Yes Yes,

We’re all in the same boat, we’ve all heard you moan and complain about how your investments have dropped by over 20% (thanks for listening mom!) , and we’ve heard about your plans to move to Asia because they didn’t seem to be affected by this whole sub-prime affair…… oh wait! too late, everyone just got screwed!

I mean what’s the point of a melt-down if you can’t share it with others? leave it to the good old U.S. of A. to share the wealth like no other:

  • Canada can take back their maple syrup
  • Europe can take back their mighty Euro
  • Asia… you thought you were safe, but you can take your lead paint back

All joking aside, the markets will come back…. I just don’t know when. Now that the disaster has happened, it’s always interesting to look back in hindsight at the people who were screaming “Warning Warning! Danger Danger!”, and what the public reaction was.

I found this gem of an article regarding the whole subprime meltdown. The choice quote is as follows:

The worry then is that somebody, somewhere has been overly aggressive in their subprime investments and goes belly up, spooking investors and sparking a world financial crisis.

That, of course, is just the nightmare scenario and not everybody is convinced the fallout will be so widespread. “I think [the risk] is containable,” says Lewis Ranieri, Chairman of private equity firm Hyperion, who developed the idea of mortgage-backed securities in the 1970s when he worked at Salomon Brothers. “I don’t think this is going to be a cataclysm.”

You gotta love hindsight! It let’s us laugh at people after the fact, when all is said and done.

Let’s go ahead and laugh at more people and their infamous quotes:

  • “Enron will be the world’s leading company” - Jeffrey Skilling
  • “Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” - Irving Fisher (Professor of Economics Yale, 1929)
  • “I thought she was 18!” - R. Kelly

Maybe if I keep laughing, this whole thing will all be a distant memory!

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