> When two investment banks vaporize over a weekend as a giant insurance
> company screams for tens of billions and a major retail bank circles the
> drain, well, this doesn't appear to be business as usual.
Oh, but it is - it's just Euro/Asiabiz as usual. The final phase of the US Empire was nothing but a vast Potemkin Mortgage -- piles of shoddily-produced, energy-devouring junk wrapped in chimerical AAA ratings, ringed by a giant prison-garrison-warfare state for show. Roubini is correct in emphasizing this isn't a liquidity crisis, this is a solvency crisis -- all those bad debts, the product of 30 years of neoliberal polarization, income disparity, and speculative madness -- are coming due.
But don't worry, the sovereign wealth funds of the semi-periphery and the central banks of the new metropoles will bail this place out. They'll let Wall Street twist in the wind a little, and after a sufficient quantity of blood has accumulated on the floor, they'll snap up the choice assets. Structural adjustment comes home at last...
-- DRR