so, as you may have heard, AIG, the insurance giant "lost" $61 billion and change this last quarter...
welll, I found it, I think,
but I can't be sure, since it could be someone else's $60 billion, I mean one big pile of used $20s looks much like another;
anyway, the US taxpayers are going to cover AIG on this one,
so "finders keepers", eh?
and the tens of trillions in Credit Default Swaps that the major ex-investment banks are carrying on their balance sheets
they're also mine,
well most of them,
I think Goldman Sachs got some too
it was such a deal, I mean the odds were ridiculously good
I did worry that they wouldn't be good for it, but I gather it will work out as planned and the government will backstop them
so, thanks
it is about 2 or 3 years of US GDP, but the payments will be spread out over a number of years, tapering off by about 2035 - which is well timed
don't worry, I'll spend it wisely, after maybe a little splurge
(hint, buy book publisher stocks, I'm behind on my reading!)
not sure what to do after that, something will come to mind I'm sure;
maybe I'll even give Harvard back their endowment
it could be worse, it could be really lost, squirreled away by crooked bankers, blown on bonuses, booked as fake paper profits backed by non-existent assets
much better that I have it
Hello Steinn:
We all know that Science Fiction is supposed to be prospective, rather than predictive - it's not supposed to predict what will actually occur in our time line, but rather to engage out thinking about what might take place in whatever time line our future happen to occupy.
In spite of all of that conventional SF wisdom, it appears to me that your friend David Brin's *predictions* in _Earth_ have turned out to be eerily accurate. Not just the relatively easy ones (e.g. the ubiquity of the net and the concomitant creation of virtual communities) - Vinge and others picked up on that at about the same time)- but the more subtle ones, such as the fundamental reassessment about the role of "privacy" in human interactions - Brin addressed that explicitly in _The Transparent Society_ but it was all implicit in _Earth_. And he got it right (Twitter exists: case closed.)
But on a larger scale, I can't help thinking about Brin's long-range forecast in _Earth_: that the collapse of State Socialism (just getting started when that book was published) would be followed by the collapse of Finance Capitalism - which was to be preceded by a multinational cry: "Open the Books. All of Them. Now!!" Only caveat was that Brin thought the "books" were in Switzerland, rather than lower Manhattan.
Hey Robert,
Yup, Brin has been pointing this out subtly over on kos, and his own blog.
Don't know if you noticed but the Obama admin put the squeeze on UBS - they have to open their books, something the EU has also been pushing them to do. So the Swiss are about to be cracked. I have also heard rumours that the NSA has turned its not inconsiderable attention to the Caribbean havens.
The Transparent Society is a deeper issue, and one I suspect Brin is comprehensively correct about; Charlie Stross has also been pushing a lot of those issues.
Interesting times.