NEW YORK (Reuters) - Renowned investor George Soros said on Friday the world financial system has effectively disintegrated, adding that there is yet no prospect of a near-term resolution to the crisis.

Soros said the turbulence is actually more severe than during the Great Depression, comparing the current situation to the *demise of the Soviet Union*.

He said the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September marked a turning point in the functioning of the market system.

"We witnessed the collapse of the financial system," Soros said at a Columbia University dinner. "It was placed on life support, and it's still on life support. There's no sign that we are anywhere near a bottom."

His comments echoed those made earlier at the same conference by Paul Volcker, a former Federal Reserve chairman who is now a top adviser to President Barack Obama.


(Reporting by Pedro Nicolaci da Costa and Juan Lagorio; Editing by Gary Hill)
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Bush began the process of putting the American Economy on life support, and now, Congress, at President Obama's urging, has passed additional legislation to help stabilize our economy further going forward.

What additional actions do you think that the American government should take to help ameliorate the disaster of economic DISINTEGRATION?

Did Soros intentionally make a $550 Billion Bank run on the money market mid-Sept ? He may have .
ALMOST ARMAGEDDON - New York Post

Democrat Rep. Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania spoke of it on C-Span
LiveLeak.com - Rep. Kanjorski: $550 Billion Disappeared in "Electronic Run On the Banks"

Apparently based on this event TARP was shoved down out thoats.

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Mr. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. had made an urgent and unusual evening visit to Capitol Hill, and they were gathered around a conference table in the offices of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“When you listened to him describe it you gulped," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.

As Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, put it Friday morning on the ABC program “Good Morning America,” the congressional leaders were told “that we're literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system, with all the implications here at home and globally.”

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It wouldn't be the 1st time. Soros had financially attacked countries before.
[Bank of England (Black Wednesday) 1992
Malaysian Devaluation 1997]
When Soros instigated Black Wednesday, it spelled the end of Thatcher's Conservative control of Britain.Could he have manufactured a similar event to manipulate the elections... an October Surprise? Possibly . Before the events in mid-September McCain and Obama was in a virtual tie.

Soros is a one world government /one world currency type of guy. That is no secret. Everything he does has that goal in mind.

Hello Choux:

Some people can't hear what Soros says because of their prejudices AGAINST him...

ME?? I hear what he says because I'm prejudiced FOR him. He's for the legalization of marijuana.

Do either of us know what we're talking about? Nahhh.

excon

Not sure what prejudices you are referring to . The fact that he is an outspoken advocate of single world government and a single currency.. or that he has intentionally used his wealth to attack national currencies for political reasons;or that he is a convicted inside trader ? In fact he is a total hypocrite... playing the market and at the same time working to undermine it's foundations .
Yeah ;I'm guilty of being prejudice against that.

My suspicions remain . Mid-Sept. McCain and Obama was in a virtual tie . Was Soros behind the scenes manipulating the money markets for political reasons ? He's done it before .

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Originally Posted by Choux

NEW YORK (Reuters) -
What additional actions do you think that the American government should take to help ameliorate the disaster of economic DISINTEGRATION??

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Get their noses totally out of the situation ASAP!

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Originally Posted by galveston

Get their noses totally out of the situation ASAP!

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Had the mortgage industry been properly regulated you wouldn't be in half of the mess you're in. Canada is not experiencing any housing mortgage meltdown due to proper regulations.

Again ;it wasn't insufficient regulation . It was government imposing social engineering mandates on the home financing industry that caused the bubble and the bubble bust.

I give you NY Slimes Sept 1999 :
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...=&pagewanted=2

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... Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.

The change in policy also comes at the same time that HUD is investigating allegations of racial discrimination in the automated underwriting systems used by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to determine the credit-worthiness of credit applicants.


The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets -- including the New York metropolitan region -- will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.


Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits. ...


... at least one study indicates that 18 percent of the loans in the subprime market went to black borrowers, compared to 5 per cent of loans in the conventional loan market.. .


Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's.

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Ah so it's the blacks again.

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Originally Posted by tomder55

again ;it wasn't insufficient regulation . It was government imposing social engineering mandates on the home financing industry that caused the bubble and the bubble bust.

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Hello tom:

It just wasn't. You try to find an enemy here and it's not surprising that it happens to be Barney Frank... That may have been one tenth of the problem, if that. But, this thing didn't happen in a bubble, so to speak. It's MUCH bigger than Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Pogo said it best, or was it Snoopy: We have seen the enemy and it is US. This meltdown happened because we all LET it happen. We all were drunk on rising house prices that we thought would never end. We all were making money, living on credit.

You're right about one thing. It wasn't insufficient regulation. It was regulators who didn't believe in regulating, NO MATTER whether there were sufficient regulations or not. Nobody was minding the store - NOBODY.

Indeed, THAT is the result of the wrongheadedness of Ronnie Raygun, when he said "Government IS the problem." With that attitude, how well would a regulator regulate?? The answer is NOT VERY WELL!

excon

Not quite... it was not lack of regulation or regulators asleep at the wheel... it was intentional lifting of well established lending practices to advance a social experiment . You can't get away from that fact.
See #16 here
https://www.askmehelpdesk.com/curren...-315430-2.html

And who profitted from it ? Do I need to remind you who was running the show and making money running Fannie.. yup the Dems ran it as their own piggy bank .

Well now that they are going to complete their vision by Nationalization of the banks, we won't have to go looking for friends of Angelo . We'll just have to find friends of Dodd.

NK sorry if you think my comments racist . I'm not being a coward just giving the facts . The best you can say for the actions of the libs was that they were good intentioned .

You guys are certainly talented at rewriting history. The Bush administration warned repeatedly about the potential problems at Fannie and Freddie. The Democrats response?



Maxine Waters: Through nearly a dozen hearings, we were frankly trying to fix something that wasn’t broke. Mr. Chairman, we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and particularly at Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Franklin Raines. [Raines would barely avoid prosecution for fraud.]

Gregory Meeks: … I’m just pissed off at OFHEO [the regulators trying to warn Congress of insolvency at the GSEs], because if it wasn’t for you, I don’t think we’d be here in the first place. … There’s been nothing that indicated that’s wrong with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac has come up on its own … The question that then comes up is the competence that your agency has with reference to deciding and regulating these GSEs.

Lacy Clay: This hearing is about the political lynching of Franklin Raines.

Barney Frank: I don’t see anything in this report that raises safety and soundness problems.

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Originally Posted by Choux

Bush began the process of putting the American Economy on life support, and now, Congress, at President Obama's urging, has passed additional legislation to help stabilize our economy further going forward.

What additional actions do you think that the American government should take to help ameliorate the disaster of economic DISINTEGRATION??

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The various agencies of the US Government actually have pretty limited ability to affect the flow of events and the financial chains of cause and effect that have been set in motion. None of us should expect anything they might do to make a whole lot of difference at this point. It's the perfect financial storm, worldwide in scope, and beyond the ability of any one national government to even influence significantly, much less control.

While Government policies designed to encourage home ownership probably led to some overinvestment in the sector, it didn't get to idiotic proportions until the vast ocean of dollars held outside the US, (dollars we spent on cars, oil, and consumer goods), came flooding back into the domestic real estate market through the purchase by foreigners of mortgage-backed securities and related financial "derivitaves". Predictably, this flood of new money artificially inflated the price of real estate especially, but other capital assets as well.

What has to happen is pretty simple. The artificially inflated values of capital assets (residential and commercial real estate, farms, mines, and factories) has to fall back to a level that reflects the ability of real people to pay for the goods and services they produce. Unfortunately for banks and other financial intermediaries, financial leverage works the same on the way down as it does on the way up, meaning that it's possible to lose way more money than you actually put into a deal, and if lots of deals go bad at once, you become insolvent with Astonishing Rapidity, as Winnie the Pooh would say. So far, everybody who's said we've reached bottom has been wrong. We live in "interesting times".

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What has to happen is pretty simple. The artificially inflated values of capital assets (residential and commercial real estate, farms, mines, and factories) has to fall back to a level that reflects the ability of real people to pay for the goods and services they produce. U

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yes and any "stimulus " creates an artificial floor that delays the inevidible .

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Originally Posted by tomder55

yes and any "stimulus " creates an artifical floor that delays the inevidible .

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Well, it's less like a floor and more like a grate or a sieve with very large openings.

There are two issues: One is falling demand in product markets, leading to job losses, leading to further demand reduction, and so on, in a self-reinforcing cycle. The other is that credit markets are barely functioning because so many of the big financial intermediaries (commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, private equity firms, hedge funds, etc.) are either insolvent or feared to be insolvent by other market participants.

Tax cuts and government spending are designed to address the first issue. The hope is to avoid a catastrophic overshoot on the downside. It may be a vain hope, because the contraction is happening so much faster than government policies can be agreed to and implemented. And also because, big as it is, the government sector is still small compared to the private sector, and if most of the private sector is running scared, government is neither big enough nor agile enough to counteract the effects of the stampede.

Government bailouts and other heroic efforts in the financial sector have the most potential to delay and impede the necessary and inevitable deflation in capital asset values. The fact is that many of the "assets" on the books of financial institutions are worthless, or at least they're worth far less than book value. In many cases, shareholders' equity is zero or less, i.e. they're broke. Anything less than full recognition of these facts will only prolong the pain. Bankruptcy is the proper outcome in many cases, and the sooner that's recognized and litigated, the sooner credit markets will begin to function normally again.