Ahira's Hangar

I could probably start a thread with the bizarre things I have seen.

We just had a lawsuit thrown out of court. A patient had assaulted one of our police officers a few years ago. The other officers on duty and the emergency room nurses had to take him down. He turned around and sued the police officer he had attacked. Took it five years to get through the court system and get thrown out last week.

We will not even discuss the bizarre things patients have done to themselves over the years and end up in the ER. Well, maybe...

spoilered for weirdness and grossness:

Either today or tomorrow I will be heading to the dollar movies. Mummy 3 has finally made it to the dollar show.

I spent the day packing my cubicle. Two of my attorneys and I will be moving up one floor. The good news is that my third attorney sits on my new floor (and has since we moved to this building -- for the first time in two years, all my attorneys will be on the same floor as me!). It's kinda sad, tho -- all my stuff is packed and the place looks so barren.

Ah well, I get to go home in just a few minutes....

Feeling emotionally attached to your cubicle, ali? You must've worked in that space for a long time.

Duchess, I felt pain in my groin just reading that spoilered stuff. No offense, but I'm sure glad I don't work in a hospital.

Had a haircut today. Tried a hair salon that was new to me - yeah, that's my idea of adventure. Turned out it was the snazziest salon I had yet gone to - was almost afraid they would make me into some high fashion mutant. Luckily, that didn't happen and I in fact got a decent haircut. They did charge more than other places, but that's all right for a one time thing.

Yeah...the price of those places is ridiculous. I'm grateful that when I did have hair, it was long, so I never cut it. And when I cut it, I shaved it off, so I keep it shaved myself.

Actually, now that I'm growing a mohawk for a while, I'm having to put more efort than ever into my hair...and have to get the GF to shave the sides, otherwise I'd certainly ruin it.

I think my next step is to dye it blue.

--A

Last night at work I heard the really bad financial news about the failure of Lehman Brothers (a huge long standing Wall Street bank that holds other firms) and the simultaneous buy out of troubled mega-broker Merrill Lynch by the equally troubled mega Bank of America and how the biggest insurer in the US AIG is scrambling around trying to find saviors before it goes belly up...and this time the US government will not step in to try to save Lehman the way it did Bear Steans and Freddie and Fannie.

So last night I watched the overseas markets falling...falling...falliing....

Today I am watching the American markets tanking.

They are calling these two days Black Sunday and Meltdown Monday, and a small paranoid part of me is wondering if I am seeing the end of the US financial system as I have known it.

Generally, my brain hurts whenever I try to make sense of the financial world, but what I gather is that Lehman Brothers' woes stemmed from the calamity in the US housing market, which itself was a result of the subprime mortgage crisis. And it was companies like Lehman that, through their own greed, contributed to that mortgage mess. So it's kind of come full circle, hasn't it? Not sure how much sympathy - if any at all - is out there for Lehman Bros and the other companies in trouble now. I'm just glad for ordinary Americans' sake that their gov't won't be using their money to bail out Lehman.

Wow, that bad huh? Had no idea.

Very interesting. And it'll be small consolation to them if it's still being used to bail out the other companies.

--A

Well, we started out the year with five huge multibillion dollar Wall Street banks that did worldwide business (hence the world stock market meltdowns) and that serviced/held/owned other huge corporations. We are now down to two.

Multibillion dollar worldwide roadkill:
Bear Stearns
Lehman Brothers (biggest bankruptcy in the history of the Earth)
Merrill Lynch (only one bought out by another company before it went bankrupt)


On the road writhing in probable death (these are not holding companies, but are still huge firms that will cause worldwide problems when they fall):
AIG (biggest insurance company in the US; also has worldwide business connections that will cause worldwide fallout if it goes bellyup)
Washington Mutual (USA's biggest savings and loan)

There have been rumors for months that some of the biggest banks in the US such as Wachovia might go under, too. And with Bank of America gobbling up failing companies like Countrywide (a huge mortgage company that had huge numbers of accounts with funky subprime crap) and Merrill Lynch, who knows how stable it now is, as this huge huge huge company will have to try to absorb billions in losses from its new aquisitions...

And the government had to take over Freddy and Fanny - two firms originally set up by the government to deal with mortgages. The government had to take these over, as if those two went bankrupt, there would have been zero credibility in US bonds and the like in world markets, and the government might have fallen.

Yes, all of this is due to the subprime crisis.

And I feel really bad for the employees at these companies who will now be losing very well paying jobs - tens of thousands of really well paying jobs are gone now. And that many more mortgages and credit cards and car loans and the like will now also be in default.

Since I'm well removed from the problem, I guess I can afford to be more fascinated than anything else. However terrible it may be in terms of human cost, I'd nonetheless be curious to see how a post American-Superpower age would look. Sorry. It's just idle curiosity.

--A

The bad thing is, that these companies are so big that they are taking financial markets down with them all over the bloody world. Multibilliondollar multinationals. If Wall Street/Washington cannot get this crap under control, the talking heads and analysts are starting to talk worldwide depression here. So it very well could end up affecting every human being on the face of the Earth.


Frankly, I think it would be a good thing for America to not be a superpower, and concentrate on the many pressing problems here at home rather than be Team America World Police. I would love it if we stopped meddling with other countries other than to help out in genuine humanitarian emergencies. Only send in troops for genocide. Help out reforesting Haiti. Helping out after huge natural disasters like the Christmas tsunami.

For the amount if money we spend on things like the Iraq War, we could all have medical care with dental care thrown in.

I heard an expert on the Charlie Rose program say that, as bad as things are with Lehman, it could have been worse. Americans could have woken up to Morgan Stanley going belly up, and that would have been "nuclear war" level panic. I don't know Morgan Stanley, but I'm guessing they must be even bigger players on Wall Street than some of those companies you've mentioned.

I'm hearing that the effect of this crisis on Canadians will be minimal, at least in the short term. The situation on Bay Street (our version of Wall Street) seems to be healthier - the banks here aren't burdened with a national mortgage crisis.

What I've also heard is that for the average person on the street, this crisis won't be the nightmare that the 1929 market crash was, because today we have deposit insurance to prevent the small investor's savings from being wiped out. In theory anyway.

I guess it depends on how bad things really get.

Of course, those in poorer countries that don't have any safeguards in place will still be screwed in a global depression.

The most interesting thing I did today was be made an admin at the Watch. I wonder what I'm letting myself in for... Still, it can't be much tougher than modding the 'Tank.

I hope.

--A

Great, since you mod the Tank and are an admin, I'll be getting all the admin complaints about how that South African guy is screwing up the Tank.