Fortune tellers?
No, I know these people from the Ron Paul movement.
back in Sep 2007, when these were added to youtube, the market was still strong, the dow was just coming off a high of 14,200 or so.....
The Strength of the Market is meaningless. The stronger it appears, the riskier people behave.
The whole POINT of such things as "bubbles" is that a frenzy of speculation and "get rich quick" movements within the culture coalesce into a FALSE rise in the market.
Thus far the proximate cause in all of this seems to be the origin of new loan products whose formulae were so arcane that Loan packagers were hiring Physicists to do the math.
The rating agencies rated these new loan products at triple A, even though they had no idea what the bizarrely complex formulae really meant.
These triple A rated assets were then bought up by Fannie and Freddie and further distributed throughout the world- getting snapped up due to the long history of triple A rated instruments being secure.
So- a good hard look at who is running Moodys, Fitch, S&P is in order-
And an investigation into the Loan originators...
I just listened to an episode of This American Life where they covered an AWARDS ceremony...
folks in the lending industry giving out fucking awards to the braniacs who "invented" these new products.
I am sick to death of republican blame shifting and bullshit talk about the "irresponsible" borrowers...
These were FAULTY products 'manufactured' by U.S. corporations and PUSHED to the consumer as "safe".
Further pushed to the entire financial sector as triple A safe.
The companies that need to take this on the chin are the folks who INVENTED these products and the folks who gave them the safest rating.