Posted on 09/17/2008 11:20:14 PM PDT by HAL9000
Excerpt-
For Scotland's oldest bank, it was the suddenness of its rout that stunned. That and the silence at the top. That and the invisibility of leadership. That and the short-selling frenzy that descended on HBOS shares yesterday, like vultures on a corpse.This was the blackest day in Scottish banking. An appalling day of shock, confusion and disbelief.
Many this morning will still be aghast at the speed of the bank's share collapse. Anger and a reckoning will come later. Today, the fate of HBOS, the savings of its 22 million customers, the prospects for its 72,000 staff and the final reckoning for its 1.2 million hapless investors – whose shares have been savaged – rest on the merger with rival Lloyds TSB.
~ snip ~
(Excerpt) Read more at thescotsman.scotsman.com ...
I’ve been watching the business channels a bit more lately, but apparently not close enough. I didn’t hear anything about this at all. Damn.
Was there sabotage involved here? I don’t know enough to charge that, but it does come to mind. Are western concerns being targeted?
In the U.S. I can understand why things are taking place, but the Bank of Scotland doesn’t seem to be one that would be sharing those problems.
Russia will regret this week.
Easy money has been a world wide problem, particularly in real estate.
Evidently so. I thought we were the only ones stupid enough to give out millions of loans to people who had no chance of servicing them.
This is all too big for me.
'Sales are down by about 50% in the past year; mortgage approvals are down by more than 70% suggesting that sales have further to fall; and last week estate agents reported that in the three months to August, some of them were selling fewer than one property per week.
The head of the Nationwide building society, Graham Beale, has said that house prices might end up falling by as much as 25% from their peak seen in Autumn 2007.'
They are getting corrected as well.
Ya gotta wonder what they have been teaching (or not teaching) in finance/business programs these days. After all of these years these businesses are diving. Is it the lack of ethics? The lack of religion. Is it pure greed and lack of long term dedication to something larger than oneself? Is it just the lack of business savvy skills? Man. This generation has gone way off course. Way.
We are not alone...
Nope.
A lot of the world was part of a property bubble. Some parts also had an equity bubble. There was also a commodities bubble. Other parts just had piles of investment capital and nowhere good to park it, so they stuck it in someone elses bubble. All the bubbles have been popping since last year.
Yes, I realize that.
The complex way these financial concerns are intertwined with each other, is what bothers me. The question about some of these large firms going down, is do you let them and start the dominoes going twice as fast. Isn’t the government almost forced to stand behind some of these concerns rather than let them go?
Perhaps those who know more about this than I think that it’s going to happen anyway, and the government shouldn’t expose itself to risk.
All I know for sure, is that we need to get back to sound lending practices.
Thanks DB.
The Obama campaign has issued a swift reaction to this:
Once it again it proves how the failed philosophies of President Bush, his right-hand man John McCain and the United States Of America have caused financial havoc around the world.
It is well known that Bush has been directly responsible for the creation and implementation of Scotland’s policies and regulations, as they relate to the banking industry, since the very first day he stepped into office.
Our candidate, Barack Obama, has cancelled all US appearances and is currently in flight to Scotland to present his plan of Marxist reform to help reassure the Scottish people.
I think the problem, oddly enough, was too much savings and too much well-being.
Lots of people all over the world were getting wealthy with the long booms of the post-cold war, and putting away huge amounts in savings and through retirement funds. The trouble was, there weren’t too many safe-seeming places to put these funds.
Traditional investment in business formation in advanced countries was a bit limited, as the risk/return was poor, mainly because there is limited unmet demand - all that well-being, see. The internet bubble also had killed the attraction of equity markets and VC. And investment in the third world (a natural place for investment one would think) was also risky.
So far too much of this loose money went into property.
IBD-—The Real Culprits In This Meltdown
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=306370789279709
The dynamite itself consists of the derivatives market. It is beginning to unwind itself and the gambling bets made by the worlds largest investment houses since the early 1990's are about to detonate. Think of $500 trillion notional dollars worth of bets tearing apart the economies of the entire world.
As bad as this week has been, we haven't seen anything yet...
The Badger Detonation: a 23 kiloton nuclear explosion fired on April 18, 1953 at the Nevada Test Site,
Global depression in 10... 9... 8... 7...
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