Talk:Ankh-Morpork Mint

"People might lose confidence, which, in the last chapters of Going Postal, we see is the trick of managing an economy".

In between those words first being written, and today, we have seen the proof of this in a big way. Up until quite recently, everything was going wonderfully well in the Western capitalist word, and our wonderful Scottish prime minister could declare to the nation that boom and bust economics are a thing of the past... we have stabilised the economy".

One minute, the economy is quietly purring away in a slow, unspectacular, state of growth. Then some American banks looked at their coffers and noted a problem. They had been pursuing a strategy of issuing high-value loans to high risk ("non-prime") customers, considering that receiving interest back at several percent above what they'd charge anybody else was sufficent reward to justify the higher risk of the loan.

This logic works fine as long as the debtor repays the loan, plus interest, on time and regularly. But which part of the phrase "High-risk Customer" did the banks fail to understand, or did they lose sight of this by applying a euphemism like "non-prime"?

Those American banks noted that so many of those non-prime clients were defaulting on their loans that the normal operation of their banking system was beginning to teeter - for all the money going out, a lot less than expected was coming back.

And this spread overseas to their banking partners in other countries: the Northern Rock in Britain famously went bust when they finally got round to doing their sums. With confidence in the banking system draining, and less and less money available for current and future loans, we end up in what Hubert Turvy might describe as a "Flask Twenty-Seven Situation"... Britain on the brink of an economic recession that would have been unthinkeable several months ago.

The banks got greedy and tripped up on high-risk loans; they are currently trying to recoup the money they lost; ultimately this will come from our pockets (whose else's) which means we have less disposable income for other things....--AgProv 10:40, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Then there's the Cheney administration's War On Cheap Oil...the Tezumen are probably right. --Old Dickens 22:01, 23 May 2008 (UTC)