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One thing is when the short-term credit market ground to a halt [in October], a huge percentage of the bulk cargo ship fleet just went idle. Trade just wasn’t happening. It felt apocalyptic. The system had ground to a halt. Now you’re getting the hangover of that. Companies that had to stop operati…

One thing is when the short-term credit market ground to a halt [in October], a huge percentage of the bulk cargo ship fleet just went idle. Trade just wasn’t happening. It felt apocalyptic. The system had ground to a halt. Now you’re getting the hangover of that. Companies that had to stop operati…

Financial variables are a way of accounting for what’s going on in the real world. But the real world itself starts to react to financial variables if they’re extreme enough. And it’s funny—the financial system, all the big guns that have been wheeled out by the government and the monetary authorit…

[...] The employee beside me now looked, peripherally, as though he'd been mechanically raised out of a body of water, which made the pretense of my not noticing the incredible sweating even more creepy and farcical. [...]

I think at AIG and at some of these investment banks, there were people who were doing these securitizations who knew that ultimately they were going to blow up, and they didn’t care. They didn’t care because the structure of compensation at a place like AIG and certainly at the investment banks le…