JP Morgan has a Playmobil moment They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so we're well and truly flattered that JP Morgan has taken a leaf out of the El Reg Bootnotes book and decided that figurines are the best way to illustrate important news. In this case, it's the European debt crisis rendered in Lego miniatures: The European debt crisis …
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the work of nine-year-old Peter Cembalest, "who specializes in conceptualization of such phenomena".
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For some reason I had this memory of the Jethro Tull album "Thick As A Brick" which was written by a 9-year old "little Milton", Gerald Bostock ...
For those that don't know of it, check out the cover art - especially the stories.
I grovel and humbly apologise. I had not seen that one, probably had disappeared from the front page when i went for my daily fix.
In mitigation the link to the playmobil page doesn't include a link to that article
And I'm not an iPad user; unfortunately my company deems the site you use to host your videos as NSFW.
Dunno about anyone else, but I'm sick of these financial fuckwits spunking someone else's cash chasing stupid dreams. We could do worse than get a bunch of kids in to look at the world's finances using their in built brutally honest appraisals of everything in life.
"You want us to spend money we don't have? That's stupid!"
Everyone seems to think that because Greece and Italy are struggling to repay their debts, and they use Euros, that everyone else who uses Euros should help pay.
Well I use Pounds. Lots of other people use Pounds, why aren't they helping to pay my debts? Why is it that I can go bankrupt and the bank loose money on me, but Greece and Italy can't?
Especially since it's the bank's fault for lending so much money to Greece when they had no hope of being able to pay it back (or is it the fault of those people in USA who said; yeah this is a safe bet, buy, buy, buy just like all those mortgages?)
Oh and to be on topic, Lester could've done better :)
...they issue euros.
Like the fiver in your pocket is an IOU from the Bank of England, an Italian Euro is an IOU from the Italian state. If the Italian state defaults, then its IOUs won't be worth what they say they are; but an Italian Euro is interchangeable with a German Euro - so if I have an Italian Euro, I'll swap it for a German Euro, then I have an IOU from the Bundesbank. See what I did there? - the other Euro states then have to pay Italian debts.
Something like that, IANAE.
The stormtroopers are appropriate symbols for the European Commission: they certainly aren't skilled enough to be represented by Vader and the Emperor, no matter what Barroso and chums think.
Meanwhile, the example of Iceland is an interesting one: if you basically let yourselves off the hook and tell everyone that their money is gone, that other governments will have to bail out savers, and that money won't be returned to those governments either, of course there'll be an upturn in the economy once it has fallen off the precipice, especially if half the country has to go abroad to earn a living and you don't have to find money for unemployment benefits and so on. I'm not so sure that anyone will want to trust an Icelandic financial institution ever again, though.
IMF, that's the tunnel through Congress (possibly setup by the same) to funnel out American tax payer money to rich people around the world. That is, to bail them out after a bad day at the market.
Funny that the EU originally wanted to avoid involving the IMF as it would look bad upon the whole venture but I think the Germans and the Greeks took care of that shyness.
It must not have been enough that the TARP program and various other US funded bank bailouts also sent payola over the pond to banks on Airstrip One and the continent.
For instance what is the origin of the crisis? Ok, I guess it's better for JP Morgan not to mention the subprimes scam anymore, and the roles of banks and the financial sector at large in the economic disaster the World is experiencing. We are here to pay for them, not to expect them to be accountable, aren't they?
Anyway, another weird point is why is the EU debt crisis so serious when the ratio debt over GDP of the eurozone is still 20 points below the ratio of the US, for instance?
For UK, AFAIK the ratio is 150%. Who is gonna pay?
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