people who would otherwise wouldnt be deemed economically feasible to loan to. combined with interest rates artificially set low by one man, alan greenspan, the promotion, encouragement and environment for lending shit loads of money was in place.

now suddenly people have tons of artificially created money, buying things they cant afford and with no way to pay them back.

   

Personally I'd have let the big boys die horrible fiscal deaths, watched the housing market crash to worthlessness, watched unemployment spike temporarily to over 30% and let thousands of fresh start up companies take over the economy.

But after making the decision to protect the status quo there is nothing left except to use socialization to artificially inflate the middle class and buy the American economy maybe another 20 years.

   

It's all going to crash anyway. What the bailout and stimulus did was to allow the criminals on Wall Street to steal what was left from the nation before they abscond to Switzerland or wherever they plan on hiding.

   

i personally would have done the same thing. there is no sense in rewarding bad behaviour and destroying incentives for succesfull businesses

   

I'm with you there. I may have done something to protect personal checking and some savings(like $20k combined) but AIG and the likes would be no more.

   

http://www.usdebtclock.org/

I was wrong debt per tax payer is 122k in the states.

   

crazy! they are putting future generations in debt before they are even born!

   

Only if you can't pay that up before you die.

   

I read or heard somewhere recently if countries like China, Japan etc etc cashed in their US loans. The US would become a nation asking for foreign aid instead of giving it.

Something like over 9 trillion dollars.

   

They should try it. Then nobody will be buying their stuff. China is heavily reliant on the US now as it's biggest customer.

Try pulling your best customers credit and see how far you get.

There will be a lot of empty factories in China and all those Honda’s, Toyota’s, BMW’s, Merks etc will have nowhere to go.

It makes me laugh to see all these wiki-economists expressing high levels schadenfreude at the current US economic woes. The Yanks have been here before and they came out it very strong economically and politically. I wouldn’t be writing the US off as a world power quite yet.

I do agree with Thanos on the US right-wing though.

It has been hijacked by a lot of isolationist loonies and it really is wandering around in the political wilderness. The lack of a cohesive and reasonable right in the US is a political gift to Obama, who really has turned out be an eloquent speaker and that’s about it.

He’s turned out to be a political dud, which is a great pity. I had high hopes.

   

Never said they would, I said IF. Just to demonstrate the amount of the debt the US is in.

   

Most countries keep reserves of american currency to purchase from american markets and/or markets that trade in american currency. It would hurt everyone if someone was to succeed at crashing the US economy.

When it comes down to it, if things crashed really badly, the US has the productivity, the resources, the technology and the people to pull through it. Not all countries can say that.

   

I suppose that's actually what I meant. Any armed force would have to be contoled by someone. If it's the existing army that's in command, then it's pointless redundancy. If it's some kind of police force then why keep the ATF, FBI, etc. About all that leaves is for some kind of political party control...

   

Well not any kind of existing party, maybe some kind of a combined "National(ist) Party" who's job it is to control this "Domestic Military (like a police force with extra powers and assault rifles)" to root out "Terrorism both foreign (Al Queda) and domestic (Militia's and Hippie Protesters with rocks)"

Makes Homeland Security triply redundant.

   

IF that would happen we would probably call in our loans to pay off the ones from China and Japan ect...

But you right its around 9 trillion dollars.

A lot of Europe needs to breath a sigh of thanks that they are not being made to repay war loans from WWI. Only Finland has ever paid back the US.

It is scary though that we owe china money. Not a position I like being in.

   

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