capitalism *is* fun :-)

I was coming out from a bank today, and noticed a woman from the maintenance company taking the elevator with a giant bag of toilet paper. Banks have more branches then any business (at least here). Imagine the amount of toilet paper being used up in banks due to the recent credit crisis. This will cause a major run on toilet paper manufacturers, causing severe disruption and high prices, leaving millions of homes without the precious commodity.

Yes, toilet paper will become the commodity of the year. I dare to advice people to start going long on toilet-paper and invest in futures. This commodity will surge by the end of the year. It will become the investment idea of 2008

Here is a brief list of what the $700 billion used for Wall Street bailout, would by. I am underlining the best ones.

You could buy everyone in America 2200 McDonalds apple pies.
You could buy all 32 NFL teams - 27 times.
Gasoline for a year for every adult in America. (175 billion gallons of gas)
You could literally buy the world a Coke. One 2-liter bottle per week for a year.
You could buy a 60-inch HDTV for every man, woman and child in the U.S.
You could buy 7 Mac laptops for every school-age child in U.S.
You could buy every adult in Miami-Dade County an average priced house
Rolex watches – you could buy 1 for every woman in the U.S.
Disney tickets – 18 (3-day) passes to Disney for the entire U.S. population
You could buy a brand new Hummer for each of the 11 million people on the island of Cuba
You could buy 2 mountain bikes for everyone in China
You could buy 438 pounds of rice for every single person in Africa.
You could buy 200 four-packs or Play-Doh for every child under 14 on the planet
You could buy 400 trees for every one of the 7 million homes in the state of Florida
You could buy a Caribbean Island for every single person in the state of South Dakota.

While I was looking at the webstats for this blog, I noticed and interesting phrase which was used as a search query on Google, and reffered to visitor to this blog.
The phrase was:
“can you explain to me what capitalism is as you would to a child?“

Well, you have come to the right place. Here is a brief explanation of capitalism, which even a child would understand:

Son: “Dad, I have to do a special report for school. Can I ask you a question?”
Father: “Sure son. What’s the question?”
Son: “What is Politics?”
Father: “Well, let’s take our home for an example. I am the wage earner, so let’s call me “Capitalism”. your mother is the administrator of money, so we’ll call her “Government”. We take care of your need, so let’s call you “The People”. We’ll call the maid “The Working Class” and your little brother, we can call “The Future”. Do you understand son?
Son: “I’m not really sure, dad. I’ll have to think about it.”
That night awakened by his brother’s crying, the boy went to see what was wrong. Discovering that the baby had seriously soiled his diaper, the boy went to his parents’ room and found his mother sound asleep. He went to the maid’s room, where, peeking through the keyhole, he saw his father in bed with the maid. The boy’s knocking went totally unheeded by his father and the maid, so the boy returned to his room and went back to sleep. The next morning he reported to his father.
Son: “Dad, now I think i understand what politics is.”
Father: “Good son! Can you explain it to me in your own words?”
Son: “Well Dad, while Capitalism is screwing the Working Class, Government is sound asleep, the People are being completely ignored and the Future is full of sh*t.”

Crude oil just had it’s biggest daily surge in history:

If you want a 100% reasonable and honest explanation on how the markets work, and how we ended up in this big sub-prime crisis, and why the banks must be bailed out, here is a british investment banker who will tell you:

    On the other side of the pond, the FED is working to create the first LDP (Large Dollar Printer). The FED is trying to re-create the market conditions that existed right after the Big Economic Bang. Some eco-doomers are concerned that this would cause the appearance of miniature black holes, that could swallow the entire economy. However, the best economists in the world are involved in this, and they reassured us that due to the large size of the US economy, such black holes will not effect it.
    Take the example of the first black holes (AIG, Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, etc) … they were successfully absorbed by the giant size of the economy.
    This experiment could also lead to huge advances in the field of energy sources. Economists are looking into the possibility of using the LDP to provide enough dollars for every SUV driver, to make the price of crude oil absolutely irrelevant. Regardless of how much the price of crude oil will expand in the space-time continuum, the LDP will be able to keep up with it, fueling the SUV’s with much needed dollars.
    The building of the LDP is based on the success shown in the past years, by a smaller scale experiment called the LTBP (Large Treasury Bill Printer), which allowed the fast printing of Treasury Bills, quickly to be swallowed by the giant chinese economy, bouncing back much needed dollars for oil, SUVs and iPhones.

Due to a technical issue, the Large Hadron Collider operated by CERN in Geneva has been shut down for 2 months. As a result, the world will not end for another 2 months. However, we believe that this “down” has been caused by Wall-Street speculators shorting the LHC. This should buy enough time to restore faith on Wall-Street, for the US to solve the subprime crisis and for the russians to conquer Georgia and other territories containing the much needed crude oil. We expect markets to rise on Monday as a result of this.

It’s a nice Georgian style brick mansion, with 6 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms, 3 car garage, heated pool, etc … up for a mere $4.975 million. I guess he couldn’t keep up with the raising interest rates on mortgages.
It breaks our hearts to see people having to sell their homes. I thought the bailout included these guys also.

And to also bring you some great news, Bill Gates is back on top of the Forbes 400 list with a net worth of $57 billion. Way to go Bill … there’s our guy who didn’t put his retirement money in mortgage backed securities

Given the extremely harsh conditions under which people in the banking industry have to work in (such as the brother’s at Lehman), the FED should take one more step and finance the purchase and install of the wonderful item shown in the photo below, in every toiled in every bank in the US.

I’ll let you enjoy this one. Watch the background.

Given the extremely harsh conditions under which people in the banking industry have to work in (such as the brother’s at Lehman), the FED should take one more step and finance the purchase and install of the wonderful item shown in the photo below, in every toiled in every bank in the US.