Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Fear

When I initiated this blog, I discussed how fear and greed are driving factors in our markets.

The Federal Reserve and the Treasury are now trying to deal with the tremendous fear in the markets today by creating a mechanism (a $700 Billion mechanism) to absorb the shocks to the system and restore confidence to the markets.

I consider myself a capitalist. I believe that markets work, in the long term.

I believe that situations like this, however, require a party to step in to allow markets to work properly - and prevent panic selling from overwhelming and eliminating demand.

While some parties to the discussion are focused on blame and punishment, I don't believe we have the luxury of dealing with that now.

I believe intervention is necessary, and urgently so.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi all,



Just want to tell you my opinion on why we have greed.



1. people don't care or get involved and make people accountable it's to much work or stress.

2. as long as I am happy have a good job who cares attitude.

3 I think greed is spreading every were.

4 Lost are morals and ethics in america

5. we don't have god in are heart.

6. stupidity and loss are common sense in america.

I feel america is a mess and were heading for some serious dark days. If want know my opinion email me. Greed is going destroy use and america is going to go broke, loosing jobs like crazy. Do we make anything any more and we used be a place were people looked up at america but not any more. Were a joke any more.

I so sick of it and wish I could do something to help!!!

Michael75065@Yahoo.com

Michael Ladd

Lawrence D. Loeb said...

In my opinion, greed is a natural imperative and is part of human nature.

This becomes a problem (like in the case of the Madoff scandal) when greed is not constrained by morals.

The underlying cause of most of the current crisis does not seem to be primarily related to criminal (or immoral) activity. That certainly happened in the case of certain mortgage originations, but I don't believe that it played a large part in the overall crisis.

I believe the biggest underlying cause was euphoria overcoming good sense as prices levitated and the cost of borrowing was cheap. People believed the assets that they purchased would continue to increase and never go down (particularly in the housing markets). These people borrowed excessive amounts of money in good faith, but based on a false belief (hope).

Money remained cheap because of other factors (mainly the trade deficit, which led to our trading partners keeping their dollar revenues in Treasuries, preventing an increase in the value of their currencies versus the dollar).