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[...] (Investment bankers like to say "distribute" the risk, since they see their primary social function, the "good" they do in the world, as that of "distributing" risk to those who can bear it. We can see now how well this works, and how valuable this "social function" is. In practice, it is mer…

the payments are amortized over forty years, to keep them low, but are scheduled on a thirty-year payback, meaning the homeowner had to have 120 months of cash at the end of the mortgage to cover the remaining debt (a so-called "balloon" payment)

[...] The biggest problem for finance capital, and almost anybody else who wanted to borrow to invest, was not where to get the money but where to put it all [...]. Idle money is not capital; it is not accumulating [...]. [...]

Speculative currency shorting (usually) targes a weaker nation in the global political economy, because stronger nations can fight back by using reserves to purchase their currency on those same markes, thereby maintaining demand and protecting the currency's exchange rate. [...] Thailand had littl…