Toxic Loans and Toxic Food—The Regulators Sure Have a Funny Way of Making Us Feel Warm and Cuddly
Saturday, September 27, 2008 at 03:10PM
I’ve been trying real hard to understand the causes of the current financial crisis. I even watched former president Bill Clinton explain it on the David Letterman Show, but despite Clinton’s efforts to simplify, my reaction was similar to Letterman’s: “It makes my head hurt.”
For a while, it didn’t seem that bad. Federal regulators running around on weekends trading and dissolving big names like Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. But you know, down deep, that one day before long the music is going to stop and there will be a tab.
The initial tab, we’re told, is $700 billion—really kind of a shot in the dark because they don’t know how much bad debt is out there. So I take that to mean $700 billion is more likely a down payment, a deposit, if you will, before we get the real tab.
The problem, they tell us, is that so-called “toxic loans” have contaminated the entire financial system. And, indeed, much of the financial system is paralyzed—loans not being made, money market funds teetering on the edge, states and municipalities unable to float bonds.
Now, I’m getting this same queasy feeling trying to make sense out of this Chinese dairy scandal. Regulators running around, pardon the pun, like in a Chinese fire drill, and the damn thing just gets bigger and scarier. It’s not only baby formula in China and 53,000 kids who are sick, which would be horrendous enough. Now we’re learning it’s Pizza Hut cheese in Taiwan, cookies in Macao, White Rabbit Creamy Candy all around Asia, and (horror of horrors) instant coffee and tea in the U.S.—all contaminated.
Just like in the financial crisis, you know we haven’t heard the end of the story. Even knowing germ lawyer Bill Marler has been to China (great new market, it would seem) doesn’t make me feel much better.
Aren’t we dealing with similar problems in the financial and food crises? On the financial side, balance sheets filled with questionable loan instruments that have been packaged and re-packaged so many times no one knows where anything originated…and on the food side, products filled with questionable ingredients that have traveled so far and through so many hands no one can begin to figure out where they came from. Systems based on scale and greed rather than on basic human values. Regulators arrogant in their power, who descend on tiny dairies for producing unpasteurized milk because these dairies might muck up the “real” system…while that “real” system is poisoned in endless small and large ways.
The main alternative people have to survive both the financial and food crises is to seek out old-time alternatives. For financial safety, that probably means things like gold and silver. For food, it means growing your own or buying from small producers and farmers markets, where you are as close as possible to the source.
Are systemic collapses closer than we think?
Reader Comments (35)
Real food AKA RAW DAIRY , real money AKA GOLD and SILVER coins and no debt is looking better and better.
I am opposed to putting 700 billion dollars at the financial sector's disposal. I believe it should be invested in new infrastructure and new energy technology. Maybe that will keep our country from going down the tubes.
The CEO's of the financial sector need to get a real life for a while and solve their own problem. The trickle down to mainstreet will be a minor nuisance compared to the fall the CEO's of these poor performing companies will face. Many of them should end up in jail.
As for the Chinese recalls - homegrown and raw are looking better and better . China should lose favored trading status immediately .
It is amazing how our food police are so soft on countries like China , yet so harsh here at home!
Our system is wacked big time.
This model from the '70s makes more sense every day.
The Co-operative financial model is a real alternative to the out of control for-profit dominance that is so much a part of this current crisis.
Um, most big companies, including the last hospital I worked at, have their capital tied up in mutual funds. After Enron, that topheavy hospital delayed an expansion plan for about 10 years, and "laid off," numerous management positions, eliminating their jobs, and passing their paperwork on to us staff nurses. Do you have any idea what the significance of that is?
Already this week, I have heard that UPMC (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Pittsburgh's large parent medical corporation) is laying off upwards of 300 employees; and another nearby hospital is considering closing their new catheterization department. Our hospital is nearly ready to open part of a new tower they built, and was going to change half the unit I work on to private beds. Guess what? That plan got ditched 2 days after it was passed on to us.
I'm sorry, but Main Street is already being affected. Your healthcare, and your waiting time in doctors offices and hospitals is going to be an issue in coming years. You think 2 hours to be seen in the ER for a migraine is long? You'll be wishing it were still so.
For every $1 a bank has in savings, it can lend $2. Given most banks have lost their invested "money," there won't be much to lend. I'm pretty sure there are going to be a lot of clunkers being driven around in about 5 years...maybe even some horses and bicycles. So the cars you see driving down Main Street, are going to look different.
Gwen
I didn't read the entire presentation of the S.T.O.P. HUS conference. I read Dr. Linwood's explanation on the Acute Phase of Verotoxin-induced HUS (which included cell membrane mechanisms); skimmed Dr. Phillip Tarr's details of differential diagnosis, and cardiologist, Gary Cornel's description of its attack on a girl's heart in Canada and how he saved her. Dr. Cornel notably stated that there is a huge lack of information on how HUS attacks the heart.
Then I Googled a few things, and skimmed through Kaplan's book on HUS.
After all this reading, a few things stood out to me. Few of my questions have been answered - namely, how do you tell whether HUS was caused by E-coli 0157:H7 or some other entity, in the absence of the pathogen?
It is clear, that even the leading scientists and doctors studying this don't understand the causes in their entirity. They think it might have something to do with individual immune responses, and possibly genetic predisposition to be susceptible to verotoxins produced by bacteria (and other substances). Kaplan states in his book that there are over 50 serotypes of bacteria that cause human disease. E-coli 0157:H7 is easy to distinguish from other e-coli because it has a lack of sorbitol fermentation. It can also be mistaken for C-diff in common hospital lab tests, and treated as such.
The idea that estrogen in birth control increases susceptibility to developing HUS in favorable circumstances is a hypothesis with little support. Some other medications are more clearly implicated, though (Ticlid and chemotherapy agents that mess with the immune response). Susceptiblity is related to a person's immune system, how it works in different conditions, and how it is made up in individuals.
So little is still understood about the mechanisms, that nobody on either end can say with confidence that it is one way or another. I think we need a lot more Linwoods and Kaplans out there working on it. Too bad for the rabbits and monkeys.
Gwen
Is this really happening under the auspices of a constitution designed to prevent concentrated power and preserve individual liberty?
I found this website that answers your question—The atypical HUS website. http://atypicalhus.50megs.com/about.html
In most cases, Atypical HUS does not begin with a violent illness. Instead, the child starts off ill, fatigue, irritable, perhaps has an infection and lethargic to a point where hospitalization is needed. Supportive treatment is absolutely necessary in order to prevent further damage. (As opposed to Typical or regular HUS, which begins rather violently, with a severe bout of gastroenteritis that may be accompanied by bloody diarrhea).
Thereafter, symptoms of both typical and Atypical HUS may be similar. Atypical HUS causes clotting, and therefore results in vascular enlargement. Clotting tends to affect the kidneys, and may result in acute kidney failure, requiring dialysis or kidney transplants.
A wide variety of symptoms can occur. Life threatening intestinal problems may occur. Neurological problems such as seizures, blindness and coma could develop (though rarely do). Profound intestinal or neurological diseases are indicative of a more severe HUS, and have poor prognosis.
Atypical HUS patients are especially prone to recurrences of the disease and are much more likely to develop chronic renal failure and other complications such as chronic high blood pressure. Atypical patients can have Atypical HUS episodes set off by routine colds and infections.
It's my impression that the banks were leveraged far more than 2 to 1, and that given the derivative market for mortgages and insurance, this "crisis" was fairly predictable. It started over a year ago.
As I said, many lucrative jobs will be lost, and there will be some trickle-down effects to other sectors. Even so, 700 billion to a trillion dollars to buttress up a house of cards isn't money well spent, IMHO.
Prior to our current crisis some have said that in the last 8 years our dollar has lost 40% of its purchasing power. Oil in 2000 was $22 a barrel now $100, gold was $275 an oz. now $900 an oz if you can get it, silver was $4.58 an oz now $13.50 if you can get it. That is a 300% increase in US dollars above the year 2000s cost.
I think that to say the $700 billion [starting number] bailout out cost will only TRICKLE down to Main Street maybe a huge understatement, but a deluge of inflation, deflation, job losses and tax increases of epic size will be the result.
It has also been reported that now the US Home Builders Asso. has also asked for a $90 billion bailout . WHO WILL BE NEXT IN LINE?
Sylvia-Gwen, who is really Gwen
(Sylvia is someone else)
Would you email me please? I have a question to ask. Thank you
sundancr56@yahoo.com
http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2008/09/27/Shipments_of_contaminated_lettuce_halted/UPI-56441222488825/