There were emergency meetings with the Federal Reserve. Bankers across the city in their offices trying to figure out how much of their company’s assets were invested in these two companies, and then the horrendous game of “Who’s Next?”<\/p>\n
People are wondering if this is the beginning of the end; the end, that is, of the economic system as we know it. It seems the shadow banking system is finally percolating to the surface.<\/p>\n
We last covered this issue in March<\/strong><\/a>, when Bear Stearns was sold for pennies on the dollar. It looked like Pluto in Capricorn then, and it looks like Pluto in Capricorn now.<\/p>\n We’re currently working on how this development is likely to affect the presidential race. I am putting calls out to my contacts on Wall Street, and developing an article for Friday on the impact of the coming journey of Pluto in Capricorn. For now, here is an excerpt from our coverage of the financial crisis earlier in the year. This is not an easy story to write, so I’ll be avoiding blogging on it this week, saving my energy for Friday’s edition of Planet Waves Astrology News<\/em>. We will have coverage by other writers and be keeping an eye on other blogs as well — so stay tuned.<\/p>\n Part of the structure of society involves the financial markets and the way that the economy is set up, or rather, set up for change. I have been doing my best to wrap my head around the current news and get to the bottom of things. I think it can be explained pretty easily, at least in its most rudimentary elements. We have seen this thing recently called the “subprime mortgage crisis” take on new dimensions as a credit crisis, a solvency crisis and potentially, a global economic crisis. Banks in France, the UK and the central European bank have all been affected, and it could easily spread to Asia.<\/p>\n How did this happen? American banks sold a lot of mortgages to borrowers (a\/k\/a homeowners) who could not afford them. This worked fine, as long as housing prices stayed high; you could always get out. But then housing prices dropped, meaning that people owed more to the banks than their homes were worth. This involved first-time buyers and also many experienced homeowners who invested above their means. People could not make the payments, and many defaulted; but by then all of these mortgages had in effect contaminated the entire investment industry and global securities markets.<\/p>\n In short, real estate turned out to not be so real. The most secure investment of all — one’s home — for many people turned out to be a lot of hot air. The biggest story that whipped through the week was the federal government guaranteeing the buyout of Bear Stearns, one of the world’s largest securities firms, by J P Morgan-Chase. The firm’s stock is now sold for $2 a share when it had recently been trading for $170.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dear Friend and Reader: I did something weird last night, which was come home from my studio without my laptop. When I went out for coffee this morning, I saw an unusual New York Times for a Monday — Merrill Lynch, on the verge of collapse, sold to Bank of America; Lehman Brothers being liquidated … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1,14],"tags":[36,246,245,244,243,117,247],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2016"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2016\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Eric](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.planetwavesweekly.com\/resources\/images\/sign_white.jpg?resize=185%2C45&ssl=1\" "\\"Planet")
<\/strong><\/p>\n