If you're not worried about what's going on....

StevieJ

Batchy wrote: »

two bad days on the markets.

Everyone is back from holidays now, could see some major activity as people profit from buying low, and pile in!

I can't believe that they all go on holiday for three months

gagahouse

Generali has never come across to me as some wild-eyed internet nutter and he is right to point out the dangers. We are on the precipice of another seize up in the financial system, govts are floundering and making the situation worse.

Trust is disappearing amongst the banks as in 2008, I would not treat this lightly. I can't say for sure the system is going to pop and when, but I can see the probability is increasing greatly. All one can do is to arrange your affairs to minimise your exposure but we will all be affected in some way if it does go down.

Generali

Thanks. I probably am a bit of a nutter, I used to do 80 hour working weeks!

Nobody has ploughed salt into the soil and the productive capacity of the world remains the same. My feeling is that it's 2008 all over again. Banks are going to go bust and probably countries too. To see the most likely outcome look at Iceland. Things were bad but not that bad. There were shortages of imported goods for a while but nobody starved and the lights stayed on.

Mrs_Bones

Generali wrote: »

Thanks. I probably am a bit of a nutter, I used to do 80 hour working weeks!

Nobody has ploughed salt into the soil and the productive capacity of the world remains the same.

Will that not be part of the problem going forward? I mean in a general way not just in a banking sense. The world does have a limited resource productive capacity, and yet we are populating the planet at an alarming rate. Sooner or later the productive capacity of the world will not match the needs of it's population.

Generali

Mrs_Bones wrote: »

Will that not be part of the problem going forward? I mean in a general way not just in a banking sense. The world does have a limited resource productive capacity, and yet we are populating the planet at an alarming rate. Sooner or later the productive capacity of the world will not match the needs of it's population.

Maybe. Malthus believed that food production rose arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4) and population rose geometrically (1, 2, 4, 8, 16). Technology has increased the ability of the world's population to feed itself.

There are billions of people who are or basically are subsistence farmers. That's a lot of land that could be used more effectively.

Perhaps technology will come to our rescue and perhaps it won't. I'm a pretty optimistic person at heart.

sabretoothtigger

That is an ancient doom prophesy going back to the 1970's
It has not been true so far due to technology benefits, society is able to provide for itself when its not busy screwing things up with politics or war, etc

In fact I would say the opposite in that population growth is a positive for a country including this one. Its not immediate or obvious but a decline in working population raises costs as China is starting to realise. They are lifting their one child policy in some parts for this reason I think


Currency is the big failure Iam expecting. A failure to maintain current worth due to poor trade in some countries, thats the basic supply and demand.
We have a false worth based on other things right now, so its a positive correction back to reality ?

Is the bank going to be in trouble if they get all the loan back but the value of it has dropped by half in the meantime.
Usually they also owe money themselves in the same currency so Im not sure who wins or loses

Generali

sabretoothtigger wrote: »

Is the bank going to be in trouble if they get all the loan back but the value of it has dropped by half in the meantime.
Usually they also owe money themselves in the same currency so Im not sure who wins or loses

They shouldn't be. The problem I guess would be for a country like Aus that relies extensively on funding from abroad. If foreign lenders lost faith in the currency it would make bank and business funding difficult and expensive.

quantic

"Be Fearful When Others Are Greedy And Greedy When Others Are Fearful" - never really understood this statement until recently.

Hoopie1

Generali wrote: »

Thanks. I probably am a bit of a nutter, I used to do 80 hour working weeks!

Nobody has ploughed salt into the soil and the productive capacity of the world remains the same. My feeling is that it's 2008 all over again. Banks are going to go bust and probably countries too. To see the most likely outcome look at Iceland. Things were bad but not that bad. There were shortages of imported goods for a while but nobody starved and the lights stayed on.

All of Iceland's energy is either geothermal or hydro, which may explain why the lights remained on.