The Price of Greed

The graph below gives me some hope for the citizens of the west. While Wall Street is in the toilet, the Bush administration is proposing to bail out the various financial institutions with $500 Billion dollars. This is, essentially, the price of the greed that free market economies, capitalism and conservative governance encourages. Hopefully, this will mean less money to commit war. I’m glad the blogosphere at least is calling it as it sees it.

Comments

[modgen]

Please, this is not real free markets. The government encouraged this with its corruption from the very start. I'd call it a failure of crony capitalism.

[marc]

ha i like this. although i would almost argue that this graph is inversely proportional to the actual price of greed. particularly: the more visible greed is, the more strenuously it needs to be concealed

[MichalT]

"I’m glad the blogosphere at least is calling it as it sees it."

You mean like "greedy financial institutions are lobbying Bush administration for a buyout"? :P

[MichalT]

BTW, no offense, but as much as I enjoy your blog and respect your work, the comment about price of greed encouraged by free markets and capitalism shows you don't know much about neither.

[Matthew Hurst]

MichalT - are you saying that the mortgage crisis is in now related to the greed of the employees of the financial institutions that are now looking to be bailed out?

[Renegade Division]

How are you guys blaming it all on Greed, OR on Capitalism?

Its sheer ignorance(at least about capitalism, since everybody is cursing Greed so I would give you that that you got caught up).

Simple logic says that so many of the people, entities and businesses cannot become GREEDY at ONE SINGLE TIME.

Its ridiculous. If overall rapes in a society increase, then you might say that people have become more Horny, but if only in the month of Feb there are 500% more rapes than any other time in last 5 years then you don't need a Data mining tool to derive that there is something other responsible for the phenomenon rather than their persona GREED(or horniness in this case)

Federal Reserve caused this breakdown, and Federal Reserve has caused EVERY single breakdown/recession/depression till now.

How do they do it?
They do it by increasing the money supply of the economy thereby creating artificial wealth, and an artificial boom in the economy.

Take a look at Federal Funds rate and the artificial boom it followed in 2002-2006.

Someone who is TOO greedy for money is smart enough to plan his acquisition of largest amount of money. But inflated money supply blinds/distorts the vision of the Market. It creates malinvestments in the economy which someday fail and the market goes through a correction phase once more.

Those $600 checks everyone received a few months ago contributed more than anything in this meltdown.

I am just started in the field of Data Mining, but try doing a simple data mining on the Money Supply of the Economy, Inflation rate, Gold Price, and GDP Growth rate and see this thing for yourself.