Toothpaste Economy

HOME PAGE

PATRON SAINT

Hunter Thompson

Tuesday, September 23. 2008

The mainstream media has gone bizarro trying to explain the current economic crisis to the public. Comparisons to the Great Depression or a standard pyramid scheme don't quite do the situation justice. The resident geniuses at Blog from the Future Past came up with a more simplified model to explain the dire situation to those of us lacking a Harvard MBA, or even a GED: the Toothpaste Tube Economic Model™, depicted in the illustration at right.

First off, there needed to be pre-conditions. A corporate culture developed during the high-flying 80's and 90's, whereby companies would stack their Board of Directors and management team with greedy synchophant homies of the CEO, who would then award everyone at the corporate Christmas Party enormous 'performance-based' bonuses and stock options.

The Tootpaste Model of the Economic Crisis explains how speculators and Fat Cats ate your lunch.

More recently, clever execs in the banking/lending biz invented the 'sub-prime' mortgage market and used it to artificially inflate the net worth of their companies, on paper at least, by selling off bad loans at good-loan rates, and triggering huge bonus payoffs and stock awards for themselves.

This created the pressure at the back of the tube, where the small lenders and consumers at the base of the economy reside--their pension plans, their homes, their savings are poised to collapse.

The $70 Billion Bailout is supposed to replace the money from the bottom of the tube that got sucked out of the top by our Wall Street wizards.

Right now they're wondering, plotting, how they can get their mitts on the new bailout bonanza, as well.

You can bank on it.

Posted by Bill Lambert in Media Fool at 08:56 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

No comments

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to
Comment	To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above: Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (word), underscore are made via _word_.
	Remember Information? Subscribe to this entry
Submitted comments will be subject to moderation before being displayed.