Back to the past...

There is hope, yet again. As the most common emotion floating around between the late hours of 31st December and 1st January. And for 2009, people do need a lot of hope... to get back into a mindset of thinking in terms of futuristic figures...
...It is interesting to note that most stock market indices are back to 2005-2006 levels. So are the inflation and GDP growth figures for a large number of economies. The FRR is back to 50s level, and gasoline prices are US are at 2004 range. And of course, the root cause, the real estate prices are trying to achieve a meaningful bottom.
Which is good, in a way. 2006 and 2007 had seen an irrational exuberance fuelled by severe greed amongst almost all businesses. 2008 dealt a rather harsh, sobering financial blow. Reality has that habit of hurting. And all these shocks, coupled with the demonic terrorist attacks on Mumbai, further affected the general sentiment.
Which is again, the reason why the common populace needs more than a bushel full of hope to lead their way into this new year. But like always, we are a resilient race. The size of the fight doesn't reduce inside us. The future, though unknown, can still look good if viewed with the right lenses. And here's the best part -- the choice of that lens, lies with us.
Happy 2009.

Insomniac..,

Every night, there’s this fear
That something strange, would cross my mind
Wading through, the darkest hours,
What will I lose, what will I find?

The sun has set, but not upon my thoughts
A lot within, a few without
I sit at rest, through with it all
My mind at peace, is what I doubt

Creating visions, pictures and scenes,
Just like me, working overtime
Fighting with itself, to see who would win
It’s my very own, but no dreams are mine

The morning comes, and the hangover remains,
The nightmarish cocktail of all that I passed by
And when they’ve given up asking questions
My brain’s busy answering, the What, the How, and the Why

It’s right to rest, it has forsaken,
A strange mission, it has embarked upon
Chasing itself, never catching up,
Still undecided, has it lost or have I won?

Breaking news...

...Fucking disturbing, that all news channels since yesterday could not find anything better to report than Mr. Bachchan's digestive system malfunctioning (to be precise, they reported it was intestinal inflammation). How fucking illuminating to get this news, there couldn't be a more severe national calamity, so much so that Mr. Prime minister found it important to convey his concerns to the entire family. Our obsession with the make-believe world is almost complete. Perhaps that explains why we have let our real world be as fucked as possible. 

  Not the media's fault perhaps. What do you do when you have to run 24 hour shows of "news". Just how much news can be cooked up in a day? That's where celebrity illnesses come into picture. Or some stupid inspector's senile dog being lost in the city (and of course, another breaking news when the same dog is found by the police, who obviously have no balls to catch the real dogs out there).

   Reporters need a job too. And what's more enriching a career than standing outside the hospital reporting which tablets are being fed to rich sexagenarians, or the visuals of people offering prayers to make sure that their earthly gods can survive stomach cramps...

   There are perhaps still enough people who believe that if these gods are cured, then maybe there is a chance for the salvation of a billion plus people in India. It's worse than the coverage of wardrobe malfunctions. Because there the fuck-crazy Indian population (how else did we reach a billion so fucking fast?) still has hopes of sneak peeks at coveted body parts. In this case, the only hope in the mind of some perverts would be a spycam fitted to the doctor's glasses, as he/she would attempt to correct the misbehaving intestines...

    We are still far behind on the road to rationalism (the recent example being some anti-Nano politicians). On a scale of one to ten, we are sub-zero. And until we stop these super-star-intestinal-fetishes, we will remain there. Though as always, I am still hoping that someday there would a breaking news that we have crossed to the other side of zero....

   

The house that Jack built...

If there's any news these days, it's that of market crashes, fears of recession, failing bailouts, excessive government intervention in the money markets, and similar stuff which is becoming the talk of every disgruntled town.

Never has Wallstreet been given such a bad name as before this, for triggering off such a widespread financial disaster. The 19.1% fall in Russian markets is an indication that was not a mere flu which had gripped the US economy but a cancer spreading to every limb of the global economic ecosystem. Because this time, there are no political reasons leading to investor concerns (note that there was a 9 odd percent fall in the Russian markets when Mr. Gorbachev was overthrown, but there were no major fundamental economic changes then). What we have now is a once in a fucking lifetime situation where the most basic elements of finance have been casually neglected.

Risk and return are always interlinked. All Jacks know that. And yet, when it came to building the grand financial house that everyone has been living in since the last IT-led recession, they all forgot the equations. Balance sheets are still balanced, but with artificial values. Hypo, Fortis, WaMu and AIG have shown us that even institutions which deal in individual consumer money paid no heed to any risk management ideologies, and conveniently rode the sugar-coated mortgage gravy train. High risk, very high initial gains, and then one day they found termites crawling all over the foundation-less house...

Multi-multi-billion dollar bailout packages are suddently proving to be too less to hold the contagion. Within one month, economic slowdown has assumed higher priority than inflationary concerns, and as is always the case, governments are now racing against each other to see who cuts interest rates the most. The only problem with this solution is that it is inherently cosmetic in nature. It's like providing an analgesic to someone who has just been shot in the knee. The pain might subside for some time, but the wound will only fester if the bullet is not removed in time.

Is there any other recourse we can take to ensure the house is brought back up again? For now, Jack doesn't seem to have any answers...

Bricks in the Wall (Street)...

Everyone's talking or writing about it. The jeremiahs are having a field day. Every fear suddenly appears justified. Every news looks like bad news. Words like "moral hazard", "too big to fail", "bail-out" are now becoming as common as that one word which started it all -- "subprime". 

And the US Treasury is certainly caught between the scylla and charybdis of tax-payers' money and the state of economy. If they don't help the biggies, then the after-effects will be disturbingly widespread. And if it does, then it's certainly taxpayers money going down the drain.

And what is hurting the US citizens currently is that their money is simply saving the asses of those rapacious financial chiefs who should actually be publicly lynched. They saw it coming. They all did. And yet, inspite of (or perhaps because of) their deep understanding of the markets, they kept quiet, all the while shouting out slogans such as "we will ride the storm, we have done it before". True, they had definitely survived tsunamis earlier, but this one was different. This one was the result of all dangerous explosives put together underneath a fuel tank. There were ego-boosting cries of "American dream" by Mr. Greenspan, resulting in 1% FRR and loans handed out of trucks and trailers. There were the regulators who just looked the other way when the shit was inching it's way up to the fan, there were rating agencies who were doling out AAAs faster than AAA batteries, there were real estate players who were making everyone believe that when it came to house prices, Mr. Newton was wrong, and then there was greed, the desire to make more and more money at clearly a huge cost to those who had no idea what trap they were getting into...

Even then, as they say, hope is a good thing, perhaps the best of things. 

And so everybody is hoping that the bottom is reached (but we know it hasn't). Everyone is hoping that the cancer doesn't spread any further. Everyone is hoping that the falling bricks on the wall street find their way back...