Shia LaBeouf - Economist

Hey Barry:

Even actors have figgered out the bank thang:


"You can make the marketplace more transparent. If people had known who was paying for the mortgages instead of having to rely on Moody's triple-A (bull) rating -- transparency would have helped. The triple A rating thing is ridiculous. That's like Oliver [Stone] paying you for a review. The people who were bundling this toxic crap were paying Moody's for the review of their crap. That's ridiculous. You can't have bank holding companies acting as hedge funds. You can't have them taking a million-dollar pension plan for Joe Schmo the bus driver and treat it with the same risk appetite that you treat George Soros' pocket money. It's fundamentally ridiculous. And it hasn't gotten better very recently, actually. They went from bundling mortgages that were crap to bundling life insurance policies and betting on people's deaths. And you can't blame it all on the Street.... People's mentality needs to change. If the Greece contagion thing takes off and it goes from Spain to Ireland to Portugal things are going to change drastically for the world. Soup kitchens, it won't be that type of change. You won't get a depression that way. But it'll be very difficult. I think, my generation, it's hard to have hope when you got a $700-trillion derivatives debt to pay and a bubble about to explode and $500 trillion worth of GDP. You took all the money in the world and put it in a pot, you're $200 trillion short. It's scary, man. You know the average person born today owes $8,000? The average person getting out of college owes $75,000 with no job. I mean it's scary. My generation, it's a scary situation."

link: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2010/05/shia-labeouf-wall-street-2-indiana-jones-steven-spielberg.html

No mystery there.

They is some good news: the Senate is goin to vote.

Will wonders never cease?

Your pal,