doom mongering? realist? you decide!

I made the "prediction" a while ago (it wasn't that dramatic really, but nevermind) that once people actually started seeing their house prices falling, people would panic and all hell would break loose, on the basis that people have just got far too used to the good times.

So far, however, we seem to have seen pretty sensible behaviour on the part of your average consumer. The domestic economy (by which I mean retail and consumer spending, I suppose) seems to be doing OK, no mass lay offs as yet, and a grudging acceptance of drops in the market.

Sure, the "banks" with their "financial system" (whatever that means!) might be in complete meltdown, but what does that matter when your average punter might not know how many noughts there are in a billion?

There's more important things to consider for the moment like the state of rangers/celtic what hapening in CSI, coronation street or whatever.
However more and more the economic realities of our current situation are going to hit, with job cuts, and recession on the cards. So my question is this more orderly decline in the housing market and the UK economy in general? Or more obvious panic, as I had previously speculated?

And if panic, what wouldl that involve? Your thoughts, ladies and gentlemen, or Im thinking

"please" In order for there to be a panic, something actually has to happen. So far, the actual impact of the current troubles to people, myself included, has been very, very mild.

People who work in construction and banking would have felt the impact. People with massive CC debt or mortgages they can't afford the SVR for would have felt it, those close to retirement who didn't switch their pensions to something safer than stock will be worried.

Having said the vast majority have not had any changes to their situation. Until real unemployment kicks off, inflation in areas other than energy kicks off etc, why is there any need to change behaviour?

I also think that the medias love of scare stories that never come to pass has had an effect. Since the early 80s, I've lived through all these events described by the media as world-ending (in no particular order)
:- Acid Rain melting everything and destroying crops.- Radioactive sheep eating grass polluted by Chenobyl fallout which will give me cancer.- Being nuked by the Soviets- Being blown up by Saddam and his imaginary WMDs- Mad Cow Disease- Vast armies of pedophiles hiding in bushes on every street corner.- Hooded yoofs queuing up to stab you for your wallet and mobile.- Global warming (now down-graded to 'climate change' since we seem to be getting colder here)- Ozone layer vanishing with the result of turning everyone blind and giving them skin cancer.- Jet stream stopping turning the UK into the Arctic- Yellowstone National Park blowing up, sending us into a 10,000 year period of dusty darkness- GM Crops taking over the world- Diesel fumes giving me Asthma- Bird Flu pandemic- Normal Flu pandemic- Oil running out ,,,,,, etc etc Compared to all that, a few bank failures on the telly looks quite minor
LOL!

Yes to the average person, recent events are meaningless. It's all just boring financial stuff, or 'politics' and let's face it, 'politics' is for boring old posh men in suits, isn't it? A good example was a neighbour, who on the same day he told me his holiday had been cancelled due to the XL bust, said 'this credit crunch, what a load of rubbish. I mean who's actually been affected by it?

'The sheeple have their bread and circuses. As Orwell wrote, they are sleeping 'the deep, deep sleep of England, from which we will never awake until we are shaken from it by the roar of bombs'.

Hopefully it won't come to bombs, but once the bread and circuses begin to be affected (no more tick on the credit card, unemployment, shops closing, etc) the people might just start to take these things a bit more seriously.

So what would it take for a revolution

Would invading somewhere like Holland do it ?

Would making us all wear an identity tags or badges do it ?

Would further HPI doubling todays house prices do it ?

Would petrol at a fiver a litre do it ?

Would the abolishment of elections do it ?

What if the whole country marched on Downing St and demanded an immediate election,would that work or would we all be tear gassed ? Or would the police be on our side given their pay dispute ?

What about Cutting off all government disability/unemployment benifits

Send their children to die for profit in a far off land

Make them serve multiple tours of duty in said conflict

Foreclose on millions of houses (Throw them on the street)

Drain their wallets at the petrol pump and in the supermarkets

Eliminate their jobs and cut them off from all government re-education grants and assistance,

Control their media outlets and pump out continuous propaganda to the masses

Manipulate government statistics to hide the real data

Use government tax dollars/pounds to enrich the wealthy

Drain their wallets to pay for a dysfunctional, piecemeal healthcare system that only benefits a few.

Fail to provide any kind of central leadership for the country

Basically you would have to tax them to death, not represent their interests and starve them out.

Thank god we live in a country where none of that bad stuff has happened yet.

or perhape educate and teach them economics properly haha.

Are you sleeping?

What we are witnessing today is how empires end. The Last Superpower is unable to defend its borders, protect its currency, win its wars or balance its budget.

Medicare and Social Security are headed for the cliff with unfunded liabilities in the tens of trillions of dollars. What we are witnessing today is nothing less than a failure of government, of our political class. Whats going on? Hank Paulson of Goldman Sachs and Ben Bernanke of the Fed chose to bail out Bear Sterns but let Lehman go under. They decided to nationalize Fannie and Freddie at a cost to taxpayers of hundreds of billions, putting the U.S. government behind $5 trillion in mortgages. They decided to buy AIG with $85 billion rather than see the insurance giant sink beneath the waves.

An unelected financial elite is now entrusted with the assignment of getting us out of a disaster into which an unelected financial elite plunged the nation. And yes this means us Brits too.

We the serfs are just spectators.

local to global

Eh well Katy didn't reply as yet, funnily enough,

wow anyway from local to national,

it all happening now with bush about to hold a press conference to the American people to tell them how much shit they are in, and its only a matter of time before Brown follows suit, most of us are well aware of the difficulty of the current financial situation and we agree with the need for bold action to ensure that the financial system continues to function but I see three main fatal pitfalls in the currently proposed plans to keep bailing out banks with tax payers money

1) Its fairness. But when have we the peasants ever been played fair with anyway, The plan is a subsidy to investors at taxpayers’ expense. Investors who took risks to earn profits must also bear the losses surely. Is it to much to ask that our government can ensure a well-functioning financial industry, able to make new loans to creditworthy borrowers, without bailing out particular investors and institutions whose choices proved unwise.

2) Its ambiguity. If taxpayers are to buy illiquid and opaque assets from troubled sellers, the terms, occasions, and methods of such purchases must be crystal clear ahead of time and carefully monitored afterwards. Again if we the taxpayer are buying this black hole of debt the bankers have created, surely we should be told how much and how many generations will pay for it! (yep its that big a hole).

3) Its long-term effects. What bush and brown are up to is fundamentally weakening markets in order to calm short-run disruptions, this is I'm afraid desperately short-sighted.

Interesting times, if you have anything invested in a pension on the stock market GET IT OUT NOW!
Bush and Brown are just trying to slow down the collapse.

I'm predicting hyperinflation,,,, you may laugh, I'm not!

Recession depression addiction right enough!