Understood, but I was actually being tactful 🙂 There aren’t enough *’s around to cover what I really think of our elected representatives, be they red, blue or yellow (or green)..

The US and everyone else’s subprime market was a creation of the credit based model that the Fed and Golden Gordo used – the roots are back in the nineties.

I don’t know anything about the gold selling to be honest, it just seems like poor judgement to me! What happened to the proceeds? What does the UK have to show for it?

There’s a reason I’m in Japan – even after earthquake, tsunami and meltdown I’m still reluctant to come home for good in October! Actually if you want a real good financial disaster story have a look at Japan’s one – it’s a corker!

Oh and another fing! Fred and Fanny Mac were lenders to high risk home buyers as well: as soon as the economy started to cool a little, their foreclosures went up and the housing market contracted.

Bad luck chaps.

I might actually research this a little! A lot of what I’ve written could be obllocks 🙂

Ahhh, but the root of the real estate collapse was the so called “toxic” debt being traded to fund lenders like Fred and Fanny (or whatever they were called!). That toxic debt was high risk, high interest credit (biggest risk, biggest return) and when that end of the debt chain saturated it was realised that a lot of wealth only existed as potential repayment of debt: that is, nothing. Fred and Fanny collapsed when the debts they owned started to be dishonoured and the whole lot fell down from there. I’ll try to work out where Northern Rock fits in, but I reckon it had the same root causes – poor investment choices with toxic funds.

Noo Labour removed safeguards and controls on borrowing, following the US lead and allowing an economy built on money that had not been earned yet (and the pillock sold the gold too).

This is my understanding of it anyway, feel free to discuss.

Post 700! Woohoo!

As far as I am concerned the gummint used the easy availability of credit to stave off a recession throughout the late nineties and post 9/11. Gordon Brown promised no return to boom and bust and the only way was to allow people to finance their lives by credit. It was like giving everyone a virtual payrise without an immediate impact on inflation.
The banks were happy cos they could charge interest, and the retailers were happy because people bought stuff on credit and remortgaged their homes to finance depreciating items like cars. Remortgaging artificially inflated the value of property which meant that more lemmings leapt after the fast buck. Then “they” realised nothing was holding the whole lot up (bit like a 2 year old learning to walk – they suddenly realise that they are not holding on to anything and fall flat on their ****), the **** hit the fan and we all got covered.

The daft Scotsman thought that smiling Tony (the oh so successful Middle East Peace Envoy and WMD believer) would step down, and he (Gordon) could lose the next election before the whole unsustainable smoke and mirrors game collapsed and it could therefore be blamed on the Conservatives.

And people wonder why I don’t trust politicians…

I’d argue that Viz has a far greater cultural significance..

Awesome!!

To refresh, I’ve gone for an i5 760 running at 2.8 GHz, 1333 DDR3 (more on that later) and an NVidea GTX550 with 1GB.

Ok, so the uprade kinda turned into a new PC (I had the brainwave of turning the old setup into a media server, so bought a new case etc.* for the new bits), but I’m pleased to report that CloD runs OK with the settings backed off a bit. Turn the grass off and pull the detail back to mediium and it runs as smooth as you like – the aircraft look lovely and the lack of detail hardly notices. There are still issues to be sorted by Oleg and the boys but it looks like a winner to me.

If anybody wants me I’ll be over the channel somewhere…

* err, 200 quid later, but that did include tickling the RAM (ooer) up to 8GB, a nice Antec case and PSU, and the gubbins to make the old box remote controlled. I might go SLi next month, we’ll see! I have the option of going up to an i7 as well which is getting close to what is reasonably cost effective without spending megabucks on Extreme processors or Zeons.

Not so fast!

http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=19645

All is well, and the 300 quid I spent on new bits is justified!