by Dan B.
I don’t know whether to blame hedge funds or not, but I keep looking for a secret force behind all this global economic crisis. I can understand how the mortgage industry in the US made a lot of bad loans to deadbeat borrowers, either negligently or deliberately. And I can see how that bad paper might have repercussions throughout our financial system. But how could that affect the global economy to such a huge extent? Economic losses throughout the world are as high or higher than in the US.
You (Post Scripts) recently had a post saying that the stock market in Russia is off 75%. I don’t think many Russians were investing in Countrywide mortgage. It is the same in almost every country — Spain, Italy, France, even in non-capitalist countries like Venezuela and Iran. I read an article in the paper yesterday that said that inflation in Zimbawbwe is so high that all consumer prices are doubling every 31 hours.
I think there may be some unseen enemy at work here.
We know that Islamic terrorists have targeted the financial system. We also know that Chinese criminals, with or without the help of the Chinese government have hacked into our most closely guarded military databanks. I even see it every day on my own computer. My anti-virus and firewall system blocks the attempts, but I can see in the log hundreds of attacks, listed as “a computer at … has made an unsolicited attempt to access your computer.” I can ask the program to trace the origin of the URL, and it displays a world map, almost always showing places in China or Korea as the culprit. I don’t have any blueprints for nuclear weapons or the secret formula for Coca Cola on my computer, so why am I under attack? I think that everyone is, every computer in the world.
I think these Chinese pirates and other hackers are sending out attempts by the millions at all times every day. If I am getting that many unsuccessful attempts, somewhere there must be some successful ones. What would it take to hack into a bank or a credit processing company? What kind of Trojan horse virus might be in those systems right now, stealing money for cyber crooks and creating havoc in the world economy?