“There are TRILLIONS of dollars at stake here, not millions. Human sin, greed, and wickedness are at play in the banks and governments at an all time high.”
I used to go to the mountains when I wanted to feel ‘small’. Feel small in that beautiful setting was good, as it let me forget about problems for awhile - as they became smaller too.
Now, in the context of watching our freedoms insidiously destroyed, and elites gain more and more power over us, I feel small again - but this time it isn’t good. It’s demoralizing.
I have to thank you for putting into perspective what I’ve been feeling lately. The scale of the problems in the financial markets brought upon me this puckering in the pit of my stomach that was familiar, but at the same time, coupled with a dread so thick that I did not recognize it as it was occurring to me.
It is that feeling of diminishment in the face of something so large the mind struggles to put it in perspective. When this occurs in nature, fear is a common companion, but the awe is what distinguishes it from its opposite here.
Jon Corzine used $1.6B in customer deposits, knew he was doing it, and walked away scot-free. He ruined MF Global, a century-old company, in the process. I struggled to get my head around that for months.
Floating above the Gulf Stream on a swim call somewhere off of Bermuda, I put on a scuba mask and looked down. There was no bottom - just a China blue abyss. It was like being suspended in air above the earth in space and not being able to see the ground.
The awe and fear struck so hard it caused me to hyperventilate. It is one of the best feelings I’ve ever had. It took minutes for me to put my head down to look into the abyss and achieve a forcibly steady breathing pattern.
Another number that struck me a few years back was the amount of CDO paper out there - somewhere in the neighborhood of $64T, which compared to over twice the planet’s GDP. It’s a number so large you know there is no way to unwind it. That number was a 2010 number. Who knows what happened to it, but I suspect its only one unfathomable number.
Maybe some folks bet the wrong way at JPM and there are folks trying to keep the biggest domino in the world from falling first and crushing every other domino in the planet in the first second of it falling?