"Credit squeeze spreads to Norwegian towns" - the global and the little individual...

[demoleft]

from the Financial Times.

"Few people in the remote Norwegian town of Narvik, 200km north of the Arctic Circle where the sun has disappeared until January, were likely to have given a lot of thought to the credit squeeze sweeping the global money markets – that is, until it threatened their wages over Christmas.

Narvik, along with three other similarly isolated towns of Hemnes, Rana and Hattfjelldal, has become the latest community to discover just how directly even the most remote places can be affected by the financial turmoil after it made multi-million dollar bets on complicated US-linked financial products.

The towns invested about $96m (€65m) in complex products linked to unspecified municipal bonds in the US, designed by Citigroup, and sold to them by Terra Securities, the investment banking arm of one of Norway’s leading banking groups.

Now representatives of the towns have admitted that recent market movements linked to the credit crisis had destroyed most of the value of their investments."

now there's some who suspect documents in norwegian do not appear quite the same as those in english and so on...
in italy similar operations costed whole lifesavings to many families. in the remotest towns of the north in particular.
then Argentina bonds, Parmalat downfall...

who's going to regulate and monitor these processes?

FT article

ciao from italy :)

[Deja Q]

1. Pay people what they're worth and they wouldn't need credit so much...

It's interesting, the rise of credit over the same period the average exec's pay went from 40x that of the average worker to well over 400x...


(True, credit can be abused, but life isn't as simple as as one-liner. A shame; I love one-liners. But one-liners are jokes too.)

[demoleft]

2. heeeey....

...with that photo in your post you made me bounce back in life of many years!!! was it "George" the character's name?
thax so much for the unexpected feeling.

as to the post - yes, in fact i referred to abuses.
ciao ;)

[Deja Q]

4. :)

In the pilot of "Three's Company" his name was George. In subsequent episodes, it became Stanley. :D

[Angela Shelley]

3. From my previous post, SAME TOPIC

Imagine this:

A man works for 45 years for the same company, making a modest income. He provides a comfortable life for his family. He never buys anything on credit. He saves a small percentage of his income every month, investing cautiously in bonds and mutual funds.

This man lives outside of the USA.

He invests in mutual funds from a respectable bank in his country, which in turn, buys "low-risk loan packages" from US banks. These "loan packages" are rated as "low risk", BUT the true contents of the "loan packages" are "risky loans to US homeowners who are living beyond their means."

Foreign banks "trust" that the US banks are selling "low risk loan packages", because banks are required to disclose the risk level of their "loan packages". But unfortunately, US banks don´t adhere to the rules, because the US government will not punish them for being dishonest.

Unfortunately, when US homeowners don´t make their payments, the foreign bank gets the raw end of the deal, and in turn, so does the honest individual investor.

My point is: Every bank on this planet is working with money which was initially earned by hard-working and honest INDIVIDUALS, who over their lifetime, EARNED more than they SPENT.

It´s a slap in the face to the rest of the human race when an American lives above his means, doesn´t make his monthly payments, and then expects to be bailed out and have a second chance, BECAUSE the invested money did not come from within the United States.

The value of the dollar is falling because 95% of the world´s population is slowly but surely losing "TRUST" in the ability of the USA to "adhere to the rules".

[Deja Q]

5. And those who declare bankruptcy on a whim.

Which includes people who lack proper insurance and end up with a hundred thousand dollar bill, have tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in educational debt and can't get a job thanks to offshoring and bogus hiring requirements, and real irony cases such as Donald "Squirrel on the scalp" Trump.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump
(Enlightening article, if believed at face value, that somehow manages to feature "voluntary" and "forced" regarding bankruptcy in the same sentence no less, and quotes how he ultimately "it really wouldn't matter that much." Remember, at one time he got in debt for over $900 million (early 1990s).

Still, if corporate America believes the panacea to piracy is selling products at a lower price (other countries whose piracy rates are in the mid-70s to low-90s are getting some sweet deals by members of the BSA, MPAA, and RIAA); they should be global about it too. Or what the relevance of that is, except why are the same countries accepting so much from the same entities that are involved in this sort of thing...

I wonder when the Chinese will get credit cards to use. If movie studios think US sales have plateaued, and the US is seen as plateaued, credit card companies will want their share in "developing" nations as well.


http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061113-8207.html
(one of many websites discussing special treatment)