OT: When is the bubble going to pop?

Really? Then how did you miss at least 100 hints in the past year, pointing to the problem with oil commodities? The hints have been in every single article about oil prices. All of them.

You missed them all. I know this because you asked me to provide examples. Remember? Just last week.

You missed them all.

Really? There are also hints that Bush is able to think. But not have been born out.

And yet you failed to do so.

Hints are not proof of anything.

And it has yet to be determined how big of a role speculation has played.

Jeff

I most certainly did. You didn't respond to the messages. You also failed to tell me what you did for a living, a question I asked because you don't understand quite a bit about the investment markets.

What do you do for a living?

After you reach the age of 18, you will understand that hints mean everything.

You need to discard your quasi-religious faith in free enterprise. It does not exist.

The only time Hach. was ever wrong was one time back in 1983 when he thought he was wrong but was really right.

A prime example of why you should never gamble using borrowed money!

No one was forced to sign the agreement, neither the banks nor the borrowers. The fault lies with both as well as the federal banking regulators.

What federal banking regulators? The problem was that banks weren't involved.

Jeff

Where did the money come from Jeff? Did the mortgage brokers have a money tree were they picked it? Why are the banks in financial trouble?

Jack

Something doesn't make sense there. In order to sell slow moving widgets, the price needs to be *decreased*, not *increased*. If he increased the price I would expect the sales to be even slower - or if close to zero sales, I would expect them to remain close to zero.

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')

The owner is a kid of less than 30, I've met him once. Daddy bought the apartment building for him. He's never had to work with his hands. Another Peter the Insignificant. Part of the problem is the people that are buying the apartments he doesn't like, so he's trying to price them out of the market, I suspect.

Let me put it this way. The phone company still delivers the same number of phone books. The last 3 years there were no leftovers. This year, you can see all the leftovers sitting down in the mail room. (Hint, hint)

Charles the Curmudgeon

Close. It was 1984, and I thought I was right, but I was *REALLY* wrong!

The money came from companies that sold the mortgages to home buyers. The companies then packaged the mortgages and sold them to investors, such as the Bear Sterns Investment bank.

Which banks? The banks that are in trouble are the banks that bought the loan portfolios as investments, without understanding how risky the loans were. As far as I can tell, very few banks made a lot of risky mortgages. Some companies that owned banks, like Countrywide, got into trouble. However, this is because of their mortgage operations that were not tied to the banks.

The banks that are in financial trouble, like HBSC, are banks that bought the mortgage portfolios.

Banks, savings and loans and credit unions that had nothing to do with the questionable mortgages had no financial difficulties. They didn't really need to increase their borrowing standards because they never lowered them.

Jeff