More and more people are getting edgy about the markets. What started out as the “subprime lending crisis” is turning out to be only the tip of the iceberg, just as I have been saying for years. Top bankers on Wall Street are no longer willing to lend out new capital at ANY interest rate. The big investment firms are doing the analysis and finding that their testicles are frozen. Recently, auctions that help to set interest rates in the market have been failing right and left because none of the banks are willing to commit to them anymore. Situations like this have come along before- in 1907 when J.P. Morgan bailed out the markets with his own money and the day after the Black Tuesday crash of 1987 when Goldman Sachs and Salomon Brothers committed their own funds to keep the S&P 500 liquid. However, in today’s global market and with the size of the financial abyss that much of the developed world now teeters on, there is no one stepping forward to save the day. Probably only players on the scale of nations can stop what is about to happen, and even then it will only be to push the crash a few years further out. The times of free credit are rapidly becoming a distant memory and it is finally time for market economics to rear its ugly head and pop the multitude of bubbles that have been growing for decades. Time for me to go buy a shotgun and a bomb shelter and move to the mountains. See you guys later!
I sorta feel like Nostradamus, except more likely to be correct. If only governments had left the free markets alone and not interfered with regulations and rules (such as the Federal Reserve itself), the markets would have maintained themselves without monstrous consequences.