Historical times

Perhaps we are witnessing history in making "live in colour" with investment banks falling like a pack of cards left, right and center and creating ripple effect worldwide. It is disheartening to see so many of banks' employees loosing jobs as the biggest bubble maker in history - "greed", created a bubble of epic proportions that started leaking last year and finally burst last weekend. Wall street has the knack to reinvent the so called "risk-free, high yield" instruments and the investors never lacked the insatiable appetite to lap them up. In the late 80's it was junk bonds, in the late 90's dot-com stocks and now sub-prime mortgages triggered the downfall. This time it is much bigger and there seems to be no end in sight at least for a few more months. Funny to think that banks as far as in Australia have exposures to these CDOs - shows how intertwined our economies are in this globalized world. The beacon of capitalism had to eat the humble pie of socialism as the US government started bailing out or nationalizing one financial institution after another - five so far and counting!